- A weird iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro glitch has been reported
- White squiggles and black blocks appear on certain photos
- Apple says this is a rare occurrence, and a fix is already on the way
It seems the launch of the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro haven’t gone quite as smoothly as Apple would hope: the cameras on these phones are glitching in a weird way in certain scenarios, though a fix is on the way.
The problem was pointed out by Henry Casey at CNN (via MacRumors), who noticed blacked out sections and white squiggles on some photos taken during a concert. Apparently this affected around 1 in 10 of the snaps taken by Casey.
As per an Apple spokesperson, this “can happen in very rare cases when an LED light display is extremely bright and shining directly into the camera”. Apple says it’s identified a fix for the issue, which will show up in an “upcoming software update”.
It’s not clear if this problem is affecting the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 17 Pro Max as well, which launched at the same time, though it’s not something the TechRadar team has noticed while reviewing any of the new iPhones. We’ve asked Apple for further comment and will update this story if we hear back.
A first-day fix?
These iPhones aren’t going on sale or being shipped to customers until tomorrow, September 19, so there may well be a camera troubleshooting update available to download as soon as these devices have been unboxed.
Apple hasn’t said what’s causing the rare glitch, though there’s some speculation in the MacRumors forums that these oddities could be caused through the way the iPhones are taking multiple exposures and combining them into one.
That’s now standard practice on smartphones of course, and means the best parts of each snap can be combined to produce a balanced, natural, single photo. It seems that here, some of that instant image processing has gone awry.
You can already preorder the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone Air, with starting prices of $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,999 and $999 / £999 / AU$1,799 respectively – although waiting times for the iPhone 17 Pro model have been creeping up since preorders opened.