iPhone 17 Pro Max vs IPhone 3 GS perfectly illustrates 16 years of smartphone photography progress

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There it was, nestled among our office’s pile of aging smartphones, a white iPhone 3GS. I felt like I’d just stumbled on a vintage Furby. Cradling the tiny, 4.5-in phone in my hand, I wondered if it still worked.

I had reason to doubt. After all, the iPhone 3GS shipped 16 years ago, and this one had been sitting in a drawer for I don’t know how long. The only way to know was to charge it up. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a hoarder, and I still have quite a few 30-pin charging cables lying around.

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(Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)

Now that I had the iPhone 3GS fully charged, I wondered what to do with it. I couldn’t put it on a cell network since 3G support ended around 2022. Wi-Fi worked, however, so I opened the settings and put the phone on my local office network.

I should say that every operation with the phone was a trial. Each keystroke took a beat to appear, but it worked well enough for my purposes.

What were those purposes? A camera comparison, of course, and not with just any shooter. I planned to pit one of the earliest iPhones against the apex handset, the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Since the iPhone 3GS has just one camera, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max has four, I decided to only compare the 3GS lens with the 17 Pro Max’s main camera.

From a specs point of view, here’s how they compare:

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iPhone 3GS	iPhone 17 Pro Max
3-megapixel still camera	48MP Fusion Main: 24 mm, ƒ/1.78 aperture, sensor‑shift optical image stabilization, Focus Pixels

Right. There is no comparison. This table doesn’t even mention the significant…

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