The iPhone 17 Pro Max may be Apple’s first phone with three 48MP cameras

In an investor note published to Medium, analyst Ming-Chi Quo claims that at least the iPhone 17 Pro Max will get its “tetraprism” camera module upgraded from a 1/3.1″ 12MP CMOS sensor in the iPhone 16 Pro series to a 1/2.6″ 48MP sensor. The “tetraprism” name is what Apple calls its 5x periscope camera module on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which is rumored to be coming to both the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max this year.

If this report is accurate, this would mean the iPhone 17 Pro Max will have three 48MP camera modules—both the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max are rumored to get 48MP Ultra Wide cameras, which will carry forward to the iPhone 17 series. The larger sensor with four times the pixels should offer big benefits to zoomed-in picture quality in addition to the ability to make an even deeper 12MP 10x zoom image by using just the center pixels of the sensor.

Kuo says it is not clear if the new 48MP sensor (which requires a new prism among other adjustments) will come to the smaller iPhone 17 Pro or only the Pro Max. If it’s an exclusive feature of the latter, it will likely be added to the iPhone 18 Pro the following year.

The report claims that the whole periscope camera system is set to undergo a more significant design update in 2027 for the iPhone 19 line to offer better optical zoom, but any predictions that far out should be considered preliminary and tentative at best.