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Los hermanos Riberas controlan, a través de Acek, los gigantes industriales Gestamp y Gonvarri y participan en Cie Automotive o Dominion. Leer

El banco americano está inmerso en una importante estrategia de crecimiento entre grandes clientes y busca duplicar el negocio. Leer

Los inversores se repliegan en Airbus. El fallo detectado en los aviones de su modelo A320 provoca caídas significativas en su cotización. Las firmas de análisis prevén un impacto limitado, pero al mismo tiempo difícil de cuantificar. Leer

En la mayoría de los municipios de la periferia de estas dos capitales los precios inmobiliarios aumentan más de un 10% en tercer trimestre, pero atraen a los compradores porque siguen siendo más económicos que en el centro. Leer

Taiwán prohibió la importación de carne y productos porcinos procedentes de España tras la detección de varios casos de peste porcina africana (PPA) en jabalíes hallados muertos en la sierra de Collserola, cerca de Barcelona, el primer brote registrado en el país desde 1994. Leer

Numerosas organizaciones científicas y sanitarias insisten en que la fiebre porcina africana no puede transmitirse a los humanos por contacto con cerdos o jabalíes o por el consumo de productos de estos animales. Pero las consecuencias económicas y de seguridad alimentaria pueden llegar a ser muy graves. Leer

Con un patrimonio de 5.100 millones, los March llevan generaciones afianzando su liderazgo en el sector privado con Banca March y Corporación Alba. Gestionan Torrenova, la segunda mayor Sicav en España. Leer

La creciente opacidad estadística y el control político en China generan dudas sobre sus cifras oficiales, e impiden conocer el alcance real de la desaceleración de la segunda economía mundial. Leer

Last week I set out to write a few thousand words on the iPhone Air, but it turns out I only need three: the lesser iPhone. Compared to the Pro and baseline models, it has fewer cameras and a smaller battery. For an extra $100, you can upgrade to an iPhone Pro and get power features like ProRAW and LiDAR. What was Apple thinking?

Every few years, Apple tests a new product category with a “wildcard” iPhone. In 2015, that was a Plus sized screen. In 2017, the iPhone X ditched the home-button and gained a notch. In 2019, the Pro introduced bleeding-edge technology at a premium price point

Some experiments flop. For years, people begged for a smaller iPhone, so Apple delivered the iPhone Mini in 2020 to lukewarm sales. I’d wager it was because, 13 years after the iPhone’s debut, we now use our phones like we used to use computers. The era of small screens is over.

From the mini’s ashes comes the Air, a phone as easy on your hands as it is on your eyes. It may be as droppable as any modern iPhone, but the double Ceramic Shield and titanium frame makes it as durable as ever.

Last week I set out to write a few thousand words on the iPhone Air, but found my mind pulled in another direction, to an iconic camera design. You may not know its name, but you know its work.

Invented by Oskar Barnack in 1913, the compact 35mm rangefinder may be the most influential camera of the 20th century.

By modern standards, early rangefinders were lesser cameras, lacking auto focus and auto exposure.

In many ways, the rangefinder is outright flawed. It’s hard to frame close shots, it doesn’t do macro, and zoom lenses don’t exist. This isn’t a camera for National Geographic. Yet thanks to its compact size, durability and stealth, the 35mm rangefinder excelled at candid portraiture, street photography and journalism.

SLR cameras addressed the flaws, winning the hearts and wallets of consumers by trading size and noise for convenience. Still, there’s something about the rangefinder that feels perfect. When compact digital cameras removed the need for film or mirrors, a decade of experimentation converged designs that resembled 35mm rangefinders, minus one important feature: taste.

In a world of consumer electronics made of cheap plastic and garish logos, the iPod proved people would pay a premium consumer electronics with beautiful aesthetics. So in 2010, Fujifilm tried a bold experiment. They designed a camera with the conveniences of a modern point-and-shoot, a fixed 35mm lens, and wrapped it in the aesthetics of the classic rangefinders.

Their X100 should have been a swan song to a bygone era. In a few years, the point and shoot market collapsed as normal people realized smartphones were good enough. The X100 debuted at $1,199, twice the price of an unlocked iPhone 4, it proved a smash hit, defining a new camera category.

