Why Apple takes long to roll out new iPhone features
It takes Apple around three years to add a new camera feature to an iPhone because of its hardware development cycle.
This was revealed in a recent GQ interview with Apple’s vice president of camera hardware engineering, Graham Townsend.
Despite having very powerful camera lenses, Apple has often been criticised for lagging behind other leading smartphone makers in terms of camera features.
Camera features like night mode and 4K video recording are among those that rivals like Samsung had years before Apple.
One specific delay which perhaps best illustrates how far behind Apple can be is stereo audio track capturing in video recordings.
That feature only landed on Apple’s platform with the iPhone XS and XR in September 2018, about six and a half years after debuting in the Samsung Galaxy S3.
More recently, Apple added Cinematic Video, a portrait mode for video recording on the iPhone 13.
Samsung’s equivalent for this feature — Live focus video — has been available since early 2020.
When it comes to camera features, in particular, these are highly dependent on hardware capabilities.
Townsend told GQ that planning for new camera features had to start about three years before launch because that’s when Apple fixed the specification of the silicon that powers the system.
“For instance, the sensor gets defined at that point, and the A15 Bionic processor is also frozen,” Townsend said.
Townsend said this is when they begin to talk with Apple’s vice president for camera software engineering, Jon McCormack, to predict the experiences they wanted to deliver.
“Obviously, when we designed the new ultra-wide lens, we were going to deliver macro photos. But how is that going to work both in stills and video?”
Many of the company’s iOS features also after they first land on Google’s Android OS.
Popular tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee recently explained that Apple did not care about being the first to market with new features.
He claims the company focused on ensuring the features can work seamlessly across multiple devices in its ecosystem at launch, instead of just one of the latest flagships.
Loading ...