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iPhone 17 Camera Redesign Rumors Conflict on Spatial Video Support
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What happened to the render from MacRumors where the 3 camera pill layout was in the landscape orientation? 😉
Sadly they have to change it, mainly to get bigger sensors in the camera's, because with the stove design they would be encroaching on the MagSafe magnets and to a lesser degree eliminate the wobble.
I also think, this may have something to do with a heat sink or a vapor chamber.
Ultimately there are more reasons to change the camera lay out, than not to.
How big a sensor do you want to put behind those tiny lenses?
I understand what sensor size does as I have a full frame DSLR, but after all, the lens is what does more for photo quality than a sensor, besides the actual photographer
never gonna happen. its only gonna be more and more and soon they'll have healthy competition in the field as well.What if... behind the scenes and with future plans...
Apple is backing away from Spatial Video and VisionOS and VisionPro?
just saying ... it is possible
My silly suggestion is:
Square image sensors - then the user can take spatial video holding the phone vertically and crop however they like.
EDIT: I remember the Snap Spectacles took circular images / videos and really thought they might have square sensors, but alas:
Square image sensors - then the user can take spatial video holding the phone vertically and crop however they like.
EDIT: I remember the Snap Spectacles took circular images / videos and really thought they might have square sensors, but alas:
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They don't need to rotate the sensor at all. For years the cameras have been capable of 4k (didn't do the math, but probably 8k) footage even if held in a portrait mode.
The whole thing could (and should) have an option to default to landscape or portrait regardless of the way the phone is held.
Personally I'd prefer to be able to take landscape photos without needing to rotate my phone.
As big as physically possible, it goes without saying that the bigger the sensor, the bigger the lens to accommodate it.
IMO the amount of light is the core to a quality photo and I guarantee at least one if not all the camera's will have a bigger sensor with a bigger lens in the 17 Pro's
My hope is that Apple finally does the sensible thing for the back camera: if you hold the phone in portrait and film, you're filming landscape. Landscape video is "natural". It's how our visual system is wired (why our eyes are laterally spaced and not vertically). Filming portrait when you hold the phone in portrait mode makes sense for selfie videos, but not for back camera videos. It might take a small time to adapt for some, but that's like the change to "natural scrolling" a decade ago. We whine a bit at first, but now it just feels natural. And the upside: all those people filming holding their phones upright end up with natural looking widescreen videos instead of horribly cramped vertical video.
Can you elaborate on that?
If Apple has no systems/design engineers, how are new products, such as the new M4 Mac mini, new iPhones, new iPads, etc, getting designed?
Regarding Apple's performance... can you speak to that and how manufacturing and *selling* 600,000 iPhones per day (on the average) everyday of the year, as just one example, squares with that.
I think I speak for most here - nobody cares anymore. These tiny details about the slightest of iterations expected in 9 months time just aren't interesting anymore, not least because the iPhone 16 was already such a disappointment. Apple is as generic as they come now, mass produced soulless slop, a far cry from 2011.
Make it more inconvenient then. Vertical video is the work of the devil.
off topic but...
I will never capitulate to the indoctrination of the 'natural' scrolling mac user!
The very naming convention insults me, as if I am ... un-natural
on topic though: I do somewhat agree with the suggestion that the image sensor could be landscape while held in portrait mode, anything to rid the world of the scourge of VVS
This is a no issue. Depending on how the lenses are placed, you can record landscape video while you are holding the phone vertically. During recording, you will see it with black areas at the top and bottom, but it wont prevent from being played later as intended.
They may limit that specific setting to spatial video, and everything else with the camera will work as usual.
So, for spatial landscape video, you’ll hold the phone vertically. It will give you a prompt about it, so you won’t be confused. For regular landscape video and photos, you will hold it horizontally as usual.
They may limit that specific setting to spatial video, and everything else with the camera will work as usual.
So, for spatial landscape video, you’ll hold the phone vertically. It will give you a prompt about it, so you won’t be confused. For regular landscape video and photos, you will hold it horizontally as usual.
Except then people watch them on their smartphones in portrait and they’re ridiculously tiny. That isn’t a “sensible” move at all.
As I previously said, MacRumors readers aren’t remotely representative of Apple’s ~1 billion customers.