15 years later, Fujifilm just launched their high-end, $6,000 variant, the GFX100RF. The RF standing for rangefinder, but this refers to its design language, not the hardware. Today, “rangefinder style” means, “a beautiful, rugged point-and-shoot with a fixed, wide angle lens.” It’s a device that functions as both camera and fashion accessory. Does this sound familiar?

The Air distills an iPhone to its spirit. While the iPhone Pro’s bevy of lenses make it perfect for a trip to the Galapagos, the Air seems perfect for street photography, journalism, and candid portraits.

Is one lens really enough? Will you miss ProRAW and LiDAR? To put this to a test, I took to New York with an iPhone Air and an M6.

The Natural Focal Lengths

Before we dig into the iPhone, let’s talk about lenses in general. Why are 50mm and 35mm the most popular focal lengths for documentary work? There’s a myth that 50mm approximates human vision. In fact, our entire field of view is technically 17mm, but visual perception is more nuanced than a single number.

Humans actually see on two levels. Our peripheral vision is very wide, but low detail. It probably evolved to spot predators out of the corner of our eye. We also have a narrow but high detail central vision, which you’re using right now to read these words. Central vision is about 43mm, which sits between 50mm and 35mm.

I’m not saying scientists met with lens makers to arrive at those numbers. Photographers probably just bought more of those lenses because they felt right. Still, it’s interesting there’s physiology to back it up.

Anyway, if you go from 35mm to 28mm, you get a little extra breathing room. It comes in handy in close quarters or wide expanses.

Of course you have to deal with more unwanted stuff in your shots.

But you can always crop to 35mm.

If you don’t know what lens you’ll need for the day, there’s a simple rule of thumb. Can you only carry one lens? Make it a 35mm. Can you carry two? Make them 50mm and 28mm.

I made the mistake only packing my 50mm for my trip to Grand Central, but the 26mm on the iPhone Air came to the rescue.

Will you miss the ultra-wide lens, a stable of almost every iPhone for the last six years? There’s an easy way to check. In the Photos app on a Mac, create a new Smart Album.

I found only three photos from the last year that make me go, “I’m glad I had that ultra-wide!” The first was the 7-mile wide Hubbard Glacier in Alaska.

The second was the exterior of the Oculus:

The third wasn’t wide at all! Don’t forget that lens doubles as a macro.

I bet I could get away with the panorama mode in Apple’s camera, but it’s a bit disappointing to lose macro. Halide may have a macro feature that works on every iPhone, but we’re the first to warn users that software cannot match a true macro lens.

If you love bug shots, the Air is not for you. But the available focal lengths are more than enough for the rangefinder crowd.

Computational Photography and (Lack of) ProRAW

Now that we’ve gotten composition out of the way, let’s talk about image quality. By that I mean algorithms.

Camera algorithms are a faustian deal. Sure, they “fix” photos, raising shadows and taming highlights, but it costs you control. Compare the earlier shot of the Oculus on film to the default shot out of the first-party camera.

I know this down to taste, but after seeing the dramatic contrast of the black and white film earlier, this all-too-perfect lighting feels wrong. It makes me as uncomfortable as staring into the cold dead eyes of generative AI.

Let me get this out of the way: I am not one of those elitists who resent how the iPhone has become Gen-Z’s gateway to photography. I’m glad we’re at the point where beginners don’t need to get bogged down in technical details like film ISO and f-stops before they can get a decent photo, let alone something you’d hang on your wall.

The issue is that “fixing” the lighting in photos means wrestling contrast from the hand of the photographer. Contrast is one of the photographer’s most powerful tools!

Apple addressed this in 2020 when they released the image format they call ProRAW. If you’re interested in its tradeoffs, we wrote a few thousand words about them, but in short, ProRAWS are not RAWs in the traditional sense. These a semi-baked version of their computational photography, with methods to turn down effects like tone-mapping and sharpening. That’s all moot in the case of the Air, as Apple restricts ProRAW to its Pro models.

ProRAW hasn’t changed much since its introduction in 2020. Instead, Apple has focused its resources on a new feature called “photographic styles.” In addition to color presets, you have access to a new “tone” control. Maybe you won’t get the latitude of ProRAW, but maybe we can match the film look?

