So it turns out the iPhone 15 Pro doesn’t use a periscope lens that runs horizontally through the phone but instead a tetraprism that is much more compact taking up only a slightly increased horizontal footprint in the phone.
There is a rumour that next years iPhone 16 Pro will double the zoom. If they had used a normal periscope design it would make sense they would just make the horizontal distance between the lenses greater as all other manufacturers do. But with a tetraprism design Apple seem to have made a great effort to make it compact and it also seems a non trivial engineering challenge to scale this design up to higher zooms. Also this design does not appear to be very suitable for variable zoom. Also replacing the 120mm with a really long prime zoom would leave a gap in the lens range. 13mm, 24mm, 48mm, huuuge gap, 240mm.
So here’s my hunch. What if they put in a large 48mp sensor like the main camera into the zoom camera. That way you would get high quality 48mp 120mm images and with a 2x crop (like they do with the main sensor) 12mp 240mm images.
Ultrawide - 13mm + macro
Main - 24mm, 48mm
Zoom - 120mm, 240mm.
There is a rumour that next years iPhone 16 Pro will double the zoom. If they had used a normal periscope design it would make sense they would just make the horizontal distance between the lenses greater as all other manufacturers do. But with a tetraprism design Apple seem to have made a great effort to make it compact and it also seems a non trivial engineering challenge to scale this design up to higher zooms. Also this design does not appear to be very suitable for variable zoom. Also replacing the 120mm with a really long prime zoom would leave a gap in the lens range. 13mm, 24mm, 48mm, huuuge gap, 240mm.
So here’s my hunch. What if they put in a large 48mp sensor like the main camera into the zoom camera. That way you would get high quality 48mp 120mm images and with a 2x crop (like they do with the main sensor) 12mp 240mm images.
Ultrawide - 13mm + macro
Main - 24mm, 48mm
Zoom - 120mm, 240mm.