Apple killed 3D Touch after a few generations and that was far more useful, are we really gana hold back the iPhone for the handful of Vision Pro users who probably don’t even care anyway?
As a video guy I'm not a fan of portrait, mostly because it's a horrible ratio for telling stories — there's no room for people to have conversations. It's great for one person talking to the camera but it just doesn't work for everything.
Still, with Spatial video recording on current iPhones being limited to 1080p, there's enough resolution to support widescreen Spatial even while held in portrait orientation. There's also no need for all iPhones to use the same layout for cameras; they might leave the pro models with a triangle but transition some other iPhones to an oblong.
On the other iPhones at least, it would be great if Apple could enable native 4K Spatial recording (and Log!) because the third-party apps all have a few lingering issues. Additionally, it seems that it's not possible to get a cropped video feed from the centre of the wide-angle sensor (one of the stereo angles). Even though it's now 48MP, it's binned heavily *before* being cropped further, and the 16 Pro's Spatial video looks very similar to the 15 Pro's. What's more annoying is that there are very few third-party dedicated stereoscopic cameras, so this is Apple's market for the taking.
That said, one of the great things about the Apple Vision Pro is that there is no screen size you have to conform to. Vertical works fine there, but it doesn't take up much of your field of view. Also, shooting 4:3 is interesting if you want to present on a overwhelming IMAX-style screen.
Mind you, the things that would really push uptake of Spatial would be 3D display support on a future iPhone or Mac, or 3D TV support on Apple TV. Apple Vision Pro is great, but too expensive to go mainstream, and too hard to share. 3D images you can show to your friends immediately? That changes things.
Still, with Spatial video recording on current iPhones being limited to 1080p, there's enough resolution to support widescreen Spatial even while held in portrait orientation. There's also no need for all iPhones to use the same layout for cameras; they might leave the pro models with a triangle but transition some other iPhones to an oblong.
On the other iPhones at least, it would be great if Apple could enable native 4K Spatial recording (and Log!) because the third-party apps all have a few lingering issues. Additionally, it seems that it's not possible to get a cropped video feed from the centre of the wide-angle sensor (one of the stereo angles). Even though it's now 48MP, it's binned heavily *before* being cropped further, and the 16 Pro's Spatial video looks very similar to the 15 Pro's. What's more annoying is that there are very few third-party dedicated stereoscopic cameras, so this is Apple's market for the taking.
That said, one of the great things about the Apple Vision Pro is that there is no screen size you have to conform to. Vertical works fine there, but it doesn't take up much of your field of view. Also, shooting 4:3 is interesting if you want to present on a overwhelming IMAX-style screen.
Mind you, the things that would really push uptake of Spatial would be 3D display support on a future iPhone or Mac, or 3D TV support on Apple TV. Apple Vision Pro is great, but too expensive to go mainstream, and too hard to share. 3D images you can show to your friends immediately? That changes things.
Considering the size of phone screens and the resolution of current sensors, it should be fairly trivial for them to simply record in landscape and display a phone screen shaped portrait viewport of that landscape video. Then on the phone you would have the same view you saw when you filmed, but extended width and/or spatial video when you went to view them on a television or AVP. Effectively the removal of black bars, rather than the adding of them. The only issue at that point would be the framing/composition of the landscape view, but that seems to be a lost art today, anyway.
I say this all based on the fact that the iOS18 upgrade apparently switched the settings for my AppleTV app on my iPhone mini to buy in SD resolution, so I was unintentionally buying SD movies on it for 3 months before I went to watch one on my 4K television at Christmas and realized something was very wrong. Now I'm arguing with Apple that they shouldn't even be selling SD in 2025, simply displaying the specific desired resolution requested at runtime.
There was never anything "natural" about natural scrolling - it's backwards and I literally know zero people who have ever done anything other than toggle that stupid default setting off.
Do you swipe your phone screen down in order to go up as well?
wow, 13 pro (or 12 pro max i assume since both are pretty much the same ) really did bring a huge change to the camera island size
Niantic's showcase images at their "Into the Scaniverse" website are far from photorealistic, unless you redefine "photorealistic" to mean "an image that has similarities to a photo, but which looks more like a photo of a sketch". Gaussian splatting can't possibly be what Apple is planning on doing to replace the current photographic quality of spatial videos and photos.
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