Apple’s iPhone 17 Professional stole the Pixel 10’s digicam bar, and someway makes it even higher

If I am being brutally trustworthy, I’ve by no means been a fan of Apple’s stovetop triple rear digicam 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 appears quirky at greatest and downright hideous at worst.

As Professional-model iPhone digicam sensors grew in dimension, so too did the dimensions of their respective rear digicam humps, and I can not say the stovetop design has scaled notably nicely at iPhone 16 Pro digicam proportions. On prime of this, I discover the three separate digicam 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 digicam bar design going way back to the Pixel 6 in 2021. Able to housing a full array of principal broad 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 digicam 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 any case.

• 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 digicam 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 appears similar to its predecessor, together with its sprawling digicam bump. 

  
  

The iPhone enters its Pixel digicam visor period

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

You possibly can think about my aid, then, when Apple determined to poach Google’s digicam 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 digicam stovetop, and as a substitute on the 17 Professional is a full-width aluminum ‘plateau’ that homes three digicam lenses, the LED flash and LiDAR modules, and a pin-hole microphone cutout.

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

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

The iPhone Air’s toned-down digicam bar is nearer in type to that of the Pixel 10 collection, however there’s one thing elegant in regards to 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 take a look at, and I can not wait to carry the telephones and assess their in-hand weight distribution.

Apple’s new digicam plateau is a centerpiece of purposeful design

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

Apple

In traditional trend, Apple hasn’t merely adopted the Pixel digicam bar aesthetic and referred to as it a day. Fairly, there’s a real sense of design iteration at play right here, and it someway makes the iPhone 17 Professional and iPhone Air that rather more spectacular to me from an engineering standpoint.

Apple’s new and enlarged digicam plateaus are leveraged to cram in extra tech elements, making higher use of area than a typical digicam hump, visor-style or in any other case. Within the case of the iPhone Air, the corporate has someway 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 digicam bar. When you look carefully, you may discover that the side-facing antenna cutouts soften straight 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 cell tech trade, and I’ve a hunch {that a} full-width digicam bar frenzy is about to kick off. Proper on cue, early Samsung Galaxy S26 dummy items are already floating around online, full with suspiciously plateau-adjacent protrusions besides.

For as soon as, I am genuinely on board with the thought of thicker and extra distinguished 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 feel all of us stand to profit from smarter use of inner telephone area, bigger battery capacities, higher mobile reception, and even perhaps a sunsetting of the eerie, cyclopian digicam design development discovered on so many up to date smartphones of our period.