Apple’s creator-centric iPhone 17 Pro will make the vlogging camera obsolete

Summary

Apple unveiled its new line of iPhones on Tuesday, and the iPhone 17 Pro is making a direct appeal to content creators. The iPhone camera has long checked all the boxes for anything that a casual user might need, making a digital camera obsolete for most consumers. But for millions of content creators — an industry encompassing an estimated 200 million potential customers — it has remained necessary to buy handheld video cameras from companies like Canon, Sony, Panasonic, Nikon, and Fujifilm. Some of these camera brands have spun up entire product lines marketed as “vlogging cameras,” featuring pop-out displays to record selfie videos, as well as compatibility with the common dimensions used for social media. But the iPhone 17 Pro could finally be the device that makes content creators’ other video cameras collect dust. At a glance, a key difference here is that the new iPhone 17 Pro’s camera sensor is 56% larger than the iPhone 16 Pro’s. The size of a camera sensor impacts most aspects of a camera’s performance, like low-light capabilities, depth of field, and resolution — so, basically, the specs are simply just better on the new device. But under more scrutiny, the specs remain impressive for a pocketable camera that weighs half a pound. (It still clocks in a tad lighter than the Ricoh GR IIIx, a tiny camera I’ve been eyeing for everyday street photography.) The iPhone 17 Pro’s main, ultra wide, and telephoto lenses are all 48MP fusion cameras, making optical zoom possible at 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x. The telephoto lens is a huge improvement from the iPhone 16 Pro’s 12 MP lens, while the selfie camera also improves from 12 MP to 18 MP. “The wider field of view in higher resolution are particularly useful when recording yourself speaking directly to the camera, making our Pro models the absolute best choice for content creators,” said Patrick Carroll, manager of iPhone camera architecture, during Apple’s presentation. But most important for creators is the phone’s...