Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen phone makers dial down the optical zoom range of their telephoto cameras. The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max are no exception to this radical change, as they ditch the 5x optical zoom of their predecessors for a 4x lens.
The average person will automatically think it’s a downgrade, but there’s more to it than just hardware zoom. That’s because the iPhone 17 Pro pairs that 4x optical zoom with a much larger 48MP sensor — up from the 12MP sensor on the previous iPhone 16 Pro. On top of that, the latest iPhones benefit heavily from new advancements in computational photography.
