The iPhone’s camera is not a move fast and break things kind of product. After almost two decades of careful iteration, it’s still made to take photos that you can shoot once and chuck straight in the group chat. Jon McCormack, Apple’s VP of camera software engineering, has spent a lot of time keeping things in check this way, and with good reason. When both your dad and 28 Years Later director Danny Boyle are using the same device to wildly different ends, change needs to be curated slowly. Cautiously. Trouble is, this isn’t that kind of year for the iPhone’s camera.
I meet McCormack in the limestone-clad bowels of Apple’s Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California. Usually, you’ll find the self-proclaimed “mathematician, science and biology nerd” holding court around these parts with his thick, round spectacles trained on a series of photographs from rival smartphone makers. Today, the gregarious company veteran who grew up in the Outback of Western Queensland, Australia, is breaking with tradition to dive into the new AI-powered Camera app features coming to iPhone later this year as part of iOS 27.
“They’re something we kept on kicking around for a while,” he says. “The first time I downloaded Spatial Reframing. I was like, ‘This is either an April Fools or it’s mind-blowing.’”
If Apple’s recent WWDC 26 event was dominated by the reveal of a completely reimagined (and actually great) Siri, these new McCormack-helmed tools are just as significant. Together, they’ll reshape the iPhone’s camera from its Kodak-inspired point-and-shoot ethos to something far more… fungible. This work started in 2023 with the “Clean Up” feature, now newly enhanced again, which allows you to remove stray objects, animals and photobombers from your shots and replace them with AI-generated background imagery. This year, it’s been expanded upon dramatically with “Extend” for expanding the scenery around a portrait’s subject, and “Spatial Reframing”, which moves a virtual camera around a frame to change the composition of a picture itself.
Just drag your finger across the iPhone’s screen and the frame will adjust so that you finally have your dog’s attention or don’t have a random bit of foliage sprouting out of their head, and AI will fill in the rest of the image. This isn’t about churning out mindless slop with a single prompt, but reframing your pictures so they’re more akin to your memories. Or as McCormack would tell you, it’s about capturing the intent behind a picture. “If you think back to Henri Cartier-Bresson and The Decisive Moment, the ‘decisive moment’ with your kid is when they’re looking at you…” he says. “When I hand my phone to a waiter in a restaurant, and for some reason, they take the photograph from up high, how do we solve that?”
It’s a fine line to walk between realism and fantasy, but McCormack is better equipped to judge it than most. His most recent book Patterns: Art of the Natural World is full of striking geometry – from Svalbard’s celestial ice caves to a vast flock of swooping flamingos – that could only be captured IRL. Still, even someone whose side hustle has been covered by National Geographic has found himself leaning on tools such as these more than you’d think. “I’m horrible with horizon lines,” he says. “Almost every photograph I take casually, I need to go back and adjust the horizon.” As such, the principles of how AI models behind this Camera app update have been programmed to take a deliberately light touch to editing.
