Profound implications for camera makers.
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Ugly as sin – Steve must be spinning in his grave.
Yes, the price of the new iPhone 11Pro, just introduced, is high. Yes, the ergonomics are as awful as they were with iPhone 1 back in 2007. The on/off switch remains opposite the shutter button, making sure you turn off the camera when you most need it. And yes, the absence of a proper viewfinder in bright light makes framing a hit-or-miss proposition. And yes, the device is sprouting ugly faster than the pig in the Oval Office, with its three clunky lenses and increasingly confusing menu structure.
But take a moment to read the specifications and compare them with your advanced MFT or FF camera:
And don’t forget the always on GPS so you always know where your snap was taken. And the cell phone. And the internet. And email. And Messaging. And Google Maps. And all those stupid games. Your camera does none of those.
When I started with MFT one of the primary appeals was that you could get close to FF quality without FF bulk. This was especially true when it came to the size of lenses, something which has always made a nonsense of the ‘in between’ APS-C interchangeable lens format whose lenses are scarcely smaller than their FF counterparts. I transitioned to MFT with the superb Panasonic G1 a decade ago. As a replacement for the film Leica M it was a street snapper’s dream. Better definition, finer grain, lots of images on one card, great lens range and size and bulk comparable to the exemplar of film rangefinder cameras. Later upgrades saw the Panasonic G3 replace the G1 and finally the GX7 which is the ultimate Leica M replacement, with its truly silent electronic shutter and Leica M form factor.
But now the iPhone, with its multiple lenses covering most of what a photographer needs – wide, standard, modest telephoto – looks set to obsolete the MFT system in a much smaller package. FF? At the high end for sports snappers and journalists needing ‘street cred’ (who is going to take you seriously if the iPhone is your camera of choice?) it’s likely to survive, albeit with a minuscule and falling market share.
Price of the new iPhone 11? $1,000 with 64gB, which compares with $600 for iPhone 1 in July, 2007, with its crappy 2mp camera. Inflate that at 4% annually and you get $960 and the new iPhone has a larger, better screen, eight times the memory and is several orders of magnitude faster. So while $1,000 sounds like a lot, I prefer to think that $600 back on 2007 was really expensive. I know. I bought one.