Xiaomi 13 Ultra: “Real camera” phone makes Samsung, Apple shake nervously

With that said, a “real camera” phone seems most likely to attract customers with specific photography goals, so there’s no reason to conclude that these phones are for people who don’t share those goals.

Neither does the creation of photography-focused phones have much bearing on the existence of phones with good batteries.

Single anecdote, but I charge my iPhone every 2-3 days depending on how heavily I use it, and it still manages to take excellent pictures.

Cheaper smartphones (say, in the low hundreds of bucks range) cover 100% of the needs of the average user.

Still, a lot of people buy the high end ones. My conclusion is that people like expensive toys (especially true when it comes to iPhones)

So, nothing wrong about Xiaomi going after that market. It certainly exists.

My ideal phone camera would be a single APS-C sized sensor replacing all three current iPhone cameras. The lens should be a f1.2, 50mm equivalent pancake. Yes that’s hard to do, but using fancy fresnel lenses and a pile of CPU to correct things I bet you could make it work. Make the sensor ~30 megapixels so you can digital zoom.

Add a mount that includes communication so if you want you can add fancy lenses and they can be active parts of the autofocus system.

This design actually competes with low-end mirrorless and is probably even possible to build (the lens might be pushing what’s possible, but I bet we can get close).

There are some side-effects. Sometimes there will be flicker from the flash (or maybe the active focus sensor?) that's reflected in the glass. Because phone cameras have such tiny apertures, dust and debris is more likely to be visible on the filter than on a full-size camera. I'm sure Leica can do a better job than me at minimizing those issues, but I wouldn't be sure they're non-existent.

[1] But of course it also works for circular polarizers, IR-bandpass filters, or anything else that comes in 72mm camera filter form.