convenience

 It's all about convenience, and related to time.

We can take photos and videos with inconvenient setups, giving us more control and quality overall, at the cost of hassle.

On the other hand we can sacrifice some of quality for convenience and simply use smartphone.

Example would be filming with pro camera like GH5 or G9 on a gimbal, with external sound recorder or even external recorder to get 10bit output. This however brings two problems: post-processing and inconvenience, both of which relate back to time (I don't have time to do photo post-processing, let alone video - however exciting and rewarding that might be, it requires a lot of time in addition to equipment). This brings us to a point where equipment used should give results that are ready straight out of camera.

In contrast to that, you can juts take your phone and record, and instantly share videos and photos.

Also, considering that most of the recipients of our work will consume it on the phone, there's almost no point in going for higher quality. Of course better phone will produce better imagery, however, there's little point in going for high-end full-frame setup to eventually sharing this via smartphone with small screen.

So why do people still buy new cameras despite inconvenience? 

Some of us still prefer to have better quality material. Also, having larger working area allows for more cropping without loosing much quality. I have used that extensively with my shots from Ricoh GR2 and I appreciated having larger file to work on. This would be impossible when working on a file from smartphone.

Another aspect of convenience is weight: Ricoh is 260g, Fujifilm X100V is 480g, Sony a6000 with rig and lens is over 800g. 

Next, ability to change lenses: this is cool, however, it's a hassle. Quite often there is no time to switch lens when the action happens. Imposing lens limitation on ourselves might help us take better shots.

All of those possibilities are nice when we have time to take shots, think about it, plan, etc. However, sometimes we don't have that luxury and all those things become distractions.

At the end there are also specialised tools like Sigma SD Quattro - there's no other camera like it, but it's highly specialized. 

Going back to vide: is Sony ZV-1 better than iPhone? Is it worth it?