New iPhone 14 Pro leak points to huge camera upgrade

The latest iPhone 14 Pro leaks say that the bump on the back of it and of the iPhone 14 Pro Max are going to get substantially bigger, increasing by around 5% in height and width and protruding further from the back of the case: 4.17mm on the iPhone 14 Pro compared to 3.6mm on the iPhone 13 Pro. 

The reason? The camera sensor is getting significantly bigger because it's going to deliver many more pixels than before: according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the Pro's main camera is moving to an impressive 48MP from just the 12MP unit installed in its predecessor.

That might not seem like a lot compared to the 108MP in the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. But it's not how many pixels you have that matters. It's what your phone does with them, and that's where Apple is a master.

Why the iPhone camera is more than just pixels

Pixels are just a number, and without context they're as meaningless as speed: for example 30mph doesn't feel fast if you're driving a car but it feels very different if you're going down a potholed road on an expensive racing bike. And as an iPhone 13 Pro owner I know that what's going on with its camera is much more interesting than the pixel count suggests.

In terms of pure pixels, the iPhone 13 Pro I have is no different from the iPhone 7 I had when it was Apple's best phone. But in this shot, taken with my 12MP iPhone 13 Pro camera, is better than anything I managed to get with my iPhone 7's 12MP.

I'm not claiming to have any photography skills: anything good here is the camera's doing. All I did was pointed my phone, pressed a button and selected a slightly more vivid filter afterwards. But while it might not be apparent on screen here, the level of detail and the speed of the shot are really impressive. I've also got photos of gloomy landscapes shot in pitch darkness that simply wouldn't have been possible with the iPhone 7, or the iPhone X, or the iPhone 12.

That's down to the sensor and image processing my phone does, which gets better with each release. But I think the iPhone Pro has reached the point where to make really noticeable improvements, it's time to up the pixel count as well as improve the software – and with so much more data to process, that means it's probably wise to limit it to the fastest iPhones with the most RAM.

The biggest difference in the iPhone 14 Pro won't be the size of the bump. It'll be what you can do with what you point it at.