What is happening with the iPhone 2019 camera?

“Apple Suddenly Abandons Massive New iPhone Camera Upgrade” (Forbes):

Major UK newspaper The Telegraph has revealed that Apple has pulled cutting edge camera technology from its upcoming iPhone 11 line-up and the company has nothing comparable to replace it. With Apple (controversially) redesigning the iPhone 11 around its massive camera upgrade, the news is a shock.

Where does that leave photographers who want the best possible images from a Smartphone? All of the top-ranked cameraphones on DxOMark are Android (Huawei and Samsung topping the list). What has kept me on iOS, though, is that the Apple software is great at wringing the best out of the sensor, e.g., with color balance or intelligent focus point selection.

What’s the next big cycle for Android? Not until spring 2020 for the new Samsungs? Nobody is doing my dream phone with extra thickness for a substantial battery, a bigger sensor, and a bigger lens, right?

What will Apple have? A three-lens system like Android phones have already had for a while? (history)

My iPhone X is less than one year old (required replacement under warranty), but it already seems a little weak in terms of battery life. If I can hang on until September will there be a world of photographic improvement from the next generation of iPhones?

9 thoughts on “What is happening with the iPhone 2019 camera?

  1. There is Battery Health section in Settings, so you can check if your battery is going bad.

  2. Unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket, you want to skip the next generation of smartphones and wait for next year’s, which will have the first usable (and fully standards-compliant) 5G based on the Qualcomm X55 modem. It’s rumored the iPhone will finally ditch the notch foisted upon us by that hack, Jony Ive, and who knows, they may even resorb the bump by putting an adequate battery inside (I’m not holding my breath).

    As for the camera, just get a Ricoh GRIII or a Sony RX100VA.

  3. Apple can just do nothing & let the falling dollar drive up their valuation. These days, carrying around a point & shoot for a telephoto lens, a gopro for a fisheye lens, a $50 phone for a wide lens. The DSLR from 10 years ago has been neglected. Despite having airplanes, helicopters, & phones, your photos don’t pop like they did 25 years ago.

    • Thanks, Tom. I just checked battery health and it is supposedly at 93 percent. Maybe it is programmers writing terrible software that makes good hardware seem bad!

    • (Separately, for a sort-of-waterproof-phone like the iPhone X, is it truly practical for a consumer to replace the battery and end up with an immersible phone?)

  4. You have to buy two things (sometimes they are sold together). One is the battery and the other is the assembly adhesive. To do a really good job with the adhesive, you need to take it apart a bit more than just the battery connector. There are lots of videos on how to do it. If you are willing to risk it not being as waterproof as possible, you can just cut the adhesive in two parts and get by only having to unplug the battery otherwise you have to unplug a few more connectors. The adhesive is a loop laid out in the exact shape needed on a solid piece of plastic so you have disconnect the screen part.

    I replaced the battery of an iPhone 7 Plus and not sure I even needed the adhesive to hold it together. I was repurposing it as an EFB to record flight tracks and see ADS-B traffic so completely waterproof was not expected to be an issue.

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