Apple has 800 people working solely on the iPhone camera, 60 Minutes episode reveals

The tiny fingernail-sized camera contains over 200 separate parts

The camera on Apple's recently iPhone 6 Plus device (George Frey/Getty Images)

The camera on Apple's iPhone is one of the best out there, and it's consistently the most-used feature on the device - so it's not surprising that the company has a team of 800 people working solely on it.

This revelation came during a recent episode of American news programme 60 Minutes, which went behind the scenes at the company to see the latest hardware and speak to the company's nbosses.

One of these people was Graham Townsend, the head of the camera team, which has 800 "engineers and other specialists" devoted to it.

The camera module itself is tiny - capable of lying the palm of your hand. But despite its small size, it contains over 200 separate parts, including tiny wires half the width of a human hair that stabilise the camera and stop your pictures coming out blurry when your phone is shaking.

According to Townsend, 24 billion operations happen inside the phone every time a picture gets taken.

The segment also showed off a testing room where Apple recreates hundreds of different lighting conditions, in order to ensure that the camera can cope with all of them.

It's likely that Apple's competitors test their cameras in the same way, but given the attention that the company tries to draw to the camera at every device launch, it makes sense that they would devote such a huge number of staff to this single feature.

Interviews with Apple CEO Tim Cook later in the 60 Minutes episode also threw up some other revelations - such as Tim Cook denouncing allegations of Apple's tax avoidance as "total political crap," and his renewed pledge to protect Apple users from prying eyes by keeping strong encryption built into their devices.