To me the main difference is in challenging circumstances. All those "taken with an iphone/pixel/samsung" ads are not proving anything, because they can only t

To me the main difference is in challenging circumstances. All those "taken with an iphone/pixel/samsung" ads are not proving anything, because they can only take that in absolute perfect conditions. But make the conditions less perfect and suddenly the camera matters more. Things like you need more control of DoF. Or it's a bit dark. But that's going after perfection. Nobody cares about DoF, noise, colors, or clarity if it's a boring photo. Even with perfect gear sometimes you have to take the slightly fuzzier photo, or the one where the focus is on the eyelash instead of the iris, because the one where focus was perfect was less... good.