What point is the author trying to make in comparing the two iPhones? There was a setup but no payoff.
In the newer iPhone, and in Bill Gates' setup, it is understood that the framing is the important part, it is not enough to pretend to be in a normal meeting.
Of course the whole thing is a bit silly
As goes with fashion as well. I’m not a practitioner myself (but married one, and am the parent of one) and I have observed that even the ones who take it seriously also treat it wil a sense of humor.
Fashion trends in the past few years have often progressed increasingly into a level of irony. It's become about what level of craziness/funkiness you can pull off while making it look intentional and attractive.
This includes hairstyles like dying your hair platinum blonde or purple and buzz-cutting it, or wearing loud, maximalist patterns, or even ironically wearing defunct fashion brands or cultural symbols opposite of your everyday life, like the popularity of Bass Pro Shops hats. The comeback of 'dad sneakers' and 'mom jeans,' while even retaining those monikers but in a positive way, are other good examples.
In the part where they compare Bill Gates to the Bloomberg anchor, it just says "Her self-presentation is overawed by Gates’ setup." with no clear explanation as to why. And it's not actually clear to me when I look at the pic.
Maybe I just don't have the "technical expertise to understand how colour temperature, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO conspire together to form a beautiful picture".
Given the disastrous video setups I’ve seen, I think the Bloomberg anchor’s setup was at least a 7 on the 10 scale (and maybe an 8), so hardly terrible.
Side note: audio is a fraction of the effort and expense and IMO is more important.
It's done with a Roswell Colares (or a Sennheiser lav) a $1500 boutique mic inspired by $10,000 mics, into an API 3124 studio pre, directly into a MOTU 16A interface with no further processing. Room treatment also plays a part: the room has two large openings into other spaces and six large T-Fusor diffusors, painted to match the walls.
A setup like that projects its sound character into the recording so strongly that there's nothing to fix: when the mics and things are high enough quality it's like the intention of the vocal performance comes through more powerfully in the first place, and this responds very well to digitization and compression.
My comments were more directed at getting people into the 80th percentile level (decent mic on a boom, correctly placed and away from a built-in camera/laptop mic), but your point is correct for the absolute best 1-in-10000 level.
He's using a good camera and a lens with a wide aperture to blur out the background (possibly even with ND filters to allow the wide aperture with brighter lighting). The bokeh is quite good on his blurry background: it's not meant to be just a gaussian blur, bokeh has edges (especially on point light sources) but in a nice way. It's definitely a real camera he's using with a proper lens.
The anchor's hair is blending with her bookcase, color-wise. It's not the best possible background, there's too much sharp detail and contrast behind her (by contrast Gates is apparently in Heaven).
She's got two points of light, one a larger area (you can see the reflections in her eyes) but Gates seems to have larger area lights, entirely to the sides. Maybe, maybe a light nearer the camera, but it's not very intense. Maybe just white area in front of him to bounce light. You can see reflections off the SIDE of his glasses, but there are no bright reflections IN his glasses and this is probably why he chose the way he did. He loses out on being able to have 'anime highlights' in his eyes for appeal, but he looks younger through the lighting covering him from all sides, hiding detail.
When I stream or make videos, I push pretty hard to get useful effects out of the situation, and I go for a big flashy anime highlight reflected in my eyes. You can use an area light, like a tent, but those have to be HUGE to really push the highlight size and cover a broad area: like, several feet wide and right up next to you. Instead of that, I've been using a ring light and aiming the camera through it, using a slightly longer lens (and wide aperture, and modular synth for bokeh-ed out blinky lights in the background, and Hypno video generator to do stuff in the black areas of the shot, etc etc etc)
It's pretty hilarious how close the ring light has to be, to take up any space in the image reflected off your eyeball. You're almost sticking your head through the ring light. All that matters is how the shot looks: viewers can't see all the crazy lighting that you're looking at.
There's a competitive aspect to it. If I can beat Bill Gates's quality level, I'll feel I did a good job. I will not beat Ricky Tinez, no matter what I do :)
De gustibus!