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.
Saturday April 11, 2026 8:17 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
As we previously reported, astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft used the iPhone 17 Pro Max to take selfies of themselves with the Earth in the background during the Artemis II mission around the far side of the Moon last week.
Now that the crew members have safely returned to Earth, Apple's CEO Tim Cook and marketing chief Greg Joswiak have both turned to social media to congratulate...
Thursday April 16, 2026 8:25 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
In a video uploaded to its YouTube channel in South Korea today, Apple showed off a handful of iPhone 17 Pro devices decorated with tiny stickers.
The stickers are placed on the iPhone 17 Pro's so-called "plateau," the protruding aluminum area housing the rear cameras, an LED flash, a microphone, and the LiDAR Scanner. The video has the hashtags #PhoneDecor and #iPhoneCustomization....
Apple's iPhone became qualified for extended use in space back in February, and during the Artemis II mission to the Moon in April, NASA astronauts shared several photos taken with the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman recently followed up with a shot on iPhone video of an "Earthset," or the moment that the Earth disappears behind the Moon. The video was captured from the...
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
