A Super Telephoto Camera

Another report that seemed a bit “out there” was the idea of Apple bringing a Super Telephoto Camera to the iPhone 16 Pro Max. After all, the company had just finished bringing its 5X tetraprism lens to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, so it felt too soon for Apple to make another dramatic leap to an even higher zoom factor.

With reports of Apple bringing that 5x lens to the iPhone 16 Pro (which did happen), some pundits felt that the iPhone 16 Pro Max had to get an even longer focal length to remain ahead of its smaller sibling. However, Apple has never deliberately chosen to separate its two iPhone Pro models, and they’ve more often had the same camera specs than not. The only exceptions were last year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max and the 2020 iPhone 12 Pro Max, which had a 2.5X telephoto lens, while the iPhone 12 Pro maintained the same 2X focal length as its predecessor. In both cases, those resulted from the Max model having more room for larger and more advanced lenses, but in both cases, Apple brought things back into parity in the following year’s models.