No Camera Control? No problem, your iPhone 15 Pro will soon get Visual Intelligence

The shocks just keep on coming. After unveiling the iPhone 16e earlier this week, Apple has now revealed that the iPhone 15 Pro is going to get Visual Intelligence despite not having the Camera Control button normally used to activate it.

The clues to this surprise, in fact, were there to be spotted at the 16e launch as that phone is in exactly the same boat. It too does not have a Camera Control button (one of many compromises to keep down the price) yet it will support Visual Intelligence out of the box. If the iPhone 16e can offer this feature, it stands to reason that any handset with the specs to run Apple Intelligence can do likewise.

The iPhone 15 Pro obviously did not support Visual Intelligence out of the box, since the feature did not exist at that time. But as reported by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, Visual Intelligence will come to the iPhone 15 Pro “in a future software update.” That’s almost certain to be iOS 18.4, which is slated for an early April release but hasn’t begun beta testing yet.

Visual Intelligence is one of the marquee features of Apple Intelligence. It’s used to deduce information from visual images: you can point your camera at a pair of headphones, for instance, and Visual Intelligence will do its best to tell you what they are and where you can buy them. It can identify plants and animals, summarize text, create Calendar events from flyers, and get information about businesses from a glance at their frontage. You activate it by pressing and holding the Camera Control… at least, that’s how you activate it for now. We don’t yet know how it will work on the iPhones 16e and 15 Pro.

For all the latest information about Apple’s AI features and when they will roll out in your country, check out our Apple Intelligence megaguide.

Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld