A leaked picture purporting to be of the iPhone 16 digicam module has simply surfaced on-line, and it seems to substantiate studies we’ve been listening to over the past couple of months that Apple is returning to an iPhone 12-style structure for the digicam on this 12 months’s commonplace iPhone fashions.
The picture in query was shared by leaker Majin Bu on X, the social community previously generally known as Twitter, exhibiting a vertical, tandem structure for the vast and ultrawide lenses.
It seems to be the primary leaked picture of a {hardware} part meant for this 12 months’s iPhone 16 lineup. Though the leaker’s monitor file has been hit or miss, MacRumors has been in a position to independently confirm the part’s authenticity from its trade sources.
Additional, it appears to align with what we’ve been listening to from different sources, which have advised that Apple will return to the unique vertically stacked digicam association used within the years earlier than the iPhone 13 shifted them right into a diagonal structure.
It was the iPhone X that first launched the vertical digicam design, altering issues up from the horizontal association used on the dual-camera iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 8 Plus fashions. Nonetheless, these earlier fashions used an oblong pill-shaped digicam bump; it wasn’t till the iPhone 11 that Apple moved to the sq. digicam array we all know in the present day.
It was by no means clear why Apple determined to go along with a diagonal structure within the iPhone 13, but it surely was at all times assumed some inside {hardware} modifications required transferring issues round, presumably as a result of new sensor-shift optical picture stabilization (OIS) on the first digicam.
Final 12 months, Apple additionally modified lens positions for the iPhone 15 Professional and iPhone 15 Professional Max. Whereas it wasn’t obvious, because the triple-lens system regarded the identical on the surface, the Telephoto and Extremely Vast cameras swapped positions.
Whereas many believed this was performed to accommodate the brand new tetraprism 5X lens on the iPhone 15 Professional Max, with the smaller iPhone solely following go well with for consistency, that will not have been the actual cause — or at the least, not the entire story.
When Apple unveiled the iPhone 15 Professional lineup final September, it stunned us with a function no person noticed coming: Spatial Video Recording to permit customers to seize 3D movies that could possibly be performed again on the Imaginative and prescient Professional to relive the second in a full, immersive expertise.
To perform this, Apple makes use of the primary (vast) and ultrawide lenses on the iPhone 15 Professional and iPhone 15 Professional Max, however these should be organized in such a manner that they will seize the required element to compose a 3D video — side-by-side when the iPhone 15 Professional is held in panorama mode.
Altering the lens place aligned them for Spatial Video recording on the iPhone 15 Professional, which is able to undoubtedly nonetheless be a function on this 12 months’s iPhone 16 Professional. Nonetheless, it appears to be like like Apple might do the identical with the iPhone 16 this 12 months, making it attainable to seize Spatial Video on much more gadgets.
In fact, that’s pure hypothesis at this level. Even when these rumors are true — and there’s no certainty of that but — Apple might have another excuse for rearranging the lenses. In any case, we by no means actually knew why it adopted the diagonal structure within the first place.
Nonetheless, it could make sense for Apple so as to add Spatial Video Recording capabilities to the extra inexpensive iPhone fashions. Not solely are these movies extra simply captured from an iPhone since most people gained’t be sporting their $3,500 Imaginative and prescient Professional throughout all of life’s landmark moments, however Apple will ultimately launch a extra inexpensive model of its spatial computing headset. The subtle digicam array that powers spatial video seize is likely one of the corners the corporate could also be chopping to get it right down to a lower cost, which gained’t be an enormous loss if each fashionable iPhone can seize Spatial Video anyway.