Not bad, but there are two problems. One, unlike ProRAW, Apple has limited this control their Photos app. You can’t tweak tone in third party apps like Lightroom or Halide. The second problem occurs when you zoom in.

Notice a lack of texture. That’s because this photo was not generated from a single capture. My iPhone took a series of captures, and merged them together to improve dynamic range and reduce noise. There’s nothing you can do about this with Photographic Styles. Even ProRAWs have limited control over this, because noise reduction is a byproduct of Apple’s algorithms.

Whenever people accuse their phone of applying digital makeup to faces, or textured objects turning to plastic, this is what they’re talking about. When your annoying hipster friend goes on and on about “the warmth of analog,” they’re talking about film grain, the extra texture caused by the random activation of silver halides as light strikes emulsion.

Digital cameras may act different than film, but many people (myself included) find that the noise from a digital camera sensor adds an organic quality. The good news is that back by capturing a traditional, Bayer (a.k.a. “Native” a.k.a. “Real”) RAW. Every iPhone since the iPhone 6S supports Bayer RAW capture.

Thanks to the binning on the 48 MP quad-bayer sensor, the noise is soft and subtle. Maybe too subtle! We’ve gotten requests on our Discord for more texture, so I whipped up synthetic grain.

Anyway, let’s compare film, photographic styles, and Bayer RAW.

One thing you’ll miss about ProRAW is editing latitude. When shooting high dynamic range scenes, you can bring out details in the shadows that you don’t even know exist. Bayer RAWs can push and pull exposure a few stops, but it can’t work the miracles. For many people, that’s a serious drawback. For me? It makes things more fun.

Like every mid-century camera, classic rangefinders lacked auto focus and auto exposure, forcing you to think through every shot. They were technically obsolete by the 1970s, with SLRs like the Canon AE-1 tackled automatic exposure. By 1980s, we had auto focus.

Yet the fully manual nature of classic rangefinders still captivates camera nerds 40 years later. There’s just something about knowing that you, not the machine, took the photo. If you feel the same way, the lack of ProRAW makes the Air more of a camera-camera than the iPhone Pro.

A Camera for the Present Moment

If I could pinpoint the moment the iPhone became the definitive camera for breaking news, it was January 15, 2009.

By 2012, you’d see iPhone 4S photos on the cover of Time Magazine.

The iPhone is so important for capturing once-in-a-lifetime moments that every iPhone now ships with a dedicated capture button. But how do we test an iPhone’s ability to capture history?

Luckily, I live in a crumbling empire. Shortly before I started this review, America’s mad king assaulted the first amendment.

One hundred years later, black and white remains the best look for a nation’s spiral into fascism.

This march didn’t start as a protest for Jimmy Kimmel. Officially, this was the Make Billionaires Pay March, a protest against climate abuse by billionaires. One highlight were the paper mache effigies of Elon and Bezos.

The centerpiece of the march was the 160 foot long Climate Polluter’s Bill, detailing $5 trillion of damage caused by climate change in the last ten years.

I think the reason the rangefinder captured so many great candid moments came down to its humble presentation. It didn’t scream “Camera!” like its contemporaries.

Today, seeing someone with any sort of dedicated camera draws attention to itself. In the past this might have worked to a reporter’s attention, but today feels like a target.

If our country continues its descent into authoritarianism, the most important feature of our cameras will be security. At the moment, the iPhone is the most secure camera in the world. At the moment, you can download third-party apps like Signal for anonymous, end-to-end encryption. How long will this last? As long as we keep talking about it.

Film Intermission

The Lost Art of Building Things That Last

If I treat my decades-old cameras right, they’ll last decades more. They never beg for software updates. I never wake up one morning to find the dials changed size and shape. It makes me happy thinking of a world before software.

Yes, I’m a developer, and I can’t look away from the version of iOS that shipped on these phones. To be clear, I’m not talking about aesthetics.

I don’t think the problem rests on their designers or engineers. These small bugs seem like the same mistakes I’ve made myself countless times. Whenever they’ve slip into a release, it’s generally because I ran out of time to find and fix them.

It feels like Apple rushed things out the door to make a Fall 2025 release. With another year of work— maybe just another few months— this could have been a smash hit. Instead we read stories about battery drain, accessibility, and other unforced errors.

