Small sensors rule.

Apple’s latest acquisition.

Let’s face it, the photography world needs yet another 35 mm f/1.4 or 24-70 mm f/2.8 lens for full frame as much as it needs a hole in the head.

The future is not with more optics but with better computational photography and Apple knows this better than anyone, with the dramatic improvements in quality visible in the output of the iPhone 11 Pro. Yes, those Sony optics and sensors in the iPhone 11 Pro are tremendous but the secret sauce is in the code. Any phone maker can buy the optics from Sony. Only Apple has the code and the fabulous A13 CPU to drive all those instructions. So Apple’s latest acquisition makes eminent sense while the competition at the major SLR manufacturers continues to make optics no one needs. Like the Pentagon, these camera makers are fighting the previous war.

It’s the likes of Sony and Nikon who should be buying these businesses with their smarts, not Apple, if they are to have any chance of survival. I think those chances fall daily. These companies are like Kodak whose board of directors believed film would never die.

Apple has already shown with its latest cell phones that the need for bulky digital gear falls daily. To all those skeptics who say that small sensors will never equal the output from big gear, I would remind them of what Oscar Barnack accomplished with the Leica a century ago. “Small camera, big picture“ applies as much today as it did when Oscar was a lad.

The photography future is with small, leaving just a few masochists to hump around heavy equipment bags and tripods. Increasingly, their results are indistinguishable from those produced by cell phones in capable hands.

All change.

Here are some of the activities and businesses which will die with the oncoming tsunami of change powered by computational photography:

• Professional wedding photographers – anyone can take a good wedding snap, and it only has a shelf life through the divorce date
• Micro Four-Thirds cameras and lenses – they add nothing to iPhone 11 Pro quality at 4x the bulk and weight
• Olympus – all their eggs in one basket …. and a handful of microscope sales and accounting fraud
• Nikon – no diversification
• Canon’s big gear division
• Panasonic’s camera division – they managed to deliver a great FF body just as the format died. They should stick to TVs and washing machines
• Pentax – no distinguishing product
• APS-C – a ridiculous format which delivers the quality of MFT in the bulk of FF
• All those silly-priced Zeiss lenses for full frame
• The third rate garbage that goes by the moniker ‘Sigma lens’, an oxymoron if there ever was one
• Most large format digital – silly priced, no quality advantage over big sensor digital bodies
• Sony’s camera division. On the other hand their cell phone lens and sensor division will bloom
• The last handful of reportage pros – everyone has a camera and the pro will never be in the right place at the right time
• The mystique associated with ‘pro’ gear. It’s inferior in most practical aspects to the best cell phone cameras
• DP Review – how many cell phone reviews can you do in a year?
• All the other hardware sites for pixel peekers

Leica, however, will survive as there are always antiquarians with china cabinets to fill.

And it’s all because of this little part with 8.5 billion transistors in the area of two postage stamps, plus a team of very smart programmers:

And by the time Samsung has managed to steal all this proprietary technology, Apple will be on the A20. I provided an early peek inside Samsung’s design lab almost a decade ago.

iPhone 11 Pro fully loaded with case, credit card, DL, health insurance card and ATM card. Nikon? Not so much.