The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

In my case my favorite landscape photo that I’ve ever taken was shot with a smartphone at sunset. I would love to print it and hang it on my wall, but there’s just not enough detail for a large print. I’m glad that my smartphone performed as well as it did, but wish I had brought a more substantial camera on that trip.

Nobody smart is arguing phones take better pics, but they’re a hell of a lot closer than they’ve ever been and camera manufacturers have done little to make themselves more compelling.

This rather long article describes the past, not necessarily the future.

Basically, what the author identifies and yet misses is that most phones these days are no longer phones. A normal camera has similar capabilities except it has better optics and happens to not have a 4g/5g chip in it (typically) or be used for taking calls.

The status quo of the last 15 years is basically convergence of devices around a form factor that fits in your pocket that is good enough but frankly a bit awkward for many things. They've gotten uncomfortably big and yet are still uncomfortably small for many things (like typing). You only have one phone and the myth companies like Apple are built on is that that one phone comes from them and is the center of your life.

However, making phone hardware is getting so cheap now that you can produce fairly decent ones for around 100$. Manufacturers like Apple have been looking to expand in the camera domain to justify higher prices. If you look at the most expensive phones, their number one feature is always the camera.

The next logical step from a technical point of view is separating those two again. After all, if phones are cheap, there's no good reason why any camera can't be a phone as well. The only reason that's not happening is that traditional camera manufacturers (like most electronics manufacturers) are lousy at software. Eventually one of them will figure it out.

Another thing that I've been expecting to happen is that Apple will figure out that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business. Right now they have a one size fits all phone and that's it. You buy it and then you replace it after a few years. The next logical step here is to own multiple devices and start treating them more as accessories to be used in different contexts. The phone you use while biking to work might be different than what you use while you are sitting on the bus or at home. It might not even be a phone. It's like owning just one pair of shoes for jogging, weddings, office, and gardening. Once companies figure out how to make switching from one device to the next seamless, there's an enormous amount of potential for all sorts of specialized devices to be sold that seamlessly integrate. Including high end cameras.

> I've been expecting ... that Apple will figure out that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business. ... You buy it and then you replace it after a few years.

Creating a device that every person needs to replace after a few years is a very sound business model. The issue is how many years you generally need to replace it. Apple used to be able to convince folks to replace their phone every two years. Now a two year old phone is not bad at all, and many people are moving to a three year cycle or even longer. This is significant, if 50% of folks move from replacing their phones every 2 years to 3, that's a 16% drop in sales.

Apple's real challenge is to keep innovating to convince folks to keep to shorter phone life-spans. However, as Moore's law keeps it's pace towards the graveyard, that will be be harder and harder to do.

I have no idea why it was chosen. I was wondering this myself as I was lifted up 20 ft in the air on a forklift change the lens. The grid was configured manually. We laid out 3 plastic sheets over the machine table with 10"x10" squares. We took a picture and manually dragged points on a grid over the software to match the grid on the table. Then the scale and offset and stuff had to be adjusted. The software was somewhat crude. Once you took a calibration picture, it overrode the original and there was no way to make a backup and as I.said before all the scaling and.offset information was input into a configuration file that was almost entirely written in German.