As a hobbyist photographer and professional phone owner, I have thoughts I'm not afraid to foist upon you unwilling audience: 1) Yes, phones are great for 100%

As a hobbyist photographer and professional phone owner, I have thoughts I'm not afraid to foist upon you unwilling audience: 1) Yes, phones are great for 100% of the average person, who just wants some snapshots to remember/post on Instagram/etc. Not only that, but most phones apply filters to the photo that makes it look more appealing (like in the article), which is what most people want. Photographers want fidelity, so they can apply their own edits in post, so a deciding factor is maximizing post-processing freedom. Cameras are more for professional/artistic use these days. 2) Phones are never ever going to replace professional cameras. Hell, not even non-professional cameras are ever going to replace professional cameras. I have a Canon 5D as my main camera and a Sony RX-100 mkIII as a travel camera, and while the latter is fantastic, has great quality in a very small form factor, I end up frustrated 30% of the times I use it. The 5D is a professional camera, and much of what you pay for is for the ergonomics. It's very cumbersome to have to go three menus down to change a setting in the smaller camera when I could have done it without taking my eye away from the viewfinder on the 5D, and it leads to missed shots. I haven't seen this point mentioned anywhere, and it's a big differentiator. I could include here the fact that the camera is much more predictable: If you hear the "beep" that tells you it's focused, pressing the button gets me a photo in < 100ms. Phones have a will of their own, and it's pretty random when you'll actually have your photo. Cameras focus in a few milliseconds exactly on the subject, phones focus somewhere in the vicinity of where you asked, at some point soonish. This leads to a much better, more solid-feeling experience when using a camera. 3) Phones are great for taking wide-angle photos in ample light, but not great for everything else. They can clean low-light photos decently these days, but a large sensor is much more versatile in what you can do with it. The same goes for the lenses, 24mm is good for a lot of things, but sometimes you just need a different focal length. 4) Larger sensors have a lot more detail in the resulting photo. A camera lets you go from the before to the after here, and this isn't even a terrible shot: https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/ https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/ A phone wouldn't be able to retrieve much detail in that scene, and the result would look much worse. A camera can help you salvage many photos that would have been write-offs with a phone, e.g. when they're too dark/bright, or when you have tones too close to each other. TL;DR: Phones are great, but cameras are great too.