The iPhone’s cameras are too good

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

How do you improve on perfection?

I was working hard on my review of the iPhone 15 Plus last week, an experience which I expected to be a slog following years of Pro ownership that turned out to be a delight. It’s an excellent phone and it turns out–who knew–that in certain respects big screens can make for a better experience than medium-sized ones.

Part of the review process I particularly enjoyed was testing out the new “next-generation portraits” feature, which is designed to look for human faces when lining up a photo and automatically record depth data when it sees one. That way, if you decide that you wish you’d turned on portrait mode, you can retrospectively activate that feature and get bokeh blurring. Even more interestingly, it works on dogs and cats too… which entailed some not entirely unpleasant hours of walking the streets trying to convince the neighborhood’s cats to stand still long enough for me to photograph them. It also gave me an in with the man across the street, who owns a delightful Shih Tzu and was happy to help.

The next-gen portraits feature is a clever bit of lateral thinking that will give iPhone owners more of an opportunity to use bokeh without having to plan in advance. And the 15 Plus’s new 2x optical zoom, made possible without separate telephoto glassware by the bump from 12MP to 48MP on the main lens, is a useful and noticeable improvement too. But as photographic advances go, it has to be said that these hardly compare with the early days of the iPhone, when each new model would extravagantly surpass everything that had come before. The problem is that, as slowly as Apple sometimes seems to advance from product generation to product generation, iPhone photography reached that crucial point of “good enough for most people most of the time” a long time ago. Apple has finished gilding the lily, and is now applying a layer of varnish to the lily and putting the lily in an attractive presentation case.

Take Smart HDR, for example. I’m a big fan of this Apple tech, which uses computational wizardry to stitch together elements of multiple exposures to solve multiple lighting conditions in a single shot. That way, if you recklessly place your subject in the shadow of a tree with a blazing sun behind, you can get detail of the subject, and the shadowy side of the tree, without blowing out the bright sky. It’s clever stuff–but only useful in the minority of edge cases where the iPhone owner has essentially made an error of composition.

Smart HDR has been around, in one form or another, since the iPhone XS and XR in 2018. Sure, it’s been further honed with each successive generation (as of the iPhone 15, we’re officially on Smart HDR 5) and performance in the most challenging of conditions has moved slowly forwards. But it’s tough, even for a professional reviewer going out of his way to push the performance envelope, to spot noticeable differences between recent models. It’s got to the point where I’m seeking out the most improbably difficult juxtapositions of light and shade and deliberately committing the most egregious compositional gaffes in order to spot improvements on the previous generation. Which is fun for a reviewer, but scarcely reflective of the typical user’s typical experience.

Technology follows a trajectory of thrilling early advances followed by quiet consolidation and eventual commoditization. These days, as far as most of us are concerned, smartphone cameras are all much of a muchness. If you buy a smartphone it’ll have a camera that will be, at bare minimum, fine. It might not be capable of the DSLR-style masterpieces Apple loves to show off at its iPhone launch events, but that’s not what most of us are looking for. Any further advances are not for the benefit of the customer, they are simply something for the marketing team to write about in the ad copy. It would be like a kettle maker claiming its latest model can boil water more quickly than the last one. Thanks a lot, lads, but it’s not like I was standing around getting impatient for my tea.

Perhaps Apple will come up with a way to wow me all over again with the cameras in the iPhone 16—indeed I hope to be proved wrong. But my suspicion is that iPhone cameras have simply gotten too good for any further upgrades to be interesting or worthwhile. Apple may need to wean itself off the habit of making camera features the central plank of its marketing spiel, and focus on something that actually needs to be improved. It could start with Siri.

Foundry

Trending: Top stories

Apple is destroying the Mac by trying to make it safer.

With personality and reactivity, Apple finally made the perfect watch face.

We explain why PC pros should switch to a Mac Studio–and never look back.

Podcast of the week

On this episode of the Macworld Podcast, it’s all about your hot takes! You have thoughts on the latest happenings in the world of Apple! Let’s hear what you have to say! It’s all on this show!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner The rumor mill

Apple is already working full-time on a sequel to Vision Pro, according to the latest report.

Apple may upgrade nearly every iPad with an OLED display by 2026. But OLED displays aren’t coming to the MacBook Pro anytime soon.

The next Apple Watch may not be the ‘significant’ upgrade we were hoping for.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

iPhones are randomly shutting down and rebooting overnight and no one knows why.

Apple has released iOS 16.7.1 to plug critical security holes.

iOS 17.1, meanwhile, will address iPhone 12 radiation concerns in France.

A surprise AirPods Pro update has targeted both Lightning and USB-C models, offering “Bug fixes and other improvements.”

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.