This is just the mop-up operation. The only products left are going to be super-telephotos for live sports (sales: a hundred a year, if that?) and 4K+ IMAX digital cine cameras.
Pentax has bucked the trend and has continued to release new DSLRs as recently as this year.
I’m a data point in that: I bought a DSLRs and a few lenses probably 15 years ago. Over the years I used them less and less to the point that they’re gathering dust now. It isn’t worth the extra bulk when I head out the door, smartphone cameras are good enough.
If you're out there shooting a hundred basketball games a year or you're camping out in a swamp every weekend to get a picture of a bird it matters.
But that was never the majority of people buying "Pro" and "Prosumer" camera gear. For the vast bulk of the market the smartphone camera gets the job done at a fraction of the cost, way less stuff to carry around, and a much better workflow.
Too many hobbyist photographers seem to miss the forest for the trees here, no one cares about how sharp the picture is or how much dynamic range there is if the content of the photo isn't compelling.
But my experience with a Sony is that you need to do at least an auto-correct on Lightroom/whatever before sharing.
But an iPhone/Android is much much less conspicuous, which is a huge advantage for street photography.
The Olympus Tough series may be the last man standing in that category until Apple makes a shatterproof and diveproof iPhone.
But photography with dedicated cameras is alive and well, and won’t go anywhere anytime soon even as these phones get better and better.
The super telephoto market is alive and well, and Wildlife photography in particular is a big contributor to this. When Olympus released their 150-400mm (300-800mm full frame equivalent) super telephoto aimed at wildlife shooters, it was sold out for almost a year.
For me, the new iPhone means I can shoot B-roll footage that looks great, but this will not replace my main camera anytime soon. It’s currently far more viable for high quality video than it is for high quality photographs.
sensor size matters for low-light stuff too. sure, an iPhone can do a pretty good job at taking several pictures over say a 2s. exposure, but there _will_ be artifacts in the shot as there isn't physically enough light to form a legible image regardless of post-processing.
this is just one of many reasons why digital cameras are NOT at the brink of collapse yet.
Watching them take photos on their iPhones at high school sporting events is always painful.
For what it’s worth, I’m a professional sports photographer (side gig obviously), and I don’t get paid for iPhone photos. I’m not disagreeing with you that iPhones cannot replace dedicated cameras, but they are a lot closer to replacing them for weddings than they are for sports.
But yeah, there is only so much advanced computational photography can improve - you can probably do a fairly good job for a slow scene like a wedding, but fast movements are hard to capture with small sensors.
It’s not the sensor size they matters (larger sensors actually have more noise: that’s why phone photos can look as good as they do). Stop and think for a second: where does the extra light captured by a larger sensor come from?
What actually matters is the physical aperture of the lens. What a large sensor forces you to do is use a larger physical aperture to get the same focal ratio (“f-stop”) and field of view. That’s how you get more light. (the larger physical aperture and constant focal ratio implies a longer focal length, so the math works out)
If you do the math, the larger physical aperture more than compensates for the extra noise of the larger sensor (signal to noise of the system scales as sqrt(sensor_dimension)), so camera systems with larger sensors and the same focal ratio have better noise figures. But it’s not directly due to the sensor.
You can compensate for a lot of that effect by simply installing a lens with a larger focal ratio on a small sensor. That’s because it turns out to be easier to have a high focal ratio when the lens is small: the shorter focal length (for a given field of view) requires a smaller radius of curvature, so controlling chromatic aberration and circle of confusion is easier at higher focal ratios.
I also see a lot of outdoor photographers using them to save on weight (and pairing with some type of spotting scope when needed).
Digital cameras are definitely not on the brink of collapse, but I do see phones being used to either augment or replace specific scenarios more and more.