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Perhaps an add-on that allowed you to attach professional lenses to your iPhone (which already has a pretty good CCD.)

People already do make add on lenses for iPhones and while they will give you some telephoto abilities they will never produce professional results. The reason is that the sensor in the iPhone and stock lens are already diffraction limited so any lens with a greater f-stop than the factory one will only make that worse. Also since no lens is perfect adding another one will only introduce additional optical defects and aberrations into the final image. Now some times this is acceptable (look at 1.4x and 2x telephoto converters) but the results are not as good as just using a larger lens to begin with. For example I have a very nice SMC Takumar 200mm lens and a really cheap 400mm lens, I get better results with the cheap 400mm lens than using the 200mm with a 2x telephoto converter. That said before I got the 400mm I would use the 200mm + 2x converter for that extra reach as the results were still better than a tighter crop of an image taken with just the 200mm lens. So don't expect adding more glass in front will work miracles.

Moving on to sensors the iPhone has a very good sensor for its size but it is still a tiny sensor (about 6mm x 5mm). Compare that to a professional full frame sensor that is 24mm x 36mm, APS-C 22mm x 14mm, medium format (43mm x 32mm or 53mm x 40mm) sensor. The light gathering ability of those larger sensors is substantially better that the tiny sensors in cellphones. The iPhone does use a back illuminated sensor which does help it out with high ISO noise but even then the high ISO performance of the larger sensors is vastly superior. It looks like the iPhone tops out at ISO 1250 which is pretty damn low compared to even an old DSLR (I have a 10 year old one that tops out at ISO 3200 and one less than 2 years old that tops out at ISO 51,200) and the amount of noise in the image from the iPhone is comparable to my newest camera at ISO 25,600 or the older one at ISO1600.

Then you have the combination of the existing lens plus sensor on the phone which produces a very deep depth of field, even with the "telephoto" lens on the iPhone. Yes software can fake it but there is a reason that professionals like a mild telephoto (in the 70mm to 150mm range) with a nice f/2 aperture on a full frame camera or better yet a 200mm on a medium format for portraits. The depth of field comes about because of the sensor size and focal length so a big sensor with a big lens will give you a shallower depth of field while the tiny sensor (crop factor of about 7) with tiny focal length (about 4mm) give a very deep depth of field. If I want that I will stick my 17mm fish-eye or 28mm wide angle on my full frame camera, set the f-stop to f/11 or f/16 spin the focusing ring over to about 2 meters and not bother focusing it again and go do some street photography. In looking at a lab test of the iPhone 8 image quality I'm not impressed with what it produces under ideal circumstances but there one is a pixel peeper.

All that aside a camera like what one finds on a modern good quality cell phone will be all most people, 99% of people fall in this category, will ever need and they will never find the camera being the limiting factor in their photography ability. The only area that these cameras could really improve would be in noise reduction, especially at high ISO, as they are at the limits of what can be done to improve image quality with optics and pixel densities. Even there they may be rapidly approaching the limits but I don't know much about that area of senso

The Apple A11 has a die size of 87.6mm^2 -- compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 used in many leading Android devices (incl. the Samsung Galaxy S8), which comes in at 72.3mm^2, the A11 is a mere 21% larger. Nowhere close to double in size.

The iPhone has a BCM4774 chip to handle the GPS. It's a low power GPS chip.

There has been a specific GPS chip since the iPhone 3G.

Looking at a teardown of an iPhone 7, we see the WiFi/Bluetooth chip is a Murata device, not a W1. The W1 is in the airpods, not the iPhone.

Hmmm. That's interesting. I thought the iP7's had the W1, too.

And what's a damn TRANSFORMER company doing making BT Chips?!? ;-)

Well, then, that's actually even better news. That means that the issue with the call-drop is much more likely to NOT be related to a W1 to non-W1 incompatibility, as I first worried it was.

Looking at a teardown of an iPhone 7, we see the WiFi/Bluetooth chip is a Murata device, not a W1. The W1 is in the airpods, not the iPhone.

How the hell did this get marked as insightful?

The COGS on a $750 iPhone 6 is less than $250. A 200% markup is a high markup.

http://www.techinsights.com/te...

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow...