Conversation

Phenomena like selfies are wrong level of explanation. They are just the most common epiphenomena. There’s also stuff like photos of book pages, parking space numbers, receipts… Photography basically trended towards “too cheap to meter” so Cambrian explosion of usage variety…
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Sometime btw 2013-1016 I remember vividly bc it took me (and millions of others) longer than expected to upgrade from iPhone 4/5 to iPhone 7/8/X Why upgrade if “only” improvements were marginally better camera and more storage? Longer battery and 4/5G speed more important IMHO
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most legible improvement to the average consumer? there is an anecdote in hbr article “how apple is organized for innovation” where they describe introducing portrait mode as a major bet to sell more devices. and it worked.
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Phones are social devices. In a viral era of social media, mobile cameras were a bottleneck. Camera Upgrades drove device update demand, and Emoji drove software update demand.
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Apple always shares camera stats which are usually 1 generation behind Android versions. So I don’t know if camera tech salience actually is a meaningful consumer behavior driving differentiator.
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The most profitable mobile apps (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Tinder, Snap, etc.) are largely built around sharing outputs of mobile cameras. Our main activity with our phones is consuming images, so it's no surprise that the camera is the main driver of purchasing behavior.
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