It is far more than that. It is getting amazing results out of that tiny lens.

Why would you not want the same to be applied to a bigger lens?

What's so great about what the iphone camera does specifically?

Take a RAW image with your phone, take a JPEG of the same scene, and then compare.

If the scene is challenging at all, the JPEG may look fine, but the RAW will look like it came out of a 1990s webcam. No dynamic range. Fuzzy focus. Harsh/blown out highlights and muddy shadows.

There is astounding computational sorcery that smartphones use to make that tiny dot of a lens and sensor produce acceptable photos and videos.

The night mode especially is beyond anything seen in a full-size camera. It can take fairly sharp three-second exposures free-handed.

OK, but it's worth noting that a full-size camera wouldn't need to take a three-second exposure though.

I would like to see a full-size camera with some extra smarts though.

It would, in the middle of the night. The lens on an iPhone is not slow compared to your average lens.

The lens doesn't matter nearly as much as the sensor. A wider aperture on something that collects 1/10 the light isn't going to match a DSLR. Even the slow 3.5 maximum lenses that come with most DSLRs will beat the 1.8 on an iPhone just because the sensor is 10x bigger.

None of that matters to the basic argument that DSLR software is primitive, and could be lots better, as the iPhone shows, by producing impressive results with vastly inferior hardware.

I think you imagine a usage for DSLRs that's vastly different from reality. I could and often do fill an SD card without ever interacting with the software on the camera. This will continue to be the case unless something major changes to flip the balance between what's possible on a tiny battery and what's possible with 6 cores, a wide range of software that can do anything the iPhone does, and an essentially limitless supply of power.

Even the stuff on there already uses too much power. Nikon's SnapBridge uses BLE and still cuts how many photos I get on a charge by 90%. That's without spending any time doing anything in the camera's software. I turned it off so I didn't have to charge the battery after going out for a walk with the camera. And you think I want to do more on that battery?

You do not "interact" with the software on the iPhone either to use this feature.

Until said tiny lenses start demolishing the market is the bigger lenses. Thus the death of the low end and mid end cameras.

It's not really about the lens. Phones already have solid quality lenses. The sensor is what matters. Nothing you can do with the product of a small sensor will beat the worst you get from even an APS-C sensor. ML can make guesses about what the tiny sensor can't capture. A big sensor just captures it.