Apple’s Camera Chief: AI will give you photography superpowers — but keep your memories real

In a new Wired interview, Apple’s head of camera software, Jon McCormack, explains how the company is bringing generative AI to the iPhone’s Photos app in iOS 27 — without going overboard. New tools like Extend (which adds realistic space around your shot) and Spatial Reframe (which shifts perspective) use AI to generate “fake pixels” that fix common compositional mistakes. McCormack argues these features give everyday users Photoshop-like superpowers while protecting the authenticity of personal memories, taking a more restrained approach than competitors.

Julian Chokkattu for Wired:
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As tech giants pack generative AI capabilities into our phones and their camera software, the line between what is a real image and what isn’t continues to blur. Phones from Google and Samsung, for example, now come with features that let you drastically alter a photo by erasing people, moving people around in the shot, and even adding new objects to the scene.

Apple is getting in on the action by adding new generative features to its Photos app, though the company’s iPhone camera chief, Jon McCormack, stresses that Apple is taking a more measured approach than its competitors and isn’t “doing AI for the sake of AI.”

At its annual Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple showed off a handful of AI features invading the Photos app in iOS 27, which will arrive on iPhones later this year.

While the iPhone’s Photos app already has the Clean Up tool, which lets you erase unwanted objects in pictures, it’ll perform even better in iOS 27 thanks to its access to Apple’s improved AI models. However, there are two new features—called Extend and Spatial Reframe—that let you expand the space around your photo or change the perspective of an image, all while generating fake pixels. The camera “thinks” about what should be there, then draws it in.

McCormack says there’s a giant backlog of unsolvable issues that AI is now helping to address and that these new features are very deliberate. “You don’t have to know all the details of how to do something in Photoshop or something else — it gives normal people these absolute superpowers,” McCormack says.

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MacDailyNews Take: The Extend tool in Apple’s Photos app is an great example of a genuinely useful AI tool that people will use often.

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