Technologies

iPhone 17 Owners: Not Enjoying the AI Button? Here’s How I Turned Mine Off for Good

Commentary: I made my iPhone a little bit dumber, and I’m never going back.

The iPhone 17 is here. As I’m watching folks get the new iPhone Air and other new Apple accessories online, I’ve been reminiscing about how excited I was to upgrade to the iPhone 16 last fall. I was ready to channel my inner photographer with the nicer cameras, not worry too much about charging it every night, thanks to better battery life and — very exciting to me — to have a phone in a new Barbie pink color. But what I didn’t expect was that one new addition would threaten to ruin my entire experience with my brand-new phone.

If you’ve upgraded from an older iPhone in the past few years, you might have been surprised to see two new buttons on the newer devices: the action and camera control buttons. The action button is a small button above the volume adjusters. It was introduced with the iPhone 15 Pro models and is a customizable button that can do anything from turning your ringer on to ordering your Dunkin’ coffee to go. It’s small, demure and minds its own business.

It’s the camera control button that causes all the chaos.

Camera control is a new button on the iPhone 16 lineup that does what the name suggests: It controls your camera. It’s meant to help you quickly snap photos and serves as a shortcut to launching your camera app. You can slide your finger through a mini settings menu to adjust your camera’s zoom, among other things. But there’s one true reason for the button’s existence: AI. All of the iPhone 17 models have this button, too.

Like every other tech company, Apple has been heavily investing in artificial intelligence. Apple Intelligence has been the driving force behind much of the company’s innovation, with lots of AI updates in the new iOS 26. But there’s no bigger sign of Apple’s dive into AI than the camera control button. It’s the physical pathway into Visual Intelligence, a new AI-powered feature that lets you use your camera to scan objects in the real world to get more information on them. It sounds snazzy, but it’s completely pointless to me, and it’s a feature I have never been enticed to use.

There are other use cases for the camera control button, including ways to customize your button’s settings, as my colleagues have found through their testing. But that doesn’t change the fact that my camera control button is so completely annoying.

It’s a long button, about the size of the power button, located on the lower right side of the device. And it’s very, very easy to tap by accident. I’ve opened my camera while putting my phone in my pocket, while I’m driving and using navigation apps and once as I was turning off my phone for the night, which left the camera app open the whole night and drained my phone’s battery.

And if that wasn’t annoying enough, every time I actually intended to open my camera via camera control, it took several taps to do so. Go figure.

While I had camera control enabled, my camera roll included stunning shots like these:

I ask you: What is the point of a button that works when you don’t need it and doesn’t work when you do? There are already three ways to access your iPhone’s camera from the lock screen that take literal seconds to use. Camera control is a very expensive, very unreliable addition to the newer iPhones, all for the sake of AI features that many people don’t need or use. There hasn’t been one moment since I turned camera control off that I’ve missed it.

I realize my gripes with camera control are minor complaints among what has been an overall positive experience with my new phone. But as an AI reporter, I can’t help but see this as a troubling sign. So many tech companies have overhauled their software and devices to be AI-friendly, whether it’s Google spamming us with Gemini pop-ups in every single Google app, the new Copilot button on Microsoft Windows laptops or Apple’s camera control button.

Tech companies are too eager to get on the AI train and haven’t given enough thought to whether those features enhance or just derail our experience using their products. And not enough offer opt-out options. Thankfully for me and my camera roll, Apple does. But I hope in the future, such drastic measures won’t be necessary as companies become more intentional with their AI-enabling features.

If you want to join me in making your camera control button obsolete, you can navigate to your iPhone’s settings and select camera. Then, tap camera control. Within camera control, select accessibility, and then toggle off camera control. If you’re also experiencing the hyper-sensitivity, you can adjust how many taps (and the pressure needed) to trigger the button in that same accessibility page under light-press force.

For more, check out our hands-on experience with the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, Sept. 24

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Sept. 24.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Hint: There are a lot of S words in it today. I couldn’t figure out what the editors wanted for 5-Across and 8-Across, so I solved the other clues and those answers filled in. Need some answers? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Pond gunk
Answer: SCUM

5A clue: With 8-Across, like an unlimited buffet
Answer: ALLYOU

8A clue: See 5-Across
Answer: CANEAT

9A clue: Opponent of Athens in the Peloponnesian War
Answer: SPARTA

10A clue: «Keep it down!»
Answer: SHH

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Outs that advance the runner, in baseball lingo
Answer: SACS

2D clue: Put your hands together
Answer: CLAP

3D clue: Bone on the same side of the arm as the pinky
Answer: ULNA

4D clue: Mike who voiced Shrek
Answer: MYERS

6D clue: Hippocratic ___ (doctor’s pledge)
Answer: OATH

7D clue: State with license plates that read «Greatest Snow on Earth»
Answer: UTAH

Technologies

NASA Is Sending Astronauts to Circle the Moon in February 2026: What to Know

The astronauts won’t be landing or picking up moon rocks during their 10-day mission.

It’s been more than 50 years since astronauts last went to the moon, and yet few NASA missions stir the kind of excitement that the Apollo program once did. But now, NASA has new moon plans. The upcoming Artemis II mission, scheduled for February, will be the closest humanity has come to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. And it’ll be setting the stage for another moon landing.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

On Tuesday, NASA announced details of the upcoming mission, which will send four astronauts around the moon and back again.

