As much as I love my iPhone 13, it suffers from a terrible flaw: for some reason its front-facing camera seems incapable of capturing my incredible hotness.
Never mind Tinder profiles: my selfies are so scary even the cops might balk at using them for mugshots. It's quite obvious that this is a technological problem rather than a me problem, so I'm delighted to discover that every single iPhone 14 will have an improved camera that will make the subject of its selfies look much more attractive.
The news comes via analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who posted details on Twitter of the new cameras: where the iPhone 13 camera is fixed focus with an aperture of f/2.2, the iPhone 14 models "would likely upgrade to" autofocus and a f/1.9 aperture. The aperture figure tells you how much light the sensor lets in; the lower the number the better the results in low light.
And handily, it makes your selfies look better.
Why the iPhone 14 selfie camera will deliver better photos
The improvements in the camera would deliver two things: better focusing, of course, but also better depth of field. That's the effect that the iPhone's Portrait mode uses to blur the background and make your photos really pop, and it's one of my favourite things about my iPhone: I just wish it were faster so I could use it for absolutely everything. And as Ming-Chi Kuo notes, the autofocus can deliver better performance in video calls and live streaming.
I know an improved selfie shooter is hardly hold-the-front-page news, but Apple has a long history of not really bothering about front-facing cameras: the focus, pun fully intended, has been on rear cameras and their processing. And that applies to more than just iPhones: the camera on my previous generation iPad Air isn't brilliant, and neither is the one in my M1 MacBook Pro. So I'm greeting the news of an improved front-facing camera in much the same way someone in a desert would greet a small glass of water: you'd rather there was more, but it's still much better than nothing.
While I'm excited about the improved front-facing camera, the larger iPhone 14s are also getting much improved rear cameras: 48MP sensors and possibly periscope lenses for better optical zoom. If you take a lot of photos, it looks like the next iPhone – or at least the Pro and Pro Max versions of it – is shaping up to be a pretty big upgrade even from the iPhone 13.
