Summary
- With its all-new iPhone 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and Air smartphones, Apple has poached a signature design cue from Google’s Pixel line: a full-width camera bar.
- Aside from vastly improving the aesthetics of the iPhone, Apple has iterated on Google’s design by making this camera ‘plateau’ a functional part of the phone’s design.
- I still think the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro have the more visually pleasing set of camera visors, but Apple’s new iPhone models aren’t so far behind.
If I’m being brutally honest, I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s stovetop triple rear camera design. First appearing on the iPhone 11 Pro all the way back in 2019, I can appreciate the technical feat of engineering required to create its raised glass effect, but, in my own personal opinion, it looks quirky at best and downright hideous at worst.
As Pro-model iPhone camera sensors grew in size, so too did the size of their respective rear camera humps, and I can’t say the stovetop design has scaled particularly well at iPhone 16 Pro camera proportions. On top of this, I find the three separate camera rings to be major dust, grime, and pocket lint collectors, and cleaning them is an involved process that requires putting in some genuine elbow grease.
On the other side of the smartphone isle, Google has settled on a signature visor-like camera bar design going as far back as the Pixel 6 in 2021. Capable of housing a full array of main wide angle, ultra-wide angle and periscope zoom sensors, I find the latest Pixel 10 and 10 Pro phones from Google to be infinitely more elegant in the camera design department. The Pixel’s full-width bar is more intentional, symmetrical, visually harmonious, and, dare I say, intelligent, than its contemporaneous iPhone — it stops wobbly phone-on-desk syndrome dead in its tracks, after all.
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- Brand
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Apple
- SoC
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A19 Pro
- Display
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6.3-inch 1206 x 2622 pixel resolution Super Retina XDR OLED, 120Hz, HDR10, Dolby Vision, 1000 nits / 1600 nits peak brightness
- RAM
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N/A
- Storage
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256GB
- Battery
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N/A
The iPhone 17 Pro is Apple’s next-generation flagship smartphone, with a new aluminum unibody design, a full-width camera plateau, the A19 Pro chipset, and a 6.3-inch display.
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- Brand
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Google
- SoC
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Tensor G5
- Display
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6.3-inch Super Actua display 1280 x 2856 pixel resolution OLED (1-120Hz)
- RAM
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16GB
- Storage
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128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB
- Battery
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4,870mAh, 30+ hours of battery life
The Pixel 10 Pro features Google’s new Tensor G5 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 128GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of storage. The smartphone’s overall design looks very similar to its predecessor, including its sprawling camera bump.
The iPhone enters its Pixel camera visor era
The iPhone 17 Pro’s full-width rear camera module builds upon the Pixel’s signature visor aesthetic
You can imagine my relief, then, when Apple decided to poach Google’s camera bar wholesale for use on its brand-new iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air handsets. Gone is the iPhone 16 Pro’s questionable rear camera stovetop, and in its place on the 17 Pro is a full-width aluminum ‘plateau’ that houses three camera lenses, the LED flash and LiDAR modules, and a pin-hole microphone cutout.
The iPhone Air, meanwhile, features a slimmer Ceramic Shield-based bar that only needs to accommodate a single camera in addition to an LED module and a microphone cutout, making it the more understated of Apple’s two new camera bar designs.
…the iPhone 17 Pro’s camera hump is a marked step forward in design when compared to its predecessor’s protrusion.
Aesthetically speaking, I think I still prefer the Pixel’s lower-profile camera visor to that of the new Pro iPhone, as it obfuscates all the camera hardware behind a single, uniform sheet of glass. Nevertheless, the iPhone 17 Pro’s camera hump is a marked step forward in design when compared to its predecessor’s protrusion.
The iPhone Air’s toned-down camera bar is closer in style to that of the Pixel 10 series, but there’s something elegant about the latter’s implementation that Apple’s super slim handset doesn’t quite match up to in my eyes. In any case, I’m excited to put both the Air and the 17 Pro to the desk wobble test, and I can’t wait to hold the phones and assess their in-hand weight distribution.
Apple’s new camera plateau is a centerpiece of functional design
The iPhone 17 Pro’s full-width rear camera module builds upon the Pixel’s signature visor aesthetic
In classic fashion, Apple hasn’t simply adopted the Pixel camera bar aesthetic and called it a day. Rather, there is a genuine sense of design iteration at play here, and it somehow makes the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air that much more impressive to me from an engineering standpoint.
Apple’s new and enlarged camera plateaus are leveraged to cram in additional tech components, making better use of space than a typical camera hump, visor-style or otherwise. In the case of the iPhone Air, the company has somehow managed to fill the protrusion with much of the handset’s internals, leaving the rest of the chassis free for a much more capacious battery pack.
On the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max, meanwhile, Apple has cleverly integrated the antenna system throughout the perimeter of the new camera bar. If you look closely, you’ll find that the side-facing antenna cutouts melt directly into the plateau, which Apple says improves wireless radio reception when compared to more traditional setups.
Apple has a knack for setting new trends within the mobile tech industry, and I have a hunch that a full-width camera bar frenzy is about to kick off. Right on cue, early Samsung Galaxy S26 dummy units are already floating around online, complete with suspiciously plateau-adjacent protrusions to boot.
For once, I’m genuinely on board with the idea of thicker and more prominent rear camera bumps on next-generation smartphones (I never thought I’d string together such a sentence).
If Apple’s function-over-form approach is adopted by the likes of Samsung, OnePlus, Motorola, Nothing, and even Google for that matter, I think we all stand to benefit from smarter use of internal phone space, larger battery capacities, better cellular reception, and perhaps even a sunsetting of the eerie, cyclopian camera design trend found on so many contemporary smartphones of our era.
