I've had the 14 Pro for about three weeks now (bought it the day it showed up at my local Apple Store, September 16th, paid the full $1,099 for the 256GB in Deep Purple because I am apparently incapable of learning from past mistakes) and for the last week and a half it's had this thing where the camera just... vibrates. Not a little jitter. A full-on buzz, like there's a tiny motor loose inside the lens assembly, and if you're in a quiet room you can actually hear it.
Turns out I'm not imagining it. This is the now-infamous "camera shake" bug that blew up on, of all places, TikTok, with people posting videos of their phone's rear camera visibly rattling the second they open the TikTok app itself, or Instagram, or Snapchat. Something about how those apps call into the sensor-shift optical image stabilization the 14 Pro and Pro Max both got this year (a feature Apple was pretty proud of showing off at the September event, for what it's worth) causes the stabilizer motor to just lose its mind and spasm instead of, you know, stabilizing anything.
Apple put out a support statement acknowledging the bug about a week and a half ago and said a software update was coming "in the next few days" to fix it. That was over a week ago now, and as of this morning my phone is still buzzing every single time I open the Instagram camera. So either "a few days" means something different in Cupertino than it does everywhere else, or this one's trickier to patch than the statement let on.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not really about Apple specifically: it's wild to me that a third-party app calling a standard camera API can apparently confuse a $1,099 phone's stabilization hardware badly enough to make it audibly rattle. We've spent fifteen years being told the iPhone camera stack is this untouchable, bulletproof piece of engineering, and it turns out opening TikTok can make it seize up like an old washing machine on spin cycle. I don't even really use TikTok, I've got it installed for exactly one reason, which is that my niece sends me things on it and I feel obligated to at least look, and even that's apparently enough to trigger it half the time.
Longtime readers know I've been cranky about phone cameras before (there was that whole saga years back when the Note 7 stuff was going on, a very different and much scarier problem obviously, but the same general vibe of "we shipped a hardware thing that does something it really shouldn't"). This one's not dangerous. Nobody's phone is catching fire. It's just annoying, and a little bit funny, in a "your very expensive computer is having a small seizure" sort of way.
For now the workaround everyone's passing around is to just shoot with the stock Camera app instead of capturing directly from Instagram or TikTok, which, sure, fine, but it kind of defeats the whole point of those apps building in their own camera capture in the first place. I've mostly just started avoiding video from inside those apps until whatever fix Apple's actually cooking up ships. Also worth saying: none of this had anything to do with the Twitter deal news that's apparently back on again this week, other than the fact that both stories somehow trace back to people staring at their phones way too much.
Small thing, in the grand scheme of a phone launch. But it's the kind of small thing that reminds you these devices are held together with a genuinely absurd amount of software gluing very precise hardware together, and every so often a piece of that glue doesn't quite set right. Mine's set to Do Not Disturb tonight either way. The phone can keep buzzing. I don't have to listen to it.