What's the TAM for a new iPhone model, versus the TAM for a new SLR? I'm guessing the iPhone wins by at least 2 orders of magnitude. EDIT: At the end of TFA they have this chart [1] which shows while camera sales peaked at 121 million units in 2009, in 2019 it's 1.4 billion smartphones sold versus 15 million cameras.
Camera performance continues to be a major differentiator / selling point and upgrade draw for smartphones. Therefore to draw in that next $100 billion in device sales, companies like Apple can spend orders of magnitude more dollars investing in the phone's camera performance than a legacy camera company can invest in their entire device.
Another major factor is that the massive processing power of the phone can be leveraged for image capture, just as it can be leveraged for gaming, and web browsing. Users can amortize the cost of all that computing power and fast storage across the several major categories of tasks that a smartphone can perform. So a processor that makes perfect sense in a smartphone is going to be very hard to justify in a SLR, versus integrating the minimum set of ICs required to process the image, with a low-power processor to run a bare-bones UI. Likewise the BOM for the screen on a smartphone is worth investing hundreds of dollars into, whereas the screen on an SLR is kind of like the backup for the viewfinder.
Finally, the raison d'être of a camera in 2019 is to share photos with friends and family, using perhaps the built-in Camera app, but most likely a dozen other social apps which all have their own custom UI, filters, and accoutrements. An SLR will simply never be as effortless and fun to use for this purpose as your smartphone.
Camera performance continues to be a major differentiator / selling point and upgrade draw for smartphones. Therefore to draw in that next $100 billion in device sales, companies like Apple can spend orders of magnitude more dollars investing in the phone's camera performance than a legacy camera company can invest in their entire device.
Another major factor is that the massive processing power of the phone can be leveraged for image capture, just as it can be leveraged for gaming, and web browsing. Users can amortize the cost of all that computing power and fast storage across the several major categories of tasks that a smartphone can perform. So a processor that makes perfect sense in a smartphone is going to be very hard to justify in a SLR, versus integrating the minimum set of ICs required to process the image, with a low-power processor to run a bare-bones UI. Likewise the BOM for the screen on a smartphone is worth investing hundreds of dollars into, whereas the screen on an SLR is kind of like the backup for the viewfinder.
Finally, the raison d'être of a camera in 2019 is to share photos with friends and family, using perhaps the built-in Camera app, but most likely a dozen other social apps which all have their own custom UI, filters, and accoutrements. An SLR will simply never be as effortless and fun to use for this purpose as your smartphone.
[1] - https://www.instagram.com/p/B2b8pEDIBDb/?utm_source=ig_embed