There are many things wrong with this. I have an iPhone 17 Pro Max and use it to capture HEIF 48 and ProRAW images for Lightroom. There’s no doubt of the extraordinary capabilities of modern phone cameras. And there are camera applications that give you a sense of the sensor data captured, which only further illustrates the dazzling wizardly between sensor capture vs the image seen by laypeople.

That said, there is literally no comparison between the iPhone camera and the RAW photos captured on a modern full-frame mirrorless camera like my Nikon Z6III or Z9. I can’t mount a 180-600mm telephoto lens to an iPhone, or a 24-120mm, or use a teleconverter. Nor can I instantly swing an iPhone and capture a bird or aircraft flying by at high speed and instantly lock and track focus in 3D, capture 30 RAW images per second at 45MP (or 120 JPEGs per second), all while controlling aperture, shutter speed and ISO.

Physics is a thing. The large sensor size and lenses (that can make a Mac Studio seem cheap by comparison) serve a purpose. Try capturing even a remotely similar image on an iPhone in low light, and especially RAW, and you’ll be sitting there waiting seconds or more for a single image. Professional lenses can easily contain 25 individual lens elements that move in conjunction as groups for autofocus, zoom, motion stabilization, etc. They’re state-of-the-art modern marvels that make an iPhone’s subject detection pale by compare. Examples: I can lock on immediately to a small bird’s eye 300 feet away with a square tracking the tiny eye precisely, and continue tracking. The same applies to pets, people, vehicles, and more with AI detection.

You can handhold a low-light shot at 1/15s to capture a waterfall with motion blur and continue shooting, with the camera optimizing the stabilization around the focus point—that’s the sensor and lens working in conjunction for real-time stabilization for standard shots, or “sports mode” for rapidly panning horizontally or vertically.

There’s a reason pro-grade cameras exist and people use them. See Simon D’entrement, Steve Perry, and many others on YouTube for examples.

For most people, it doesn’t matter. They can happily shoot still images and even amazingly high-quality video these days. But dismissing the differences is wildly misleading. These cameras require memory cards that cost half as much or more than the latest iPhone, and for good reason [1].

With everything, there are trade offs. An iPhone fits in my pocket. A Nikon Z8 and 800mm lens and associated gear is a beast. Different tools, different job.

A modern lens, for comparison: https://www.nikonusa.com/p/nikkor-z-600mm-f63-vr-s/20122/ove...

[0] https://youtu.be/2yZEeYVouXs

[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1887815-REG/delkin_de...