I remember a few years ago I watched him talk about how he would carry two phones for daily driving; An iPhone for taking photos and an Android for everything else, which just made my eyes roll. I get why for his career plus he has access to phones anyway, but I also feel like his expectations of a smartphone is far removed from an average consumer. Not that people don’t care about cameras - they do, but having the best camera is enough to be contender for flagship of the year for him. Is it really more important than the OS or the price?
I think you’d be surprised at how many people really obsess over having the best camera in their phone. Apple wouldn’t be spending the majority of their damn conferences talking about it now for nothing.
I can also confirm this as I have family that is majority from Cali. All they do is take thousands of fucking photos on their iPhones and if my Mom upgrades, it’s usually because it “gets slow” or she wants the better camera.
As a nerd it’s a shame, because if I could have a smartphone with no front facing camera and a shitty rear one, I would. But I’m in a minority.
Part of the issue, I think, is that we’re at a point in smartphones where improvements from the previous model are only really small incremental tweaks. A few Hz more refresh rate, a few more pixels on one of the cameras, a slightly different curve on the bezel… there isn’t a lot of dramatic innovation to report on most of the time.
But everyone has different wants and needs. For him all he cares about is that it doesn’t stutter and the camera is good. There’s lots of technical reviewers who care more about the camera and some that don’t care about the camera at all. Think of reviewers like Lemmy. There’s an instance for everyone.
In fairness I have two phones. An iPhone and an Android.
But I need an iPhone, well I need it’s depth sensor, the rest of it I don’t care about and I don’t actually have a sim in it.
The Android I use for daily driving.
So I get his point but at the same time I bought my iPhone second hand with a cracked screen because I only needed the depth sensor.