Apple’s latest batch of smartphones are due to go on sale tomorrow, but a few lucky journalists and influencers have been trying out the devices for some time. And while the verdict has been mostly positive, one reviewer spotted a strange problem with the camera on both the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro Max—a problem which Apple has now officially acknowledged.
While reviewing the iPhone Air for CNN Underscored, Henry T. Casey took both handsets to a TV on the Radio concert, planning to test out their photographic capabilities in challenging lighting conditions. This proved to be a mixed experience; aside from some concerns about the digital zoom, he noticed a troubling (albeit intermittent) visual glitch.
“One out of every 10 or so photos taken on the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro Max [had] small blacked-out portions,” he explains, “including boxes and parts of white squiggles from the big LED board behind the band.”
In the three sample photos Casey includes with the review, you can see the problem very clearly. What should be white shapes on the band’s LED backdrop contain “small blacked-out portions,” and more abstract and colorful imagery is plagued by big black oblongs and white squiggles. It’s a strange and potentially disastrous result, even if it happens only occasionally.
CNN dutifully got in touch with Apple to ask what was going on, and the company issued a statement in time for publication in the review. It acknowledged that this is “something that can happen in very rare cases when an LED light display is extremely bright and shining directly into the camera. Apple has identified a fix and will be releasing it in an upcoming software update.”
That’s it, for the time being: we’ve had no more details on what precisely causes that reaction, why the reaction appears to be unique to the latest phones, or why Apple’s engineers were unable to predict it would happen or identify it in quality control testing. (Maybe they don’t go to enough concerts.) Neither do we know which version of iOS will contain the fix, but we recommend that owners of the latest iPhones should keep an eye out for any iOS updates and install them in a timely fashion.
