Apple News, Analysis and Podcasts

Last week Sony announced three new back-illuminated stacked CMOS image sensors. In simple terms, Sony announced better camera capability for smartphones and mobile devices, but they're likely to cost the competition much more than Apple, whle lagging behind in overall speed.

Within Apple's iPhone 4S, Apple built the Image Signal Processing (ISP) technology directly into the dual-core Apple A5 processor. The results were truly impressive. The iPhone 4S became the fastest smartphone camera in the industry, capable of launching the camera app and taking a shot in 1.5 seconds. This is faster than any camera in the industry – by a mile – and it can be largely credited to Apple's built-in ISP performance into the iPhone 4S A6 CPU.

If Apple moves forward with Sony's new camera technology for the iPhone 5, don't assume Apple will use Sony's ISP chipset. Using Sony's complete solution would offer Apple a zero advantage over the Android competition, and that's not how Apple approaches markets or the competition.

Apple's likely play is to utilize Sony's advanced optics, while using their own A6 ISP technology. The advantages for Apple to continue down this path are twofold: Cost savings and increased camera speed.

Samsung, HTC, Motorola, or any other hardware vendor do not have the resources or smartphone consolidation to develop an integrated ARM ISP architecture. Android's hardware vendors kick out a new flavor of the week models. Such road maps do not include deeply integrated platform technologies. Rather, this type of Android churn requires quick, cheap off-the-shelf solutions to be thrown together in a slick case at a specific price point (consider this the PC era of smartphones).

Apple runs counter to this non-integrated world, continuing to engineer functions into one custom ARM architecture, driving advantage after advantage into their products. The result is Apple pushes component costs down, while Apple's competition continues to fall behind at an ever increasing rate, or at best, struggles to keep pace at higher price points.

The big benefit for iPhone users due to high-level integration has been (and will be) speed. The iPhone 5 is likely to be equipped with a quad-core A series processor. With the camera's ISP built into this solution, count on the iPhone 5 being able to launch the camera app and take a capture an image around the single second mark, with multiple shots clocking in around half that time.

Sony cannot be pleased with Apple's direction, but having the opportunity to sell well over a 100 million camera-only systems to Apple without the ISP, they'll likely be able to get over their disappointment quickly. Even thought Sony will sell a repeatedly high volume of cameras to Apple, they are much more likely to make higher margins selling into the Android world, where smaller volumes of bundled camera and ISP technology will sell for more and drive more margin. Apple further's Sony's cause by driving the camera pricing down due to volume, a win-win-win for Sony, Apple and the customer, and another loss for Android vendors... and users.

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