Apple’s iPhone 17 Professional stole the Pixel 10’s digital camera bar, and one way or the other makes it even higher

If I am being brutally sincere, I’ve by no means been a fan of Apple’s stovetop triple rear digital camera design. First showing on the iPhone 11 Pro all the best way again in 2019, I can admire the technical feat of engineering required to create its raised glass impact, however, in my very own private opinion, it seems quirky at finest and downright hideous at worst.

As Professional-model iPhone digital camera sensors grew in measurement, so too did the scale of their respective rear digital camera humps, and I am unable to say the stovetop design has scaled notably properly at iPhone 16 Pro digital camera proportions. On prime of this, I discover the three separate digital camera rings to be main mud, grime, and pocket lint collectors, and cleansing them is an concerned course of that requires placing in some real elbow grease.

On the opposite facet of the smartphone isle, Google has settled on a signature visor-like digital camera bar design going way back to the Pixel 6 in 2021. Able to housing a full array of major large angle, ultra-wide angle and periscope zoom sensors, I discover the latest Pixel 10 and 10 Pro phones from Google to be infinitely extra elegant within the digital camera design division. The Pixel’s full-width bar is extra intentional, symmetrical, visually harmonious, and, dare I say, clever, than its contemporaneous iPhone — it stops wobbly phone-on-desk syndrome lifeless in its tracks, in spite of everything.

• Model

  Apple

  SoC

  A19 Professional

  Show

  6.3-inch 1206 x 2622 pixel decision Tremendous Retina XDR OLED, 120Hz, HDR10, Dolby Imaginative and prescient, 1000 nits / 1600 nits peak brightness

  RAM

  N/A

  Storage

  256GB

  Battery

  N/A

  The iPhone 17 Professional is Apple’s next-generation flagship smartphone, with a brand new aluminum unibody design, a full-width digital camera plateau, the A19 Professional chipset, and a 6.3-inch show.

  
  

• 

  Model

  Google

  SoC

  Tensor G5

  Show

  6.3-inch Tremendous Actua show 1280 x 2856 pixel decision OLED (1-120Hz)

  RAM

  16GB

  Storage

  128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB

  Battery

  4,870mAh, 30+ hours of battery life

  The Pixel 10 Professional options Google’s new Tensor G5 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 128GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of storage. The smartphone’s total design seems similar to its predecessor, together with its sprawling digital camera bump. 

  
  

The iPhone enters its Pixel digital camera visor period

The iPhone 17 Professional’s full-width rear digital camera module builds upon the Pixel’s signature visor aesthetic

You may think about my aid, then, when Apple determined to poach Google’s digital camera bar wholesale to be used on its brand-new iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air handsets. Gone is the iPhone 16 Professional’s questionable rear digital camera stovetop, and as a replacement on the 17 Professional is a full-width aluminum ‘plateau’ that homes three digital camera lenses, the LED flash and LiDAR modules, and a pin-hole microphone cutout.

The iPhone Air, in the meantime, incorporates a slimmer Ceramic Protect-based bar that solely must accommodate a single digital camera along with an LED module and a microphone cutout, making it the extra understated of Apple’s two new digital camera bar designs.

Aesthetically talking, I believe I nonetheless desire the Pixel’s lower-profile digital camera visor to that of the brand new Professional iPhone, because it obfuscates all of the digital camera {hardware} behind a single, uniform sheet of glass. However, the iPhone 17 Professional’s digital camera hump is a marked step ahead in design when in comparison with its predecessor’s protrusion.

The iPhone Air’s toned-down digital camera bar is nearer in type to that of the Pixel 10 collection, however there’s one thing elegant concerning the latter’s implementation that Apple’s tremendous slim handset does not fairly match as much as in my eyes. In any case, I am excited to place each the Air and the 17 Professional to the desk wobble check, and I am unable to wait to carry the telephones and assess their in-hand weight distribution.

Apple’s new digital camera plateau is a centerpiece of practical design

The iPhone 17 Professional’s full-width rear digital camera module builds upon the Pixel’s signature visor aesthetic

Apple

In basic style, Apple hasn’t merely adopted the Pixel digital camera bar aesthetic and known as it a day. Somewhat, there’s a real sense of design iteration at play right here, and it one way or the other makes the iPhone 17 Professional and iPhone Air that rather more spectacular to me from an engineering standpoint.

Apple’s new and enlarged digital camera plateaus are leveraged to cram in extra tech parts, making higher use of area than a typical digital camera hump, visor-style or in any other case. Within the case of the iPhone Air, the corporate has one way or the other managed to fill the protrusion with a lot of the handset’s internals, leaving the remainder of the chassis free for a way more capacious battery pack.

On the iPhone 17 Professional and 17 Professional Max, in the meantime, Apple has cleverly built-in the antenna system all through the perimeter of the brand new digital camera bar. If you happen to look carefully, you will discover that the side-facing antenna cutouts soften instantly into the plateau, which Apple says improves wi-fi radio reception when in comparison with extra conventional setups.

Apple has a knack for setting new traits throughout the cellular tech trade, and I’ve a hunch {that a} full-width digital camera bar frenzy is about to kick off. Proper on cue, early Samsung Galaxy S26 dummy models are already floating around online, full with suspiciously plateau-adjacent protrusions besides.

For as soon as, I am genuinely on board with the concept of thicker and extra outstanding rear camera bumps on next-generation smartphones (I by no means thought I might string collectively such a sentence).

If Apple’s function-over-form strategy is adopted by the likes of Samsung, OnePlus, Motorola, Nothing, and even Google for that matter, I believe all of us stand to profit from smarter use of inner cellphone area, bigger battery capacities, higher mobile reception, and maybe even a sunsetting of the eerie, cyclopian digital camera design development discovered on so many modern smartphones of our period.