This archive report was first published on 13 September 2019.
Apple's latest iPhones have marked a significant shift in the smartphone camera battleground, with the company leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize photography.
During the iPhone 11 Pro launch, Apple's marketing chief Phil Schiller highlighted the device's ability to create the perfect photograph by combining eight separate exposures captured before the main shot, thanks to its 'Deep Fusion' feature.
"When you press the shutter button, it takes one long exposure, and then in just one second the neural engine analyzes the fused combination of long and short images, picking the best among them, selecting all the pixels, and pixel by pixel, going through 24 million pixels to optimize for detail and low noise," Schiller explained.
Apple's custom chip, the A13 Bionic, plays a crucial role in this process, with a special portion called the 'neural engine' dedicated to AI tasks. This allows the iPhone to take better, sharper pictures in challenging lighting situations.
While Samsung and Huawei also design custom chips for their phones, Apple's focus on AI-powered cameras has created an expensive game where only phone makers with sufficient resources can invest in custom camera systems.
"Owning the stack today in smartphones and chipsets is more important than it's ever been, because the outside of the phone is commodities," said Ryan Reith, program vice president at IDC's mobile device tracking program.
As the smartphone camera market continues to evolve, Apple's AI-powered cameras are poised to set a new standard for photography, with potential applications extending beyond smartphones to augmented reality glasses and other products.
