[gst]

> but as a digital simulation from 1x and thereby only at 12MP, and so it isn't fundamentally different than my existing phone

My understanding is that it's even worse than that, as the 48MP sensor isn't a regular sensor but a Quad Bayer sensor. While there are some benefits over a 12MP sensor, based on what I've read it seems that the image quality is more comparable to a 12MP sensor than to a 48MP sensor. So cropping to 2x would match a 3MP sensor.

That's currently the main reason why I'm planing to keep my 12 Pro a little bit longer. A 2x lens seems more useful than 3x to me and if the assumption above is correct the 2x quality on the 12 Pro should be better than on the 14 Pro. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a lot of discussions regarding this topic, but there's a YouTube video that comes to a similar conclusion: https://youtu.be/u9sJb_E6h5E?t=588.

[californical]

That’s how MP are always defined, as far as I know.

If you buy a DSLR/Mirrorless camera with a 24MP sensor, there aren’t 24 million R,G,B pixels, but closer to 6 million Red, 12 million Green, and 6 million Blue.

So if that’s how the iPhone is doing their 48MP sensor, then that’s just standard

[gst]

It's different on the 48MP Quad Bayer iPhone sensor:

Instead of something like RGBRGBRGB for the subpixels the subpixels are layed out as RRGGBBRRGGBB (in both dimensions). So while those additional subpixels provide some additional information (either brightness information or a different exposure time for HDR) in terms of color information the sensor would still be pretty much limited to 12MP. Based on the reviews that I read in the past Quad Bayer sensors seem marginally better than comparable regular sensors (48MP Quad Bayer vs 12MP regular), but nowhere near as good as the MP number makes them look like.