With less than two months to go until Apple unveils its iPhones for fall 2025, new details have emerged concerning the new handsets. According to an anonymous tip-off, the Pro versions of the iPhone 17 will get a range of surprising and unexpected camera upgrades.
The information comes via a tipster who got in touch with MacRumors this weekend and claimed to have seen an (as yet unreleased, fairly obviously) advertisement for the iPhone 17 Pro. Seemingly based on this, the tipster told MacRumors that the Pro models will boast three significant upgrades to the camera setup:
- A bump to an 8x optical zoom, compared to a maximum of 5x on the current Pro models.
- An extra Camera Control button, in addition to the existing one at the bottom right when the device is held in portrait orientation. The new button will appear on the top of the device, the source claims.
- An entirely new pro camera app. MacRumors says it isn’t sure if this will be exclusive to the Pro models, or if the iPhone 17 and 17 Air (and potentially even currently available models) will be able to run it too.
The tipster is least certain about the third claim, however. The tipster said Apple may choose to update Final Cut Camera instead of launching a new app. It should also be noted that none of the iPhone 17 Pro case leaks show a cutout for a button on the top edge of the phone
When releasing new iPhones, Apple often chooses to focus on video and stills photography, as these are a priority for many customers (and arguably responsible for the decline of the standalone digital camera). But iPhone cameras have gotten so good that in recent years, the company has struggled to offer truly transformative upgrades in photography.
Before MacRumors’ report appeared, it was believed that the iPhone 17 models (all four of them) would feature a 24MP front-facing camera (up from the current 12MP) and a 48MP telephoto lens on the Pro models only. The latter improvement would likely enable up to 7x optical zoom, which adds some credence to the 8x zoom part of the latest report–it’s only an unexpected increase to an expected upgrade. But the idea of a second Camera Control is, as far as we’ve heard, a completely new theory and would be a major, and quite polarizing, surprise.
For all the latest news and rumors, check out our regularly updated iPhone 17 superguide.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.