And...my camera's died.

[Culmor]

I had no idea that  'Street View 360 photos' works miles from anywhere. I live and learn.
It makes GPS even more worrying.

Why? Isn't knowing your position anywhere a good thing? Isn't it good that you can look around in places you've never been at, and, possibly, will never ever be?

It's not knowing who else knows where you are that I have a problem with. Big Brother will never need to keep track of our movements because we volunteered for it.

[Like Ra]

I only change devices every 4 or more years (looking more like 6 to 8 years now) 

6 in my case. Just bought an amazing Samsung S21FE for my wife as a replacement for her old S7.

the decaying apple and android ecosystem

What do you mean by "decaying"? Looks good so far.

creative apps are mad inoperable by stupid software updates which is a whole other can of worms. 

Updates (and technical progress in general) are inevitable. Saying that, I need to update the forum software - I'm becoming a person, who is afraid of upgrades 😬

In the time since I have seen 6 generations of iPhones come and go and only now are they able to beat my camera at specific focal lengths the designer intended.

Not bad for 6 years. Here's the question - have the compact cameras advanced at the same speed? What do they have to offer 6 years later?

Also while shooting video is nice and all I really don't know anyone who does it often

There are 3 kinds of people: those who do not take pictures, those who take "still photos", and those who only understand live moving stuff. And think of all vloggers, tiktokers and instagrammers.

I have a 2k ultralarge screen and no printer with a high enough dpi

Then you do not need a DSLR 😉

 better fps also has significantly diminished returns. (24 fps can't tell the difference)

Huge difference, actually. It's in the flow smoothness of moving objects.

I just hate the newer phones with a burning passion for their increased costs

6 months ago salmon was 2 times cheaper.

[Like Ra]

A fresh related article: https://www.techradar.com/news/smartphon...-says-sony

Excerpt:

As reported by Nikkei Japan (opens in new tab), the President and CEO of Sony Semiconductor Solutions (SSS), Terushi Shimizu, told a business briefing that "we expect that still images [from smartphones] will exceed the image quality of single-lens reflex cameras within the next few years".

Predictions about the demise of DSLR cameras are nothing new – without saying anything explicitly, Canon and Nikon have both admitted that DSLRs are a legacy format by discontinuing some models, such as the Nikon D3500, without replacing them. But Sony's latest statements highlight that phone cameras still have a long way to go before they hit their tech ceiling.

The biggest advances in recent years have come in multi-frame processing, otherwise known as computational photography. But Sony was understandably keen to stress the role that new hardware will play in lifting phone cameras to new photographic heights.

Its prediction that the sensor sizes in high-end phones will double by 2024 is slightly surprising, given that this is limited by factors like lenses. For example, the Sony Xperia Pro-I became Sony's first phone to have a 1-inch sensor last year, but its lens wasn't able to project a large enough image circle to cover the whole of that sensor, so it could only take 12MP photos rather than the native 20MP resolution.

Perhaps more significant is Sony's new stacked CMOS sensor with two-layer transistor pixels, which effectively exposes each pixel to twice as much light as a standard sensor. This sounds like a hardware advance that computational algorithms could definitely get their teeth stuck into in order to boost dynamic range and noise performance.

But given how good the latest phones are at photography, the most noticeable advances over the next few years are likely to be in video. Sony's presentation highlighted this with references to multi-frame processing and its Edge AI platform, which promises to boost both video performance and support for augmented reality apps.

And an interesting discussion in Dutch: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/197494/sony-...r_17579078