When my son was born many, many years ago, I went out and bought my first DSLR and video camera that weighed 15 pounds. Like most parents, it is important to photograph your children and capture them at many stages of their lives.

Until then, I only carried a small, cheap mainstream digital camera to use when I traveled. But the kid forced me, so I upgraded to my first DSLR.

But when camera phones came along, I mostly put aside my DSLR and decided to use the camera I had on my smartphone because it was always with me and allowed me to take any photo I needed.

However, I also longed for the power of a DSLR in a smartphone, and only recently have smartphone cameras become more DSLR-like. They now provide improved imaging, more innovative controls and new computer software that allows people to take great photos without carrying a bulky and heavy DSLR in most cases.

At this week’s unveiling of the new iPhone 15 Pro, Apple made it clear that this new iPhone has the best camera phone they’ve ever made, without saying that its features match many of today’s DSLR cameras.

First, Apple introduced its new A17 Pro CPU, which is twice as fast as the A15 chip in the iPhone 14 Pro. The A17 Pro chip uses a 3nm process and has 19 billion transistors. It has a new CPU core with 4 high-performance cores, a 16-core neural engine and processes 35 trillion operations per second.

Apple’s new 6-core GPU enables higher-resolution images via a 48-megapixel camera with 7 lenses. This processing power produces the best photos and videos using computer photography of any smartphone on the market today. The new GPU can run complex applications, including camera workloads. For example, much of the computational photography on the device uses the GPU. It helps in night and portrait mode. All in all, the GPU is the most significant Apple GPU redesign ever.

I’ve seen some comparisons between other high-end smartphones with high-resolution cameras, and it’s clear that Apple’s images are sharper, with more accurate lighting features and more excellent color saturation. The new photos I saw were the closest to what one would see of a person or landscape because they were taken in real time.

Apple also introduced a dual-camera spatial recording feature that allows a person to capture what they see in 3D. This feature is significant for two reasons. First, it’s the first spatial imaging camera in a smartphone. However, its real impact will be when those images are displayed on Apple’s new Vision Pro headphones, which are coming to market early next year.

This new capability is a significant move on Apple’s part. As Apple showed during the Vision Pro debut in June 2023, it has multiple spatial cameras on the headset itself. This would allow the person using the headset to record what they see in real time and play it back on demand. This means that spatial video of your child’s birthday party could be recorded and played back in the future, and it would seem like you were seeing it as it happened years earlier.

But with the iPhone 15 Pro now able to capture spatial images and video, Apple is building a range of features that can be used on its Vision Pro when it comes out next year. It’s an important move and could increase demand for the Vision Pro 2024.

While these more powerful cameras and the processors behind them are set to challenge any smartphone camera system today, these chips enable another new application for the iPhone 15 Pro.

The new GPU enables the delivery of ray tracing, a key technology for realistic mobile video games.

This new GPU will now deliver console games that can be run on the new iPhone 15 Pro. Apple has said that console games like Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed will soon be available for use on the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple also said that other console game makers will soon support this level of realistic console gaming on this new iPhone.

While DSLRs won’t go away and will continue to be tools, especially for professional photographers, mainstream consumers will be delighted by the new DSLR-like features in the new iPhone 15 Pro.

While this level of powerful new images and videos won’t be for everyone, if the photos you take today are meant to deliver high-quality images and videos that can stand the test of time, the new iPhone 15 Pro has to be a serious option when it ships on September 22, 2023.