Wait, what?
And what is objectively wrong with it? The big red text complains about "color reproduction" - does this guy know anything about photography? Neither camera is color-calibrated, that's what Lightroom is for.
The onus is even stronger than on DSLRs to get the defaults and automatic settings right, since you're dealing with a demographic that is even less inclined to tweak, but will judge the results nonetheless.
I think the criticism is completely fair.
That whole sensor/lens mixup is probably an honest mistake. He was talking about software vs hardware and not really going so much into detail as that making a distinction between sensor and lens would matter. He was talking about the whole sensor and lens package as a whole.
I've had to make batches of personnel photos taken with an iPhone look presentable for a web page on several occasions. A few seconds to set the white balance and normalize the orientation and scale makes a significant difference. It doesn't make it into a great photo, but nothing short of going back with an SLR is going to do that.
Also part of why I think claims about the awesomeness of the iPhone camera should be taken with a pound of salt. It's a fairly nice cell camera, but it's still a cell camera.
But I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. Even a budget DSLR that is perfectly capable of shooting raw should have great auto white balance: Most people don’t want to endlessly tweak photos. Better auto white balance means better photos, even if theoretically everything could be fixed in post.
Oh, and just because smartphone cameras are nowhere near as good as DSLRs doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to compare them with each other, doesn’t mean one can’t be much better than another one.
Only if the initial exposure was good.
I was only talking about color, not exposure. (Of course there is only so much white balance can do – but if you get the raw data you can do just as much with the color as the camera, heck, you can even throw more processing power at the problem than the camera ever could.)