This iPhone 17 Pro camera rumor makes me hesitant to buy a 16 Pro – and here’s why

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The iPhone 16 Pro is barely a month old, but we’re already seeing some credible rumors about next year’s successor – and the latest camera speculation for the iPhone 17 Pro has me considering delaying my iPhone upgrade.

According to a research note from usually reliable analyst Jeff Pu (via MacRumors), both the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max will see their 5x telephoto camera upgraded from a 12 MP sensor to a 48 MP sensor. Less exciting (for me at least) is that the front camera is also boosted to a 24MP sensor.

The note includes other predictions for Apple’s next flagship phone – both models will apparently get 12GB of RAM (down from 8GB) to improve Apple Intelligence and multitasking speeds, plus a first major reduction in size of the Dynamic Island (thanks to a new metals for the Face ID system). Of course, there will also be a new A19 Pro chip.

But as a photographer about to upgrade to the iPhone 16 Pro, the telephoto rumors about the 17 Pro have got me thinking. I’ve written before about why I skipped the iPhone 15 Pro, with the main reason being my golden rule of waiting until a new Apple feature reaches the sophistication of the second generation.

This year the iPhone 16 Pro brought Apple’s 5x telephoto camera to the smaller Pro model (previously exclusive to Max), but this one is largely identical to last year with an f/2.8 aperture and a 12MP sensor. It looks like that zoom camera will reach real maturity in the 17 Pro series with the same 48MP boost that Apple added to the iPhone Pro’s wide-angle camera this year – and that could be worth the wait.

Why a telephoto upgrade would be a big deal

Apple has left one of the three cameras of the iPhone 16 Pro with a resolution of 12 MP: the telephoto camera. The main camera is a 24mm, 48MP affair with a bright f/1.78 aperture, while the 13mm Ultra Wide has been upgraded to 48MP. While the Ultra Wide doesn’t pack the same computational ‘Fusion’ magic as the main camera, the resolution is still a useful upgrade for things like macro shooting.

The sensor size is at least as important as the resolution, if not more so. But a higher resolution 48MP sensor can help reduce noise through ‘binning’ – in other words, combining adjacent pixels to make larger ones that are more sensitive to light. Such technical improvements are especially useful when light is reflected around an internal tetraprism, such as on the telephoto lens.

If the iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto camera combined a resolution increase with a larger sensor, image quality would improve significantly. While our iPhone 16 Pro review found the 5x camera to be perfectly solid, it’s still the weakest sibling of the phone’s three hardware-based cameras – and one I’d probably only use in emergencies or as a handy digital binoculars.

Of course, waiting for Apple to give the iPhone Pro series a ‘perfect’ photography setup – three 48MP cameras with large sensors and ‘Fusion’ processing – is a fool’s game. Apple is a master at crumbling these small camera upgrades into just enough to keep you on the upgrade cycle. I’ll most likely still succumb to the temptation of an iPhone 16 Pro upgrade, but these rumors certainly make it tempting to wait another year.

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