With respect, the technology is meaningless. If you are Ansel Adams, you can take a fantastic phot with anything. A garbage camera will just place more limitat

With respect, the technology is meaningless. If you are Ansel Adams, you can take a fantastic phot with anything. A garbage camera will just place more limitations on you, which may make you work harder, but that's it. If you are Joe Shmoe, then the best camera in the world will not make you take pictures like Ansel Adams. No technological solution can fix that gap. This problem will not be fixed in my lifetime or yours. Not until we can take the entire genius that made Ansel Adams who he was, can this problem be fixed. At which point, you're no longer taking the pictures, but instead the virtual Ansel Adams is doing so. Now, between those two extremes, having more intelligence built into the device will help for certain types of pictures that you might want to take. And as the years go by, more and more technological advances will be incorporated, so there will be a wider and wider variety of pictures at which you have a decent chance of being able to take decent pictures. But phones will only eat the market from the bottom up, and slowly at that. It will take more and more effort for phones to be able to eat that next layer above where they are today. It will happen, but it will take more and more time, and more and more money. And in the meanwhile, higher end cameras are going to continue to be made that will extend the upper reach of what cameras can do. It's a constantly moving target. Today, I think phones have mostly eliminated the lower portion of the point-and-shoot market. But not all of it. It's going to be a while before the point-and-shoot market is completely eliminated. And much longer than that for the higher end cameras.