Whenever you take a photo with an iPhone you'll hear a distinct shutter-release sound, but do you ever have the feeling you might have heard it before? Well, you quite possibly have, particularly if you've been taking photos for many years, or are a fan of all things retro, because it's a sample of an actual film SLR camera that dates back to 1976.
When the early Macs were being developed, if fell to a guy by the name of Jim Reekes to create the sounds. It was him that created the famous startup 'boing' that greets Mac users to this day whenever they start their machine up (or restart it after it's crashed – again…), the 'quack' when you try to do something you shouldn't and, of course, the 'camera click' whenever you take a screenshot (Cmd-Shift-3, in case you were wondering).
While most of those early Mac sounds were synthesized, Jim wanted the camera click to sound like a real camera shutter firing, and so reached for his own SLR and made a recording as he took a picture.
Years later, when Apple launched its very first iPhone, that same shutter sound was repurposed to signify that a photo had been taken. And it's been used in every iPhone since, right up until the iPhone 16. This Instagram reel, from Phil Edwards, explains further.
That camera was the Canon AE-1, a groundbreaking SLR for the day, as it was the first mass-produced consumer camera to have microprocessor-controlled Auto Exposure (hence the AE in the name), and was hugely popular, selling 5.7 million units over its lifespan.
And while the last ever AE-1 rolled off the production line in 1984, it lives on, or at least the sound of its shutter does, as every time you take a photo on an iPhone, what you are actually hearing is Jim Reekes' vintage Canon AE-1.
