New details have emerged concerning a huge camera upgrade coming to the iPhone 15 Pro Max — but not to the smaller Phone 15 Pro.
In a recent report, respected industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reveals that Largan Precision will be the sole supplier of periscopic telephoto camera destined to appear only in Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Apple is (as usual) late to the game with periscopic cameras and that are used in pretty much all high-end and even mid-rangde Android phones these days, with Zeiss, Leica and Hasselblad developed packages.
Here, Kuo doubles down on previous reports stating that the iPhone 15 Pro won’t even get a periscopic lens this year. Leaving the new lens out of the regular iPhone 15 Pro will create an unusual differentiation between Apple’s models, so iPhone pro pricing needs to be significantly lower than pro Max this year. Furthermore, with the iPhone 16 Pro expected to pick up the new camera tech next year, it will become tempting for iPhone owners to jump to more modern devices from competitors.
The current iPhone 14 Pro Max camera is a lackluster performer compared to newer handset with better sensors and lenses (like Vivo X90, Oppos Hasselblad versions, Galaxy S23, Xiaomi 1-inch sensor phones etc. etc.). It also suffers from loss of detail when taking pictures at long range, as revealed in Dxomark’s recent tests. Fixing some of the shortcomings would therefore make the next-gen iPhone 15 Pro Max camera somewhat competitive, at least with current gen competitors.
The new camera is only expected to include a tiny 1/3-inch sensor with optical image stabilization and an optical zoom (periscope lens) of 5-6x and will improve the long-range zoom performance of the most exepnsive Apple model, bringing it closer in line with the best of the Android-based competition which have been using similar periscopic lenses for some time.
It remains to be seen what effect this omission will have on iPhone 15 Pro sales, but I suspect that potential iPhone buyers with smaller hands won’t be happy.