iPhone 17 Pro Concept shows a Radical Camera Bar Design inspired by the Pixel… and a New Surprise

The leaks seem to be all over – Apple has great plans for the 2025 iPhone lineup. What the Cupertino giant has in store for the smartphone series is absolutely uncertain, with rumors of a camera bar design, as well as of an iPhone Air making the waves. Multiple sources have, however, confirmed that the latest iPhone lineup will see one large change in the form of a horizontal camera island of sorts, borrowing directly from the Google Pixel’s design.

Putting visuals to those rumors is Phone Industry, a YouTube channel dedicated to realizing concepts and leaks into full renders. To that very end, here’s what the iPhone 17 Pro might just look like if it had that camera island. The short answer is that it’s a spitting resemblance to the Pixel. The long answer is let’s just wait till September to see what Tim Cook has to say. Until then, here’s more about this design.

Design: Phone Industry

Every year, Apple launches a new iPhone and it features a few standard upgrades. The phones usually have some design changes to help differentiate them from older models. They also have one standout feature that makes them functionally better than previous variants, and lastly, they push the boundaries of what their cameras are capable of. This phone embodies all those things.

The first and most obvious upgrade is the design change manifested in the form of a new camera layout. Every Pro iPhone since the 11 Pro has had a square-shaped camera bump in the top left corner, with three lenses in the shape of a triangle. The iPhone 17 Pro concept shakes that up, putting the camera lenses in a single line running from left to right.

From the looks of it, you have a wide and ultra-wide lens on the left, a flash in the middle, and that tetraprism-style telephoto lens on the right, capable of taking pictures with an incredible optical zoom capability. The rectangular shape of this lens probably indicates a larger sensor size, giving you zoom along with immaculate low-light performance. It’s all speculation really, but hey, a boy can hope, right?

The unique part about this new camera layout is that – aside from being the biggest design change to the Pro line-up since the dynamic island – it also gives the iPhone a fair amount of stability. The phone doesn’t rock when placed camera-down on flat surfaces. It also gives your finger a nice place to rest while you browse Tik Tok… for as long as the app lasts, I guess.

Along with design and camera upgrades, every subsequent iPhone tries to introduce something new. One iPhone introduced a Dynamic Island, the next ditched the Mute switch for the Action Button, and finally last year’s iPhone introduced us to Capture Control. This time, the Capture Control gets refined and placed right near the power button. It gets a red inlay, works just the way you want it to, and for the first time, is within reach of your thumb when you’re holding the phone vertically.

The current Capture Control button is notoriously placed in a way that only allows it to be accessed in Landscape mode. Hold your phone in Portrait and the control sits underneath your palm, making it impossible to use. This new placement means photo and videography are just as intuitive in Portrait as they are in Landscape.

But don’t get your hopes up. We’re 8 months away from the new iPhone, which means we’ve got 8 months of new leaks and rumors to look forward to. This current iPhone, as flashy as it looks, might be a little too similar to the Pixel for Apple’s comfort. It has a split rear fascia with an upper and lower glass panel and a metallic camera bump – that’s unmistakably a Pixel design feature.

I assume that, if these rumors are true, the iPhone would have a single-piece glass back like the current phones do. There’s a lot of hearsay that this particular bar-shaped camera phone won’t be the Pro version, but rather the Slim or Air version, giving you a phone that looks and feels cutting-edge. A square-shaped camera bump would destroy that illusion – but a horizontal camera array might just end up creating that wedge-shaped aesthetic that the MacBook Air first popularized back in 2008!

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