With features like Portrait Lighting, Apple increasingly wants to put the iPhone as a candidate to replace or complement a photographic studio complete. For professionals (or aspirants) who want to expand these capabilities even further, Ma has good news.
According to 9to5Mac, the Cupertino giant started to accept external flashes and strobe lights in your program MFi (Made for iPhone), the one that “regulates” accessories and allows them to use closed features and elements of Ma's products, such as the Lightning door. Several manufacturers have already received the specifications they will need to follow in order to apply their products to the program, and are working on new accessories.
With the novelty, the iPhone can gain even more accessories related to photography, especially flashes and strobe lights embedded in cases or external frames that connect to the device via Lightning being able to both supply and receive power from the iPhone.
Currently, accessories of the type already exist (like the Lume Cube, seen above), but they operate via Bluetooth and have a function that is not, say, ideal: as Bluetooth does not have the latency necessary to synchronize the firing of a flash, they they use optical sensors to detect the light from the iPhones' built-in flash and thereby fire their own lights at the same time. With future MFi accessories, this “gambiarra” can be dispensed with in favor of an integrated solution.
The annoying part that MFi flashes can only work with iPhones 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. Still, for those interested in the whole thing, they should start to emerge from the next few months the specifications are still under development, and Apple is working with manufacturers to guide them through the process. Excited?
