Apple’s misleading iPhone 17 Pro camera marketing distracts customers from the real weaknesses

No, the iPhone 17 Pro doesn’t have a telephoto camera with 8x zoom

Even more annoying, however, is that Apple’s marketing is more misleading than ever. The company explicitly advertises that the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max achieve 8x optical zoom with a focal length of 200mm, which would be a blatant lie without a lot of fine print. The 48 MP telephoto camera with a 1/2.55-inch sensor offers a 35mm-equivalent focal length of 100mm. The advertised 8x zoom is only possible through digital magnification.

Apple advertises that this reaches the quality of optical zoom, but whether this is actually the case is questionable. This is because the digital zoom effectively transforms the camera into a 12 MP telephoto camera with a tiny 1/5-inch sensor; the effective sensor area is not even half the size of the 5 MP sensor in the iPhone 4 from 2010. Apple is not alone in this misleading marketing. Samsung, for example, also advertises 2x “optical quality zoom” for the Galaxy S25. In any case, Apple’s marketing is so aggressive that unsuspecting customers could easily be misled.