In an investor word printed to Medium, analyst Ming-Chi Quo claims that at the least the iPhone 17 Professional Max will get its “tetraprism” digital camera module upgraded from a 1/3.1″ 12MP CMOS sensor within the iPhone 16 Professional collection to a 1/2.6″ 48MP sensor. The “tetraprism” identify is what Apple calls its 5x periscope digital camera module on the iPhone 15 Professional Max, which is rumored to be coming to each the iPhone 16 Professional and Professional Max this yr.
If this report is correct, this might imply the iPhone 17 Professional Max could have three 48MP digital camera modules—each the iPhone 16 Professional and 16 Professional Max are rumored to get 48MP Extremely Extensive cameras, which can carry ahead to the iPhone 17 collection. The bigger sensor with 4 instances the pixels ought to provide large advantages to zoomed-in image high quality along with the flexibility to make a fair deeper 12MP 10x zoom picture by utilizing simply the middle pixels of the sensor.
Kuo says it’s not clear if the brand new 48MP sensor (which requires a brand new prism amongst different changes) will come to the smaller iPhone 17 Professional or solely the Professional Max. If it’s an unique function of the latter, it is going to probably be added to the iPhone 18 Professional the next yr.
The report claims that the entire periscope digital camera system is about to endure a extra vital design replace in 2027 for the iPhone 19 line to supply higher optical zoom, however any predictions that far out ought to be thought-about preliminary and tentative at greatest.
