Hello! Original author (original tweeter?) here. This particular design is from the iPhone 7 (or, more precisely, my guess is that it's from the iPhone 7 due t

Hello! Original author (original tweeter?) here. This particular design is from the iPhone 7 (or, more precisely, my guess is that it's from the iPhone 7 due to both the date of the patent [1] and due to the elements matching up with marketing images of the iPhone 7), which is 6 years old now, but I think it's broadly still representative of modern smartphone lenses. In the past 5 years or so, advancements in phone cameras have come mostly in better sensors, far better image processing, and adding more cameras, but the basic principles of the compact ultra-aspherical lens design seem to still be in place. As an example, here [2] is an exploded view of the iPhone 6's lens setup, and here [3] is an exploded view of the more recent iPhone 12's lens setup. The iPhone 12 gained an extra element, but they both use similarly weird ripply elements and you can see the clear lineage between the two phones. Also, as mentioned in the tweet thread and elsewhere in the comments here, Kats Ikeda has an excellent, incredibly detailed and thorough explainer on mobile phone lens design [4]. I don't actually know a whole lot about the optics field; I'm just dabbling as a hobbyist from a computer graphics perspective. Kats Ikeda's site is a much better resource than my Twitter posts for learning about this stuff. [1] https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7e/4e/3f/4e88d657a1cceb/US20170299845A1.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7e/4e/3f/4e88d65... [2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyGm6IVkAY77eY?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyGm6IVkAY77eY?format=jpg&name=... [3] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyIbszVQAQhMQ_?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyIbszVQAQhMQ_?format=jpg&name=... [4] https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile