The Tips app is actually really nice at communicating what changes in each iOS update!

Yep this is right. And it stacks even further: they sell the same model for years.

So, think of a person with a 3-year-old car. That’s pretty new. But maybe that model launched 5 years before that, and it was designed ~3 years before launch! (The average age of cars on the road today is 12.5 years).

So your “new” car was actually designed maybe 11 years ago, aka 2012~2013! That’s like when smartphone cameras were just starting to get very good.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. But unless you’re regularly driving different new cars, it’s easy to lose perspective on how old the hardware actually is.

Exactly! The pixel camera would need basically a Tensor SOC from a Pixel in order to run the post-processing.

Maybe in the next 5 years we’ll start getting cars with onboard computers with that power…

But for now, it’s just a backup camera. There are some good ones out there too. Remember that car models stay on sale for years and years - it’s not like phones where the oldest phone at the Apple store is maybe 2 years.

Also, people buy cars and keep them for a lot longer than phones. So, for example, maybe people are complaining about the camera in their 5-year-old car, a model which launched 5 years before that!