Two people cannot disagree on whether one camera can show detail that another camera cannot show.
two people can argue whether or not that matters, we might as well call every lossy compression format ever useless because it degrades the quality of the final video significantly.
Hassle? The technical details of the cameras are completely transparent to the user. One one camera when you pinch to zoom it gets blurry. On the other it stays clear.
im sure they have documentation on automatic camera switching, and other documentation on all the other "features" it involves. God forbid you use a third party app to interact with your camera. I'm buying a phone because of the computer, not because of the cameras, i just don't need them, and yet now its YET another feature i have to contend with. One might say i should just ignore them, but alas i am stuck here, spending money on them, i am damn well getting the value out of my purchase, regardless of how useless it is.
This entire discussion is about phones!
yeah, doesn't limit it to phones though. you provided an example as to why generic hardware would be beneficial for context. I expanded upon it, explaining why i didnt think it was a very good reason. My phone is 7 years old, and quite literally, cost nothing.
“The best camera you have is the one you have with you.”
I.E. using the camera that my phone has, when i need it, and just living with the fact that it's not the best quality in the world. 3 more cameras might improve my photo slightly. I don't really care though. Modern flagship phones will take "4k" photos. I really don't understand why you would need much more. You can do a 2x digital zoom and still retain reasonable quality, assuming the original isn't making up pixels. Which is very well might be.
Having photos of everything is cool and all, kids i will excuse from this due to societal reasons. But most things in life, that you can take a picture of, you probably shouldn't. Sure it's cool when a hawk lands in your yard, or you see a new bird that you haven't before. You could pull out your phone, and take a picture or a video, or you could also just sit there, and watch it.
It's always bothered me when people stop the entire group, to take a forced group photo because "look we're having fun" when we could be having fun instead. It's a buzzkill frankly. If i'm with my friends or family i want to interact with them and talk with them, because i like them. I don't want to take pictures with them. Spontaneous photos i have less of a problem with, especially if its in the moment. They tell a much better story anyway, which is what mediocre phone cameras excel at.
I feel like since the invention of phone cameras, particularly good ones, people have just been photographing EVERYTHING, which does less good than if they just didn't. Scroll through an average family photo roll, and see how many of those photos are actually worth telling a story over. Most of them have no story, because they were forced. Some of them have "an" story, because they're tangentially related. And then a few are actually interesting.
I really just don't think you need that many cameras. Wanna put two on there? Sure, do your box standard "phone camera" and then put a zoom camera. You need nothing more. Anything else is just a waste of time. If you REALLY insist on having more than 2, do a fish eye. By that point you're hitting diminishing returns though. Also a point of contention for me, why does the base model iphone 15 have 2 (might be 3 i have no clue) cameras, but then also have usb 2.0? This isn't a cheap phone. It should just have usb 3.0.
expanding on the CPU GPU analogy you used prior, this is like owning a mini computer in the 70's 80's all of them were bespoke, they all did for all intents and purposes, basically the same thing. Some of them specialized slightly more than others (most specialization was done with third party hardware though) You just kinda pick one, and then use it. It's fine. Even though technically having multiple different ones would be ideal, nobody did that, unless they wanted to do more computing. Though in this case it's kind of hard to "use more than one camera at a time" In fact it's pretty heavily limited, i think on apple hardware, there is one app, that kind of lets you do it. That's it.