It’s just a bit ironic that if you hold off on upgrading your iPhone, you can wait to upgrade iOS until the bugs get worked out. The people who will have the worst experience paid $1,000 at launch for a device running a beta OS.

Whatever Happened to Leitz Camera?

The M6, launched in 1984, is widely regarded as Leica at its peak. It added a light meter for convenience, but if you don’t like it, just remove the battery. The camera remained fully functional without power.

In 2002, Leica launched the M7, their first model with semi-automatic exposure. It drew backlash for adding electronics, which left you with limited control if the battery dies. They responded with the Leica MP (“Mechanical Perfection”) in 2003, which dropped the electronics and basically backtracked to the M6.

Leica was in a bad position. While the rest of the camera industry transitioned from film to digital, Leica was stuck serving a niche fan base of analog purists. Their first consumer digital camera was nothing more than a reskinned Fujifilm point-and-shoot. They later partnered with Panasonic for compact Leica Digilux 1 point-and-shoot, which failed to pay the bills.

By 2004, Leica was the verge of financial collapse. It was saved by Andreas Kaufmann, heir to a 1.5 billion euro inheritance from his aunt. Kaufmann bought a major stake in the company and set out to return them to profitability. Two years later, they launched their first digital rangefinder, the infamous M8. The infrared filter on the sensor failed to do its job, causing ugly IR interference, a problem mitigated by recalls.

Meanwhile, the company juiced revenue by slapping its logo on everything from Panasonic point-and-shoots to Fujifilm instant cameras, and now Android phones and silly iPhone accessories. I guess the real money is in merchandising.

Let’s be honest, Leica was a status symbol long before its pivot into pure-brand. While war photographers went with Contax, artists took to Leica.

Even if the classic M was more status symbol than tool, at least the engineering justified its price tag. Every device felt like a work of art, hand assembled in their factory in Wetzler. Today, they crank out many products on Chinese assembly lines, if you couldn’t tell by the price hikes due to tariffs.

Leica’s optics used to be unparalleled, but today’s Voigtländer glass is ever just as good for a fraction of the price. In fact, every film photo in this post shot at 28mm was shot with a Voigtländer.

Influencers aside, I don’t know any working photographers shooting on Leica digital cameras. That doesn’t seem to worry the company. In their own words, they make “jewelry.”

Today, 55% of Leica continues to be owned by Kaufmann’s investment firm, and the other 45% is owned by the Blackstone private equity group. Maybe the company will continue to print money for decades to come, like Hermes and De Beers. Or maybe brand saturation will make it lose its cool, like Supreme.

Regardless, the Leitz Camera where Oskar Barnack invented the 35mm camera 112 years ago, is dead.

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Leica earned its reputation from stellar engineering. Precise, hand assembled cameras require a high price, which accidentally made them a status symbol. It also put them in a precarious position as technology marched on.

Apple’s greatest strength in the new millennium was its lack of nostalgia or reverence. Had another company invented such iconic products as the iMac or iPod, they would have milked those designs for decades— I remember rumors that the first iPhone would feature a click wheel! Yet time and again, Apple has discontinued successful products years before they outstay their welcome, so they can make room for the next big thing.

Apple’s engineering and taste earned it a spot alongside Leica or Porsche, but this proved both a blessing and distraction. They tried to get into high fashion with a $10,000 solid gold Apple Watch, and it flopped because they went about things backwards. At launch, Apple didn’t fully understand why the Apple Watch should exist, and they hid that with marketing until customers told them, “This is for fitness.” It’s ironic that if they hadn’t shot their shot at launch, I bet they could release a gold Apple Watch today.

Apple is known for beautiful, well engineered products, and I worry they damaged that reputation to hit an arbitrary deadline. I worry about Apple losing its sense of taste, as they send tacky push notifications to our Wallets to promote a movie, and sacrifice valuable screen real estate to promote paid services.

Apple still makes the best products in world, and I still buy them, but I hope someone in Cupertino is minding this course. Their biggest threat isn’t an Android as good the iPhone, any more than Per Se should worry about Gray’s Papaya. The only threat to Apple is Apple.

The Verdict

Since it doesn’t have rangefinder, I won’t call it the modern rangefinder. The iPhone Air is the spiritual successor to the Leica M6.

