This is a comparison of a $349 camera released January of 2011 and a $1,000 camera released September of 2017. That’s 6.5 years of engineering and 2.8x the price. A more appropriate comparison would be a $1,000 camera from even 2008 and I doubt the iPhone would match its quality. I fired up photos and looked at 2009. Looks like I was primarily shooting with a Canon Powershot G9 which was $600 and the photos look very similar to what I’m shooting today with my iPhone 8 Plus minus the software effects like filters and portrait mode.
Pro-iPhone ‘photographers’ like to paint the picture of how amazing the iPhone is at pictures but I still don’t see it. The iPhone takes photos of beer bottles for me and everything else I use a real camera.