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Yeah, while I can understand Apple picking up HEVC, this image format makes very little sense to me.

Outside of Apple I can't see this have any uptake due to being patent/royalty laden, which means that images you encode using this format need to be reencoded again (and degraded in case of lossy, which is the most common type) in order to be shown on the web or on other operating systems/devices.

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Meanwhile, every Apple user’s photo library will be half the size compared to JPEG. For many users photos are the single largest category in their iOS device storage. More importantly for Apple, they (want to) store everyone’s photos in their cloud, so they need half the storage and bandwidth to pull that off.

For sending to other people, most photos are going to be downsized anyway so a transcoding isn’t the end of the world.

Apple doesn't like downsizing messages. iMessage sends full resolution, multi-MB pictures.

That's a setting - though I don't know the default.

Irrelevant because we are talking about compression formats.

It is very likely in the next 12 - 24 months time, every Smartphone shipped will have paid the HEVC patents. So while the PC industry may be a little different, all mobile phone will have HEVC support soon.

Now whether the software for HELF support will catch up is another question.

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