It isn’t a camera for beginners, and you won’t take it on a safari, but the Air’s small size, discreet operation, and unmatched durability make it ideal for street photography, journalism, and candid portraits. You can buy phones with similar specs for half the price, but the premium pays for a beautiful piece of kit that is one-part tool, and one-part fashion accessory.

It’s a camera that distills photography to its essence. It may have less, but that’s what makes it fun. When you tap the capture button, you know that you, not the machine, took the photo.

This article may contain affiliate links.

No AI was used in this article’s production.

All product photos were shot on an iPhone 16 Pro with Halide. All street photography was captured on an M6 or iPhone Air running a pre-release build of Halide Mark III and its built-in grades.

Every year I watch the Apple Event where Apple announces the latest iPhones, I can’t help but sympathize with the Camera team at Apple. They have to deliver something big, new, even ground-shaking, on a regular annual cadence.

And every year, people ask us the same thing: is it really as big of a deal as they say?

iPhone 17 Pro looks very different at first glance. It’s the biggest departure from the style of camera module and overall Pro iPhone style since iPhone 11 Pro. It still packs three cameras on the back and one on the front. It has an actual camera button (even its svelte sibling, the iPhone Air gets one of those, albeit smaller) and a few notable spec changes, like a longer telephoto zoom. Or is it? And is that really all there is to it?

To find out, I took iPhone 17 Pro to New York, London and Iceland in just 5 days.

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We do not get early access like the press: this is a phone we bought, to give you an unfiltered, real review of the camera. All the photos in this review were taken on iPhone 17 Pro, with the Apple Camera app or an in-development version of Halide Mark III with color grades.

Let’s dig in — because shooting with iPhone 17 Pro, I was surprised by quite a few things.

What’s New

iPhone 17 Pro packs what Apple calls the new ‘ultimate Pro camera system’. This is the last upgrade the camera bump — er, I mean, plateau — was arguably still lacking.

After its introduction with iPhone 11 Pro, all cameras were shooting at a fairly standard 12 megapixels. After the ultra wide camera was upgraded to 48 megapixels in iPhone 16 Pro, Apple finally upgraded the telephoto camera sensor to a 56% larger unit with 48 megapixels. Not only does this allow for sharper shots, but Apple is so confident in its center-crop imaging pipeline that it argues it allows for a 12-megapixel 8× zoom of ‘optical quality’. More on that one in its own, detailed section: I am a big telephoto fan, and this announcement had me immediately excited to test it out.

One of the biggest upgrades this year actually comes to the front camera — but its quality impacts will be far less noticeable to most people than most tech pundits initially predicted. In a classic Apple move, the company replaced the bog standard selfie camera with a much larger square-sensor packing camera, but instead of now simply shooting 24 megapixel square shots it added a very clever Center Stage system to reframe your selfie shots to include people into it automatically or save you from twisting your arm to take a landscape selfie shot.

This is a very impressive piece of engineering, and a classic Apple innovation in that the hardware change is essentially invisible. Us camera geeks love the idea of a square sensor, but in the Camera you will not find a way to take images with the full square image area; it just puts the square area of the 24MP sensor to use for 18 MP crops in their landscape or portrait depending on the subject matter.

Apple (in my opinion, correctly) figured that if this artistic choice being made by your iPhone offends you as an artist, you are free to use one of the better cameras on the rear of the iPhone or disable the automatic framing feature altogether, returning its behavior to a ‘normal’ front-facing selfie camera.

Finally, there’s some notable changes to processing. “More detail at every zoom range and light level”. In particular, Apple stated in its keynote that deep learning was used for demosaicking raw data from the sensor’s quad pixels to get more natural (and actual, existing) detail and color in every image. In particular, Apple went to point out this also meant that its AI upscaling that’s used to make those ‘2×’ and ‘8×’ ‘lenses’ (that are actually the center portion of the 48MP Main and Telephoto cameras) is significantly improved.

Finally, and not insignificantly, the entire phone has gotten a total design overhaul. Its interface and exterior are both composed of all new materials, and some big changes under the hood (or ceramic back panel, if you will) allow for even more performance out of the latest generation Apple Silicon chip inside.

What’s Not New

While the entire iPhone looks brand new, the cameras have some familiar parts. The Main camera sensor and lens is identical to the iPhone 16 Pro’s, which in turn is identical to the iPhone 15 Pro’s. The ultra wide camera, too, is the same as last year’s 48 megapixel snapper.

