I’d be more excited about the Pixel 10 Pro if it had this iPhone camera feature

The Pixel 10 Pro sits in quite an awkward spot this year. The main differentiator between the standard Pixel and the Pro model has long been the third camera, but that gap closed with the Pixel 10 also rocking a three-cam setup this time. Getting a solid telephoto camera on a $200 cheaper phone already sabotages the 10 Pro’s position as the real ‘Pro’ for most people.

Since Google’s phones are known for cameras — they are called Pixels after all — the Pixel 10 Pro could’ve redeemed itself by offering better hardware. And I don’t mean the sensor or the lens, which are indeed an improvement over the 10. What I’m talking about is the supplementary camera hardware — something the iPhone 16 Pro Max does so much better that I wish the Pixel 10 Pro had stolen.

I remember the days when Pixels were the benchmark among smartphone cameras — a similar state to where Google’s on-device AI sits today. Google had nailed computational photography, and its older sensors didn’t matter much because the output was so good and instantly recognizable as a ‘Pixel image.’ But that head start is gone, and every other company has caught up.

Asian smartphone brands have upped their game so much that you’d want to ditch a Pixel for an Oppo Find X8 Pro. Sure, Pixels have fun features like Add Me, but Oppo turned out much better at sheer image quality — you know, the basic task of a camera. The same is true for Xiaomi and Vivo. One of my friends even replaced his DSLR with the Vivo X100 Pro for product photography, and the Pixel wasn’t even in contention.

Recent Pixels haven’t been improving iteratively either; on the contrary, they’ve actually been getting worse. Time and again, we’ve seen color tuning go off the rails, leaving photos looking like dull blobs from a cheap throwaway camera instead of a flagship phone. Plenty of Pixel users complain about algorithms butchering colors so much that the final photo looks nothing like what they saw in the viewfinder.

But my personal gripe with Pixel cameras is a little different; it’s around portraits.

If I haven’t brought it up enough times already, I love taking portrait shots of people, pets, nature, or whatever catches my eye. Modern smartphones have made them super accessible. Their real appeal lies in the bokeh: the background blur that makes the subject pop. Since phones simulate this blur by separating the subject from the background, the quality of edge detection varies a lot.

Pixels, as you’d expect, rely solely on computational data to cut out the subject, with no extra sensory feedback. Sometimes it works, but in my experience, it rarely does. My old Pixel 6 was terrible at edge detection, and the newer Pixel 9s weren’t much better.

For the longest time, my favorite portrait shooter was the OnePlus Open. Its telephoto camera was so good at portraits that I became the default family photographer. But my current favorite — and has been for the past year — is the iPhone 16 Pro Max. And the only reason is that little black hole near its rear camera.

If I take 100 portrait shots on my iPhone 16 Pro Max, 99 of them have perfect bokeh. The blur doesn’t feel artificially slapped on, even though it is (and you can adjust it in post). It’s layered — not a flat Gaussian blur — and it looks like something an SLR would do with a 35mm or 50mm lens. That’s all thanks to how the iPhone collects depth data.

Instead of relying only on machine learning and parallax (stereo vision, like our eyes) to separate subject from background, iPhone Pros have a LiDAR sensor. It blasts the scene with invisible laser beams to measure subject distance with precision. That extra depth data massively improves accuracy, and I love the iPhone for it. And since it works with fancy, invisible lasers, edge detection is spot on even when the lighting is challenging.

Some of my best portraits have come from the iPhone (included above), and none of the recent Pixels even come close.

I was hoping for more from the 10th anniversary Pixel phones, but all we got was dullness wrapped in a new package. The cameras haven’t meaningfully changed, even on the Pros. And my biggest pet peeve is that useless temperature sensor on the back, wasting precious space. I know I’d use my phone way more for photos than for measuring the temperature of cooking pans — we already have dedicated tools for that.

The funny thing is that the temperature sensor also uses infrared. If Google really wanted to make a big change for the 10th Pixel model, I’d have voted to swap it out for LiDAR. That would’ve fixed one of my biggest frustrations with Pixel cameras. But it looks like I’ll have to wait another year.

I know it’s early to talk about the Pixel 11, but I’m putting a lot of hope in the 2026 models. I want the Pixel 11 Pro to finally fix the cameras, to become the phone I instinctively grab for portraits. Until then, I’ll just be waiting, fingers crossed.