Yesterday, while I was exploring what might lie beyond an agentic interface—from a simple text box to richer artifacts like messages, documents, and spreadsheets—I fell down a rabbit hole. I ended up reading Apple’s white paper on ProRes RAW. As Apple describes it, ProRes RAW stores the sensor’s per‑photosite Bayer samples (not a baked RGB image), so demosaicing and processing are deferred. Translation: future, better demosaicing or denoise algorithms can be applied to the same file for a clearer result.
Most people, including me, will probably never use that. It needs external gear, devours storage, and feels… impractical. So why make it? Because that’s how technology moves: imperfect when it arrives, inevitable when it matures. What feels niche today often becomes ordinary tomorrow. Just like photos.
I watched an interview where someone asked Tim Cook, with the iPhone’s camera getting more powerful every year, what Apple is ultimately trying to achieve. He didn’t say, “We’re making the best movie camera ever.” Instead, he said, “We want to democratize photography, like we’ve democratized other things.” That line stuck with me. It’s not really about Apple. Or even phones. It’s about photography itself becoming something anyone can reach for.
It’s 2025, and we take it for granted that we can pull out a phone—three or four lenses tucked inside—tap once, and pin reality into a photo. Manufacturers show off tiny leaps in sharpness and dynamic range. We roll our eyes and ask, Is this the end of progress? Are we just competing over small differences now? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the better one is: What has a century of camera progress actually given us?
A hundred years ago, only a privileged few could afford a photograph. For decades, taking pictures demanded skill, patience, and sometimes luck—often you didn’t even know if the shot worked until much later. Even in 2010, when the iPhone 4 came out, few of us imagined phones would become this good at image processing.
And now there’s iOS 26’s spatial photo feature—turning flat images into something with perspective, something you can almost step into. I’ve been in design engineering for a while, but most days I still live on a 2D plane: editing photos and videos, coding clean, simple interfaces, printing on flat paper. Then I drop one of my film shots into the spatial photo function, and suddenly I feel like I’m there again. Not perfectly. Just close enough to tug at the part of me that remembers. Is that the future of photography? Or are we already living it?
Kids born today will have tens of thousands of photos of themselves before they can even walk. Whole childhoods, cataloged in thumbnails. I was born in 2003. For people my age, photos are precious because there aren’t that many. You can almost count them. Sometimes I wish I could see more of little‑me, but there just aren’t more pictures to find. That’s when it hits me: photography didn’t become universal just because cameras got better. It happened because everyone got a camera. Because our phones became the most human technology we carry.
Tech moves fast—new phones, new AIs, new everything—like there’s always something else to try. It’s exciting, until it’s exhausting. Some days, I just want to stop and pay attention to what’s already here. I’m on a flight right now, scrolling through my camera roll. I paused on a photo I took a few days ago when I visited Interaction. Nothing special at first glance. And yet… I wouldn’t have it without my phone.
It didn’t mean much when I pressed the shutter. But time gave it meaning.
Humans were granted the ability to freeze time—a power we once thought only God possessed. Maybe our job isn’t to capture more, but to cherish what we’ve already caught.