Phone Cameras Have Peaked
Yours truly with a 1950s Argus, the beer-can-with-a-stapler-attached of 35mm film cameras.
The new iPhone 18 has a camera has a physical aperture, just like the one you see on this 70 year-old camera. Why? Because there's nothing else Apple can do to make it look better than the iPhone 17, and the number one thing that drives iPhone users to upgrade is the camera.
The sensors are the same as last year's, as is the software, so we may have hit the wall on what phones can do.
Does anyone need aperture blades on a phone camera? It depends. Do you like blurry backgrounds that isolate your subject, created by a shallow depth-of-field? Currently, that's done on your phone with software. It's pretty good for portraits (if the subject is centered), but it's not perfect. Real cameras do it better.
A variable, physical aperture could help, in theory. The problem: Most lenses, even the pro ones on pro cameras, don't do well wide-open (more open = more blurry background, but also more errors). The images they make can get "soft," or lose sharpness and contrast. That's why most pros don't shoot that way. I suspect that photo software will have to correct for these physical issues, and in the end, the result won't be better at subject isolation than software that simulates a narrow depth of field.
To be clear: I like Apple products. I love my iPhone. It has a great camera, which is often my backup (at the default setting, it's 28mm full frame equivalent, which is great for street and architecture photography), and... my iPhone 13 is five years old. Older but still usable refurbs on Amazon typically cost $200-300. Their color science is great, video stabilization is excellent, and I don't need to insure it because it's so cheap to begin with. The only issue is I sometimes have to replace the battery for $50.
I've been hearing a lot about photography dying, since I got back into it during COVID. Supposedly, phones beat it up and AI is choking it out. I disagree. Today, there are more photographers taking more pictures and sharing them with more people than ever. What phones beat up was the money making task of camera manufacturers, and AI has choked out the money-making task of fashion photographers. Photography, as an art form of the people, is more popular than ever. (Just don't tell Olympus or Nikon or Lumix that, or anyone other than Canon and Sony.)
Sure, most photos by most people are a long ways from art, but Infinite Monkey Theory says eventually the greatest photos ever will appear. We just won't see them, because social media algorithms prefer pictures that anger us (or make us horny) to the subtle and longer-lasting delights of good photography.