The Camera Control from iPhone 16 Pro returns on all iPhone 17s and iPhone Air. No significant updates here, but I still find it a fantastic addition to the iPhone for opening my choice of camera app and taking a photo. The adjustments, on the other hand, still seem fiddly to me a year later. I was hoping for some more changes to it, perhaps even a face lift along with iOS 26 — but it has remained essentially the same save for some additional settings to fine-tune it to your liking.

Party in the Front, Business in the Back

This is, without a doubt, a great back camera system. With all cameras at 48MP, your creative choices are tremendous. I find Apple’s quip of it being ‘like having eight lenses in your pocket’ a bit much, but it does genuinely feel like having at least 5 or 6: Macro, 0.5×, 1×, 2×, 4× and 8× .

The — unchanged save for processing tweaks — ultra wide and main camera are still great. I find the focal lengths ideal for day-to-day use and the main camera especially is sharp and responsive. Its image quality isn’t getting old (yet).

What’s beginning to get very old is its lack of close focusing. Its new sibling camera in iPhone Air focuses a whole 5 cm (that’s basically 2 inches) closer, and it’s very noticeable. For most users, arms-length photography is an extremely common use case: think objects you hold, a dish of food or an iced matcha, your pet; you probably take photos at this distance every day. And if you do, you’ll have encountered your iPhone switching, at times rapidly, between the ultra wide ‘macro’ lens and the regular main camera — one of which produces nice natural bokeh and has far higher image quality. It’s been several years of this now, and it’s time to call it out as a serious user experience annoyance that I hope can be fixed in the future. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why our app Halide does not auto-switch lenses.

Shooting at 2× on iPhone 17 Pro did produce noticeably better shots; I believe this can be chalked up to significantly better processing for these ‘crop shots’. Many people think Apple is dishonest in calling this an ‘optical quality’ zoom, but it’s certainly not a regular digital zoom either. I am very content with it, and I was a serious doubter when it was introduced. 

The entire camera array continues to impress every year in working in unison: this year, more than ever, my shots were very well color and color temperature matched and zooming was more smooth between lenses than I’d seen.

It’s wild that they pull this off with 3 different camera sensors and lenses. It’s essentially invisible to the average user, and that’s a real feat. No other company does this as well: pick up an Android phone and go through their copy of the iOS Camera zoom wheel to see for yourself sometime. 

4× the Charm

I have previously written perhaps one too many love letter to the 3× camera lens that the iPhone 13 Pro, 14 Pro had. While it had a small sensor, its focal length was just such a delight; one of my favorite go-to lenses is 75mm. Shooting with longer lenses is a careful balance of framing, and it’s harder the longer the focal length is. 

Creative compositions are much easier when you have to select what not to include rather than to focus attention on one thing; the devil is in the detail. 

The previous iPhone traded some image quality in the common zoom range (2-4×) for reach. I found the 16 Pro’s 5× lens reach spectacular, but creatively challenging at times for that reason. There was also a tremendous gap in image quality between a 3× – 4× equivalent crop of the Main camera and the telephoto, which made missing an optical lens at that range even more painful. 

4× is an elegant solution; while I do still miss 3× — 3.5× would’ve been perfect, but admittedly not nearly as numerically satisfying as 1-2-4-8× — the lens’ focal length is fantastic for portraiture and details alike, and its larger sensor renders impressive detail: 

Even in low light, the lens performs admirably — due to a multitude of factors: excellent top-tier stabilization of the sensor 3D space, software stabilization, good processing and a larger sensor.

It is still is very much reliant on processing and Night Mode compared to the Main camera, however — expect those nighttime shots to require ProRAW and / or Night Mode to get the most out of a shot.

Even then, things will look fairly ‘smoothed over’:

Regardless, this is a tremendous telephoto upgrade, and if you were as much of a telephoto lover as me it might well be reason alone to upgrade.

Are the 48 megapixel details truly visible? Well, judge for yourself:

I find that the resolution is great, though the lens is a bit soft.

I like this softness, myself; it is to Apple’s great credit that there isn’t some kind of heavy handed sharpening algorithm that pushes these images to look artificially sharper.