Artemis II: The Plan

The Artemis II launch window opens Feb. 5, 2026, and lasts up to eight days. That means the mission will launch on Feb. 5 at the earliest and Feb. 13 at the latest.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will crew Artemis II. Wiseman, Glover and Koch are all Americans, and Hansen will be the first Canadian ever to travel to the moon.

NASA will use the same systems it did during the uncrewed Artemis I flight test in 2022. The launch will use NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which was developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance.

After launch, the Orion spacecraft will perform a series of maneuvers to raise its orbit around Earth. NASA says that Orion will be 46,000 miles away from Earth during this time. For reference, the International Space Station orbits at around 250 miles above our planet.

Orion will orbit Earth twice before separating from the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket. From there, manual controls will be engaged and the crew will be on its way to the moon. After a few days, the crew will overshoot the moon by about 4,700 miles, giving the crew a rare glimpse of the Earth and the moon at the same time, with the moon in the foreground.

After the overshoot, the crew will begin its return home. NASA refers to this as a free ride, as the crew essentially just has to wait for gravity to pull Orion back to Earth. The trip will take 10 days in total.

We’ll have to wait until 2027 for a moon landing

By the time the Artemis II crew circles the moon, it will have been 54 years since NASA’s final Apollo mission sent astronauts to the moon in December 1972.

During that 12-day mission, the Apollo 17 crew landed on the moon, collected space rocks and investigated potential volcanic activity. The mission was famous for being the first to include a civilian scientist, geologist Harrison Schmitt.

The Artemis II crew will come closer to the moon than any human has since the Apollo 17 mission, but they won’t land on the moon’s surface. Instead, they will fly around it.

The Artemis II mission serves as a test flight to see how well the Space Launch System rocket and Orion perform. The mission will also test and observe the spacecraft to ensure it works as expected. Think of Artemis II as a dress rehearsal for a follow-up mission, Artemis III, which will include a crewed moon landing.

Artemis III is planned for 2027. If it stays on schedule, it will be the mission that puts humans back on the moon for the first time in 55 years. The crew plans to touch down in one of 13 planned landing sites, including the previously untouched south pole of the moon.

Technologies

Keep an Eye Out for a Newly Discovered Comet in October

You might not even need binoculars to see this comet, named SWAN25B.

No tricks, but skywatchers may be in for an October treat when a newly discovered comet passes through our skies. Comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) — or SWAN25B for short — looks to be heading our way.

The comet — named after the science instrument aboard the SOHO space observatory, which observes the sun — was first spotted on Sept. 11 by Ukrainian amateur astronomer Vladimir Bezugly, while studying images captured by SWAN.

«This is a milestone, the 20th official SWAN comet so far,» Bezugly told Universe Today.

Read more: 7 Stargazing Apps for Spotting Constellations and More

Bezugly made the discovery one day before the comet reached its closest point to the sun, which is known as perihelion.

«It was an easy comet for detection due to sufficient brightness in the (ultraviolet) band and location in the SWAN images, exactly in its center,» Bezugly told Universe Today. «But it was difficult due to the very close location to the sun and angular motion, which is very close to the sun’s motion in SWAN images.»

On Sept. 17, an observatory in Chile snapped a photograph using a telescope, showing SWAN25B with a bright coma and striking emerald ion tail. A coma is an atmosphere that forms around a comet as it nears the sun. The sun’s heat causes the frozen gases and icy chunks in the comet’s nucleus to change and create an atmosphere.

«With its orbit still poorly constrained due to a very short observational arc, this comet has quickly become a fascinating target to follow in the coming weeks,» the team in Chile said.

What exactly is a comet?

NASA calls comets «cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the sun,» noting that «when frozen, they are the size of a small town.»

Their most famous comet feature is probably the tail. When comets come near the sun, they heat up and spew dust and gases, forming the tail, which streams away from the sun. NASA says there are likely billions of comets orbiting our sun.

The most famous comet is Halley’s comet, which appears every 76 years. It was last seen in Earth’s skies in 1986 and will return in 2061.

When should I look for the new comet?

According to LiveScience, the comet should pass closest to Earth around Oct. 19-20, and some astronomers think it could be bright enough to observe without a telescope or binoculars. Look for a faint, fuzzy patch of light. A smartphone app can help you find it.

You can track the position of SWAN25B using TheSkyLive.com, which gives the comet’s distance from the Earth in real time and offers a neat interactive star map. That map lets you enter your location so you can see what the sky looks like from where you live.

It’s much easier to see the comet, or any cosmic features in the night sky, if you head away from city lights and go to a dark area in the country. Try to find a clear night, when the clouds won’t impact visibility. SWAN25B might be bright enough to observe by looking up in the sky.

More skygazing highlights

October is already a busy month for skywatchers.

A supermoon will hang in the night sky bigger and brighter than usual during its perigee, and a great time to head outside to see it is Oct. 6, when there’s a full moon. The October supermoon will be the first of four consecutive supermoons, which we can expect every month through January of next year.

If you’re looking for help to guide your skywatching this October, head to our list of Best Stargazing Apps.