iPhone 7 Pro
iPhone 7 Pro was a concept render from spring 2016, focused on the dual-camera system that supply chain reports had been pointing to for the 5.5-inch model. A second lens was the most significant hardware change rumored for that cycle and the one that required the most visual thinking to work out.
The dual-camera rumor for iPhone 7 had been building since early 2015, when Lin Technologies published a patent for a dual-aperture camera system Apple had filed. By early 2016, Barclays analysts and KGI's Ming-Chi Kuo were both calling for a dual-camera module on the larger iPhone — one wide, one telephoto, with the system doing optical zoom between them.
The design question was how to fit two lenses into the existing iPhone camera bump without making it significantly larger. The iPhone 6s bump was already a point of mild criticism. The render tried a horizontal arrangement — both lenses sitting side by side — which turned out to be close to what Apple shipped, though the final iPhone 7 Plus positioned the lenses vertically.
What was right and what wasn't
The dual-camera system itself was accurate — the iPhone 7 Plus shipped with a wide and telephoto lens and Portrait mode at launch. The arrangement was wrong: Apple went vertical, not horizontal, which made more sense once you held the phone and thought about how you grip it in landscape. The bump grew but not as much as the render suggested it would need to.
The "Pro" naming didn't happen in 2016. Apple kept the Plus suffix until 2019, when it switched to Pro with the iPhone 11 generation.
Covered by
- 9to5Mac
- PhoneArena
- GSMArena