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Doesn't OIS increase the size of a sensor by roughly halfNo, you can apply smartphone OIS-tech on any sensor, stabilization is achieved via the lens-array, not the sensor. The size of the module slightly increases but that's not a hindering factor. Cost/Benefit of OIS on ultra-wide lenses is not there, so it's usually not applied.
>Your logic would lead to OEMs making SOCs without things like TEE and other things which started in the highend but quickly became required for one and basically free to implement for two.
TEE became a mandatory requirement of the media industry for Smartphones in ~2010, as they announced plans to restrict media-playback on a device without measures to secure the DRM-keys. Google made it mandatory shortly after, because the entire ecosystem was built on media-consumption.
It didn't come for free to the players in the industry, it became a very expensive task to develop, support and maintain it, but that's another story.
Drawing a parallel here, I fail to see who should require cryptographic authentication of a taken image from end-user devices, to the point that no consumer devices without it will be built anymore.
>Not saying it is free now, but that the upcoming gen of chips from Sony, Samsung, etc. will have it build in for such a minimal BOM impact, this will be an expected, common place feature across all prices.
It will be supported in sensors for sure, but those will be premium-tier sensors, as a differentiation factor. Until today there was no premium sensor used in mass-tier devices.
Of course, again, if there is demand in the market or a regulation requiring it, it will create an incentive for the industry to follow, but I fail to see why either of this should happen in the coming years.
>To have a more serious, honest and accurate comparison than OIS, why can you not buy a single new smartphone at any price without some NPU?
I don't know why OIS is not a "serious, honest and accurate" comparison, can you elaborate?
As stated, it's a highly mature technology available for over a decade already, providing critical-mass observable end-user value, yet it didn't just naturally "trickle down" to every smartphone price-segment, simply because it comes with additional cost no matter which scale (and the Galaxy A1x tier has massive scale).
A NPU is just the evolution of a DSP, which exists in Smartphone SoC's for more than a decade now and is required for Audio and Image processing. DSP's used to run pre-calculated inference models for lens-correction, exposure, white-balance, etc., now these processes can run as models on an NPU.
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You are trying to argue why that feature won't naturally become a commodity at basically no cost. I'm trying to answer why I don't see this happen, because I worked in this industry for more than 20 years.
The market doesn't get features as a default "easily somehow", features reach this commodity stage because of significant end-user demand (like Camera, Display, Battery), business-value (for the vendor, like Apple Pay) or industry-requirements (like TEE, Widevine example above).
I don't see this happen for this feature, because there is
1. no significant end-user value (unless the public narrative is massively skewed towards "everything is true when the image was signed"),
2. the business-value applies only for Apple's service-proposition for now (which will likely make this feature expand to the non-Pro iPhone tier), and for
3. the industry-requirement I don't see WHO would actually be able to enforce this, for WHICH actual benefit.