Why? Why wouldn't anyone with more than a passing interest in photography buy a dedicated camera for much less money that will work much better?
I find that modern phones are better than traditional cameras a) by nailing exposure more consistently in tricky lighting conditions, b) having a far better display for proofing your shots, and c) can use computational photography tricks to create great HDR photos.
Where the standalone cameras are useful are where you need a capability that you just can't get in a phone. (And that's a set of capabilities that's been greatly diminished over the years, although it will never fully go away.)
People don't _look at_ Instagram posts in the same way they might a fine art photograph. It's a double tap while scrolling through hundreds of posts.
I say this as an avid amateur wildlife photographer who posts on Instagram and gets a handful of likes while friends get hundreds or thousands for an out-of-focus image of a milkshake and bagel.
The iPhone is a lifestyle product. It does a lot of things, but it does some of them quite poorly.
The new camera is better than it used to be, but it's still a long way of short of the quality you'd expect from a high-end professional photo studio camera.
As a lifestyle product, the important factor is the narrative that buying it will put you within reach of that professional creative lifestyle.
In a sense it will, if your definition is limited to lifestyle social sites like IG and FB.
But in a more honest and realistic sense it won't, because it lacks the quality and the flexibility of real professional equipment. A good DSLR + glass will still kill it, and medium format - which is what the most successful full-time studio pros are likely to use - will absolutely destroy it.
There are still situations where that high end is needed. Fashion, ads, and high-end portraiture and photojournalism all rely on it. I don't think studio photographers working in those fields are going to be moving to an iPhone any time soon.
My point was mostly that the definition of “pro photographer” is much wider these days than many people realize. For many values of “pro” an iPhone Pro is going to be absolutely fantastic and a better fit than higher-end pro.
That's precisely what I meant. It's what most people do most of the time.
Taking a shot of my breakfast smoothie with my 150mp Phase One, editing on a calibrated workstation and exporting to have it resized to 2mp for display on mobile phones is beyond pointless.
Not if I'm travelling internationally, as then I'm concerned about the implications of having border officials demand access to my phone. Or if I'm participating in various watersports/snowsports/backcountry activities where a phone is problematically fragile and difficult to keep charged.
In either of those scenarios (which account for the majority of pictures I take) I'm more likely to have a camera accessible than a phone.
But the part it’s really going to revolutionize is the baseline level of expected image quality. Just like Casey Neistat forced everyone to start using DSLRs for vlogging with his famed 2 or 3 year experiment.
Case in point, I have an iPhone X and a DSLR with all of the above lenses and the camera kit + lenses were more expensive than the new iPhone and I probably would use them less.