Ryan Haines / Android Authority
I’m not quite ready to draw my conclusions on the iPhone 17 Pro just yet — essentially, whether it can finally pull me away from Android — but I do know one thing: Apple is taking its still photography more seriously than ever. It’s added new Photographic Styles to the mix, reworked the camera app to give it a more straightforward interface, and finally upgraded its camera hardware with a significantly improved 4x telephoto sensor.
Unsurprisingly, it has me reaching for the iPhone camera more than ever before, and it’s making me wonder whether the Pixel 10 Pro really has my favorite camera system. So, to settle things once and for all, I decided to put the two giants to the test. I set out to grab a series of snaps across some of the most common focal lengths to see if I really still liked Google’s processing the best. Here’s what I found.
It’s a battle of new sensors vs Tensor-powered processing magic
Just like any showdown between two heavyweights, it’s only right that I start with a little bit of an introduction. So, in the Android corner, representing all things open-source and flexible, we have the Pixel 10 Pro XL. Hardware-wise, it’s the same as its predecessor, which means it packs a robust trio of high-resolution cameras. It counts on a 50MP primary sensor to do the bulk of the heavy lifting, backed by 48MP 5x telephoto and 123-degree ultrawide sensors.
Under the hood, though, the Pixel 10 Pro XL packs a mean new trick: Google’s Tensor G5 chipset. It adds a suite of new tricks to the Pixel 10 series, including the Camera Coach to help you line up a better shot, Help Me Edit to reimagine your photos, and, of course, 100x Pro Res Zoom. This year, Google is touting its upgraded zoom, highlighting that it utilizes a series of Gemini-powered algorithms to process and clean up what should be in your images — just don’t try to use it on people.
Apple's 48MP telephoto sensor might be my favorite phone camera of the year.
Ultimately, though, there’s only so much that software can do to keep up with brand-new hardware, so it’s time to introduce Google’s age-old rival. In the iOS corner, representing, well, Apple, we have the iPhone 17 Pro. It’s about as close to a complete iPhone redesign as Apple has ever come, swapping the traditional glass sandwich for a unibody aluminum build and spreading the square camera bump into a full-blown plateau — one that resembles a slightly worse version of Google’s camera bar, if you ask me.
The change isn’t purely aesthetic, either — the iPhone 17 Pro finally jumped from the 12MP telephoto sensor we’d seen the last few years to a sharp (and significantly larger) new 48MP sensor, trading 5x optical zoom for 4x along the way. This swap enables the latest Pro-grade iPhone to capture central crops out of its beefy lens, effectively giving you up to 8x lossless zoom before digital enhancements have to take over. Mix in the Photographic Styles I mentioned, add a slightly more refined Clean Up, and the iPhone is now prepared for still photos than ever.
So, let’s look at some shots.
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