Apple Buys UK-Based Company 'Spectral Edge' to Bolster iPhone's Photographic Capabilities

Even if it's all software, you know Apple will tell us we need some future A-series CPU to take advantage of this new tech

You *DID* read the article, where they mentioned RGB-IR sensors, right? The whole article was about using IR to help make better pictures... And I don't think the current cameras have IR sensors in them...

On the smartphone front, Thomas says the company is waiting for consumer hardware to catch up — noting that RGB-IR sensors “haven’t yet begun to deploy on smartphones on a great scale”.

Even if it's all software, you know Apple will tell us we need some future A-series CPU to take advantage of this new tech

Why are people so into improving the camera quality?

Because they can. Because iPhone cameras have not yet caught up to DSLRs, but continue to make progress. Because not everyone uses their iPhone camera just for instagram posts.

Every pic I've taken of my nieces growing up has been with an iPhone camera, because that's what I had with me at the time (I don't generally carry around a larger camera day-to-day). They'll never be that age again, so I'd like the best pics of them possible. And the pics from my iPhone 8 now are objectively better than the ones my iPhone 6 used to take (which were better than the 5 and 4 before it).

The first digital cameras took images we wouldn't want to use for thumbnails these days, but they were the best available at the time. Someday we'll look back at the images we're taking today and we'll think, "that was a great time, but those images are so coarse and grainy, I wish we had better pictures of that magical moment". So, the constant striving for better camera quality.

(And, yeah, a huge percentage of images taken are throwaways that don't need super quality - but you never know until some time later which were the ones that really matter.)

Even if it's all software, you know Apple will tell us we need some future A-series CPU to take advantage of this new tech

The iphone 11 pro uses a TON of horsepower to run the camera app with all the computation going on behind the scenes. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if they did need more headroom to fit a whole extra layer in to keep the UX from becoming choppy and laggy.

The iPhone might be very thin compared to a dedicated camera, but there is always a "room" for improvement when it comes to software and mathematical voodoo.

nature has shown it is most definitely possible capturing great images without multiple massive lenses. Eyeballs prove there is room for improvement.

True, but to be fair, the standard-issue human eyeball is way larger/deeper than the iPhone cameras, and the "machine learning" in the drivers for that has several million years of training to fine-tune the software.