The iPhones XS
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
"The other explanation I can think of is that this almost certainly isn’t Apple’s own sensor." - Correct, it's a Sony sensor. Apple has been using Sony sensors since they dumped Omnivision back in the iPhone 4 days.
"Why isn’t Apple touting this larger sensor?" Maybe because the sensor got smaller in the previous iphones (1/2.5") compared to the iPhones before that (1/2.3"). I guess they've gone back to 1/2.3" now?
" Android handset makers can’t just buy a “neural engine” chip and stick it in a phone. " Yes, you absolutely can. [1] This chip is in all the DJI drones, also in the "google clips" camera. OK, it's not an A12, but it is exactly the kind of thing that Gruber is describing - it's a neural image processing chip.
A cursory search didn't turn up anything simple to understand.
My uninformed guess is that it's a chip that does neural network stuff to offload image processing for antialiasing, scaling and such.
But I would guess they do a lot more.
Could you elaborate a bit?
Seems pretty interesting that my phone might be already using "AI" algos for taking better pictures!
I remember reading that it's optimised for matrix calculations. Is that true? If so, what is it about matrix calculations that makes a GPU not the most optimised for this task?
> If so, what is it about matrix calculations that makes a GPU not the most optimised for this task?
Well this gets into what is a GPU since now NVIDIA and others are making special tensor GPUs that are also good at this. Most GPUs are optimized for 32 floating point math though, you're probably familiar with "8-bit graphics" being synonymous with 80's NES console quality.
CPUs are optimized for taking a decent amount of data and doing anything with them, especially if the order counts as is often the case with algorithms.
GPUs are optimized for taking a lot of data and doing the same few things to a lot of them (shaders, physics).
AI chips are optimized at taking a massive amount of data and doing a large number of calculations on all of them. In a neural net each "neuron" and/or "synapse" can represent a function/weight that needs to be calculated across many inputs.
In a deep learning set, this could be millions of weights and the more weights you have the more important memory and power efficiency become. When a NN is being looked up into (as opposed to the initial training) it's often in real time (self driving cars, "hey siri", etc.) so the demand to finish all those calculation's faster is even higher. OTOH the accuracy is less important, as neural nets - like people - are good at filtering out noise.
Some basic research would be nice.
I believe he has a Google Pixel 2, but apparently he doesn't use it or didn't do any proper research on it.
It's not the first time he shows ignorance about what companies other than Apple are doing or are capable of doing.
Apple's neural engine shipped in the A11, a few weeks earlier than the Pixel 2.
Maybe he’s ignorant there, but I think the point should’ve been that outside of Google nobody else is doing the same on android.
I have a full-size mirrorless camera with interchangeable lens (Sony alpha-5000), and I love it. I usually import all pictures I take with it to Photos, and you can immediately tell if a picture was taken with it or with my current iPhone 7 (no surprise).
But here's the catch: I understand many principles of photography, but I'm no professional photographer. I try to make adjustments to focal distance, aperture, manual focus, and etc when taking pictures, but the results are usually not good (it's all fun though, especially when you get it just right).
Therefore, even when I take my camera with me, I will still snap pictures with my phone because the balance between how easy it is vs the quality of the product really favours smartphones. And it only gets exponentially harder with difficult light conditions (overcast skies, moving vehicles, etc). I've ordered a XS despite the high price but I'm really looking forward to using its camera and comparing it with my Sony camera.
Because hey, like Gruber, I'm also an unattractive mid-30s gremlin, nothing like a fashion model. My wife, whom I love, is not Kate Moss either.
I used to run around with Dianas and Holgas - plastic cameras with plastic lenses that expose 120 film (medium or 4x5 format). Half of the shots turn out unusable, which gets really expensive -- but the half that turns out good is great. Unlike my (cheap SE) iPhone images, they have a quality that's uncannily "real". Like real people living real lives.
And when I say "strange" I don't necessarily mean "bad"; just that it sure looks that we will soon be normalizing the hard-to-notice glitches of ML models and miss them in "normal" photos. With cheap plastic cameras you knew that the artifacts (light streaks, dust on lenses...) were artifacts.
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Next up: thanatropism complains about auto-tuners in modern pop music.
This is just wrong; Google is doing lots on the Pixel devices in hardware (HDR+, Portrait, Motion Photos, etc):
What I'd like is for greater range and more situations for the algorithmic depth to kick in (ie Instagram's focus camera). My use of exchangeable lens cameras in traditional form factors is about to disappear if I can use it for selective focus on subjects 20 feet away. (Note: my use of cameras are a means of expression, and although I'm well versed in the technology and discipline I don't have any interest in the elitism of how an image was captured.)
I don't think this new generation of Iphones achieve that, but its an area I'm watching.
The other improvements suggest a 2019 or 2020 model will be amazing.
I feel like I hear this statement every other year. I'm not invested enough to go back and actually validate my theory, but this definitely isn't the first time I've heard that from a phone company. They always seem to fail the 6ft drop test.
It's kind of mind-boggling that, first, we took an object we knew people were going to drop frequently, and wrapped it in glass; and then, second, that billions are consequently being spent to come up with a glass that is sufficiently un-glass-like to be practical when wrapped around those objects.
This doesn't bode well for anyone who cares about being able to manipulate their photos without being too tied into Apple's ecosystem.
I hope that Adobe and the developers of other photo editing programs manage to reverse engineer this.
This is great news if it is solid enough. I would happily spend +$1k for a phone only if I can let it fall without causing damage.
iPhone cameras haven't been the best on smartphones for years now, let alone among all camera devices.
He's not comparing the cameras to other phones, although he does briefly discuss the device vs cloud processing approaches.
And, shockingly, even fanboys can have useful information to share.
"No science involved, but Apple engineers and I agree that the iPhone XS camera is the best"
I bet fanboys print out DXOMark as cleaning paper for their iPhone lenses - "best lens cleanser for the iPhone is DXOMARK ratings of other phones being better"