Apple is planning to release a fix for an iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro camera bug that causes black boxes to appear in photos. CNN Underscored's Henry Casey discovered the issue in an iPhone Air review when snapping photos at a concert.
He said that one out of every 10 images taken with the iPhone Air or the iPhone 17 Pro had "small blacked-out portions, including boxes and parts of white squiggles" that showed up from the LED board at the event.
Apple told Casey that it's an issue that can occur in "very rare cases when an LED light display is extremely bright and shining directly into the camera." Apple has a fix, and plans to release it in an upcoming software update.
Apple did not provide a timeline on when the software update might be released, but the new models are set to launch on Friday, September 19.
Wednesday March 18, 2026 7:39 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another six months or so, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component...
Wednesday March 18, 2026 11:56 am PDT by Juli Clover
Apple provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate versions of iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4, which means we're going to see a public launch as soon as next week. The RC versions of the software include Apple's official release notes, giving us final details on what's included in the update.
Apple Music
- Playlist Playground (beta) generates a playlist from your...
Apple has unveiled a whopping eight new products so far this March, including an iPhone 17e, iPad Air models with the M4 chip, MacBook Air models with the M5 chip, MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, the all-new MacBook Neo, an updated Studio Display, a higher-end Studio Display XDR, and now the AirPods Max 2 this week.
iPhone 17e features the same overall design as the iPhone...
This appears to be a similar glitch to what some RED cameras used to do in their HDRx mode, when combining multiple shutter exposures into a single image for better dynamic range.
I'm guessing the lines are from some kind of sharpening algorithm that got scaled or timed incorrectly, and the black spot is a failed merge of different exposure in that spot. Concerts can be quite flashy and cause things like shutter speed to change rapidly, so I'm guessing something in the pipeline lagged a bit too much.
Image taken by CNN Underscored's Henry Casey
