Apple has 800 engineers obsessing over this one part of your iPhone

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iPhone 6 Gold camera

George Frey/Stringer/Getty Images

Apple has hired more than 800 engineers to only work on perfecting the most-used part of the iPhone: the camera.

It may seem like a lot for one piece of a phone, but the camera is actually made of 200 pieces, says Graham Townsend, the director who oversees it all, in an interview with "60 Minutes".

"To capture one image, there's actually 24 billion operations going on," Townsend told Charlie Rose.

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One way the small army of engineers has made family photos better is by building a way to counteract people's shaky hands. 

Inside the camera are four tiny wires, each half the width of a human hair. The four wires create a "microsuspension" of the camera parts that can absorb the shaking from hands to get a steady shot. 

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Townsend's team also has its own lab to test how the camera photographs in different lighting situations. The engineers have to calibrate the camera to take the best shot, whether it's the bright light of high noon over the camera or the yellow-ish dim of sunset.

Here's the full video where Townsend takes people into the camera lab.

 

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