How Apple’s New iPhones Are Elevating The Selfie To A Professional Art Form

This article, written by Kit Eaton, was originally published on Inc.com.

When Apple splashily announced its new lineup of iPhones for this year, including a trend-setting ultra-slim iPhone Air version, it also did something that nobody had predicted it would. Every new iPhone that the company announced today included a new front-facing camera system, the 18-megapixel Center Stage unit. 

This smart new system has just one main purpose: taking truly excellent selfies. 

Yup, you read that right. Selfies. The much-belittled photographic cliché that many people look down on.

If you’re wondering why this is important, remember that we live in the influencer, or creator, era, where digitally savvy workers do everything from marketing themselves as trendsetters and opinion-shapers to representing world-famous brands. Some even earn six-figure salaries. 

Apple even backed up its decision to reinvent selfie-taking with a statistic: During the past year, the California-based big tech firm said iPhone users around the world took half a trillion selfies. Apple asserted this was more than were taken than with any other smartphone, and it equates to about 60 selfies for every person alive on the planet.

Conscious of the way that its user base seems to be using this one photo-snapping feature of its devices, Apple decided to inject some technological smarts into the process of taking a selfie. 

The new Center Stage camera system has a square sensor array, making it quite unusual in smartphone camera systems, which tend to follow the traditional 4:3 shape made popular by the film cameras of yesteryear. It also has 18 megapixels, six megapixels more than the front-facing camera on last year’s iPhones.

Plus, you don’t have to rotate your iPhone 17 to take a landscape or portrait selfie anymore: A tap on the screen means you can switch between the two popular photo formats. 

More than that, the extra pixels available from the square sensor shape (and some AI image processing magic) mean that when you wiggle your phone around trying to snap just the right image of yourself, or when you’re making a selfie video, the phone can use digital trickery to keep the image extremely stable by choosing which pixels frame you best as you move. 

Even neater, if you’re taking an image or video and your friends wander into the scene, the iPhone will detect the extra faces, and use some of the extra pixels available to it to try to make sure everyone is in the frame. 

There’s even a novel mode that lets users shoot video-in-video clips from both the front and back cameras of their iPhone 17 at once, combining the traditional talking head video influencer format with a view of whatever the thing is they’re talking about. 

You may have gotten to this point and still be wondering why this is so important. 

The answer is actually quite simple. Where Apple chooses to go, other manufacturers often follow. This means the humble selfie may soon move from being a low-quality, possibly grainy image into something much more artisty. And selfie videos, which are a social media influencer staple, will also get a dramatic quality boost. 

Apple itself said its new front camera was going to be great for “content creators,” and it’s easy to see that all those product demo videos that we watch while doomscrolling, all those funny unboxing clips, and lots of other selfie-centric content made for social media are going to look a lot better when shot on the new iPhones. As well as ensuring that lots of influencers buy its latest devices, this means Apple’s also going to stamp its influence, subtly, on social media marketing habits around the world.