It renders very naturally, extremely flattering for portraiture, and showcases processing restraint that I haven’t seen from many modern phone makers. Bravo.

It also has an additional trick up its sleeve thanks to those extra pixels and processing: an additional lens unlocked by cropping the center 12 MP area of the image, along with some magical processing. Does it really work?

8× Feature’s a Feat

The overall experience of shooting a lens this long should not be this good. I’ve not seen it mentioned in reviews, but the matter of keeping a 200mm lens somehow steady and not an exercise in tremendous frustration is astonishing. Apple is using both its very best hardware stabilization on this camera and software stabilization, as seen in features like Action Mode.

You will notice this while using the camera at this zoom level: the image will at times appear to warp in areas of your viewfinder, or lag behind your movement a little bit. The only way to truly communicate how impressive this is is to grab a 200mm lens and hand-hold it: you’ll find that it magnifies the small movements of your hand so much that it is really hard to frame a shot unless you brace it.

And then there’s the images from this new, optimized center-crop zoom.

To say I’ve been impressed with the output would be an understatement.

Sometimes you get a little bit of a comedic effect as you realize you are seeing things through the telephoto lens you hadn’t even noticed or can’t quite make out with your own eyes:

And other times you become that stereotypical bird photographer (or in my case, a wanna-be). I will note that even with its magical stabilization, getting a picture of something in rapid motion is a bit of a challenge…

… but the results are truly magical if you do nail it. Is this tack sharp?

Well, no, but this is 500% detail of a crop of a phone sensor shooting at 200mm at a fast moving bird on a cloudy day. I am pretty impressed.

It allows for some astonishing zoom range through the entire system. 

I mentioned it before, but I want to reiterate it because it’s such a fun creative exercise for anyone with this phone: I believe that the longer the lens, the more of your skills in creating beautiful compositions and photos will be challenged. It’s just not that easy — but it also means you suddenly find different beautiful photos in what was previously a single frame:

The details are often prettier than the whole thing. Now I get to choose what story my image tells. What caught my eye, or what made the moment so magical. In video this is also lots of fun; I will post some Kino shorts on our Instagram to highlight the fun of moving video details of a scene.

Another example: here, Big Ben can take the center stage. As I shoot at 4×, I get an ‘obvious’ composition:

At 8×, I am presented with a choice: I can capture the tower, or the throng of people crossing the bridge and note as the evening sun lights up the dust in the air:

I like what this does for you as a photographer. Creativity, as many things do, can function as a muscle. Training it constantly, and stimulating yourself by forcing creative thought is what helps you become better at the craft.

This is a little artistic composition gym in your pocket. Use it.

Trust the Process 

As we mentioned in our last post, algorithms are about as important — perhaps more so — than the lens on your camera today. There’s a word for that: processing. We’re keenly aware of just how many people are at times frustrated with the processing an iPhone does to its imagery. It’s a phenomenon that comes from a place of exceptional luxury: without its mighty, advanced processing an iPhone would produce a far less usable image for most people in many conditions.

I believe the frustration often lies in the ‘intelligence’ of processing making decisions in image editing that you might consider heavy handed. Other times, it might be simply reducing noise that makes an image look smudgy in low light.

Image processing is the one area where phones handily beat dedicated cameras, for the simple reason that phones have far more processing power at their disposal and need to do more to get a great image from an exceptionally small image sensor. We review it as intensely, then, as a new bit of hardware. How does it stack up this year?

Well, it’s somewhat different.

On the Main camera, don’t expect huge changes. I found detail to be somewhat more natural in the Ultra Wide camera, but even here it was somewhat random-seeming if the results were truly consistently better. Overall, image processing pipelines are so complex now that it’s hard to get a great idea of the changes over just a week. The images overall felt a bit more natural to me, though — although I still prefer shooting native RAW and Process Zero shots if I have the option to.

As I mentioned in the earlier section, it is truly noticeable that the 2× mode on the Main camera is a lot better. Not only is the result sharper, it also just looks less visibly ‘processed’; a real win considering Apple claims this is actually due to more processing!

Finally, you might wonder: if these images are a bit better processed and all this being software, why isn’t this simply being rolled out to the older iPhones just the same? Is Apple purposefully limiting the best image quality to just the latest iPhones?

