You seem to be under the impression the only thing people care about with "big cameras" is image quality. Yes, it would be great if I could do everything with an iPhone, but until it has the same ecosystem of add-ons and tools, it just isn't going to work. I've only mentioned image quality because that was the focus of the thread, but that isn't everything.

I've seen some of the absurd lengths people go attaching things to their iPhones just to reach parity with an entry-level DSLR and a few attachments that cost less than the iPhone rig with the cost of the camera included. I looked into the lenses on the 12. The longest is a 35mm equivalent of 85mm. I would need a grip add-on and a lens clip with no image stabilization just to approach the stability and reach of my 70-300mm lens on an APS-C sensor. That's just for wildlife photography, and not even the longest lens. Most serious wildlife photographers go for a full frame and 600+mm primes. And that's just one use case served by the photography platform that "big cameras" are.

You don't know what you don't know and it shows.

You seem to be thinking that I am arguing that you should use an iPhone instead of a DSLR. Not sure where you are getting this idea from.

The argument is that DSLR software is lagging far behind what an iPhone can do. The point is that DSLR software needs to improve, not that you should use an iPhone.

Again: it doesn't matter how much the on-board software improves. It will always lag behind desktop software that's not power constrained. I have the screen on maybe 30 seconds for every 200 photos for checking exposure and using the very well-designed settings screen. Why would I want to use battery draining software that will never match what I can do once I offload photos to a real computer?

Because, again, the kinds of feature I talk about can not be done in software on your desktop. They need to run in realtime on the camera, interacting with its image sensor and other sensors.

Worth 1k words: Electronic video stabilization on Foxconn/Sharp Aquos R6 smartphone[1]

1: https://twitter.com/sm_hn/status/1394210048318971908