Apple Has Always Been at War with Physics — and It's Happening Again

There is a pattern to how Apple makes its most interesting bets. It finds a hard physical constraint, something that looks like an immovable wall, and decides that software is the answer. It happened with the camera. It is happening right now with artificial intelligence.Act I: The Lens ProblemGreat photography has always been, at its core, a physics problem. A camera captures light. The more light it captures, the richer the image, more detail in the shadows, less noise, better colour fidelity. The way you capture more light is through a large lens and a large sensor. This is why professional cameras are large. Size is not a design failure; it is a feature.Then came the smartphone. A device engineered to slip into a pocket carries a sensor roughly the size of a fingernail and a lens that barely protrudes from the chassis. By every classical rule of optics, the images it produces should be terrible. For a while, they were.Apple changed that, not by cheating physics, but by…