A newly-revealed patent details a button that can be swiped as well as pressed. It's the iPhone's Camera Control button, and it may be coming to the iPad.
Introduced in 2024 with the iPhone 16 range, the Camera Control button has been sufficiently divisive that Apple is even rumored to be dropping it entirely. That's unlikely, if not impossible, and now a newly-granted patent suggests that Apple at least used to have big plans for the button.
That's big as in the device it would go on. The innocuously-named "Input System for Portable Electronic Device" patent chiefly consists of drawings of iPads.
Across its 20 drawings and charts, there are three that show the iPhone, and others that are close-up diagrams of how the button works. Plus in typical patent-speak, Apple never says iPad (or iPhone) and at most refers to tablets.
That conscious vagueness, though, is followed by immense detail on the functioning of what it also won't call the Camera Control. Variously describing it as a button, an "input member," or a "strain sensing element," the detail describes every action that the control is built for.
Apple proposes having two strain sensing elements within the control, so that it can compare readings. In a way similar to triangulation, the readings from two such sensors can tell the iPad which part of the control the user has pressed.
"[It] may further include a dome switch configured to collapse in response to the force input" that exceeds the amount of pressure needed to register on the strain sensors.
In other words, the one control can detect a light tap, potentially a swipe, or a full-on press. Exactly as the iPhone Camera Control button already does.
Apple is even specific about the amount of force needed to trigger each element, starting with the touch-sensitive control. "The first force threshold may be between about 0.8 Newtons and about 1.2 Newtons," says the patent, "and the second force threshold may be between about 3.0 Newtons and about 4.0 Newtons."
Then if a user presses the control with pressure in this range, the button will trigger haptic feedback.
This one button can be tapped, swiped or as shown in this detail from the patent, also just pressed - image credit: Apple.
Every element of this patent says that it is precisely the same Camera Control button as has already debuted on the iPhone. It isn't clear, then, if this patent varies from a previous iPhone one in any way but the drawings.
This granted patent does follow an earlier version of the same proposal from December 2025, though. So at the very least, it can be presumed that Apple has been seriously considering adding such a Camera Control to the iPad.
Apple applies for at least several hundred patents a year, though. Even when it is granted one, that does not guarantee that a product will be released.
We have moved on, though, from the days when holding up a whole iPad to take photos seemed peculiar. If enough people are doing this, it seems only right that they should also get Apple's Camera Control.