The answer is yes, though not through inaction or some kind of malevolent and crooked capitalist lever to force you to upgrade. Software in itself might be easily ported across devices, but image pipelines like the ones we see on the iPhones 17 Pro are immensely integrated and optimized. It’s quite likely the chip itself, along with hardware between the chip and sensor are specifically designed to handle this series’ unique image processing. Porting it over to an older phone is likely impossible for that reason alone.

Video for Pros

This is mainly a photography review, but I also increasingly shoot video and make an app for it. iPhone 17 Pro has some absolutely wild features for pro video. They put the capital P in Pro; things like Genlock and ProRes RAW are far beyond what even advanced amateur users will likely use.

That being said, these features aren’t just for Hollywood. While it’s true that some of these latest ultra-powerful video pro features will allow the iPhone to become even more of a pro workhorse in terms of capturing shots and become usable in significant productions, the introduction of Apple Log with iPhone 15 Pro and other technologies are really just fuel for developers to run with.

When we built Kino, we wanted to make it so you can actually use things like Apple Log and the Pro iPhone’s video making advancements without an education in the fine art of color grading in desktop software and learning what shutter angle is.

Adding technologies like this not only make the iPhone a truly ‘serious camera’, but since it’s a platform for development, it also creates use cases for these technologies that have not been possible in traditional cameras used for photography and videography.

This is super exciting stuff, and I think we’ll see the entire field evolve significantly as a result. With this set of new features — Open Gate recording, ProRes RAW, Apple Log 2 — Apple is continuing to build an impressive set of technologies that let it rival dedicated cinematic cameras without compromising on the best part of the iPhone: that it’s really a smartphone, which can be anything you want it to be.

A Material Change

Everything’s new on this phone, appearance wise: a return to aluminum is welcome. The new design cools itself much better and that’s noticeable when you shoot a lot. It feels great in the hand and hopefully will age as nicely as my other aluminum workhorses from Apple. Apple even markets it as being especially rugged:

On the other hand, its other user-facing aspect — iOS itself — has also gotten a new material shift.

Liquid Glass is here with iOS 26, and it brings about an entirely new Camera app design, some much desired improvements to the Photos app, and a general facelift to the OS. While this isn’t an iOS review, I will say that it’s beautiful, and I’m a fan of Liquid Glass. iOS 26, however, has been a bit of a rough start: I ran into a lot of bugs even with the latest updates installed on the iPhone 17 Pro, from bad performance (OK) to photos not showing up for a long time to distorted images and the camera app freezing or being unusable (not so OK).

Big releases are ambitious, and difficult to pull off. I give tremendous credit to the teams at Apple for shipping iOS 26 along with these new devices, but in everyday use it truly felt like using a beta release. The constant issues I ran into did not make me feel like I was using a release candidate of an operating system.*

*Feedback reports on these issues have been sent to Apple.

Conclusion 

I think the iPhone Air serves a very important purpose: it allows Apple to make one phone a jewelry-like, beautiful device that is like a pane of glass and one that is decidedly like the Apple Watch Ultra: bigger, bulkier and more rugged.

For years, I was a bit annoyed at the shininess and jewel-like qualities of the Pro, and to be entirely honest, I do now miss it a little bit. This is a beast in both performance and appearance, and it feels almost a little unlike Apple. I think, however, that the direction is correct and significant.

Our phones are such a central part of our lives now that it feels significant be able to have a choice for a product that prioritizes the true ‘pro’ — much like MacBook Pro did in a fantastic way with the thicker, bulkier M1 series.

This, then, might be the first ‘workhorse SLR’ of the iPhone family, if the regular iPhone is a simple Kodak Brownie. In that, some of the simplicity that delighted in the first iPhone may have been lost — but the acknowledgement that complexity is not the enemy is a significant and good step. As a camera, it is first and foremost a tool of creative expression: gaining permission to become more fine-tuned for that purpose makes it truly powerful.

It’s left as an exercise to the user to excel at their purpose as much as the phone does.

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All images in this review were taken on iPhone 17 Pro (unless otherwise noted). Photos were taken with an in-development version of Halide Mark III with built in grades for adjustment, with a smaller portion taken with Apple Camera in ProRAW and stills from the Kino app using built-in grades for adjustment.