[thg]

> The article seems to praise the iPhone a lot for some reason

It's an Apple news and rumours site, so not really unbiased.

> but to my eyes all its images immediately pop out as worse, except for the case where high depth of field is desired

Can only do so much with limited glass and computational photography. Dedicated cameras are always going to win in the image quality department, simply by virtue of having much larger photo diodes to capture more light with.

Smartphones will also never be able to match the bokeh, as the shorter the physical focal length, the more depth of field you have. Can't beat the laws of physics. They're great for flat-looking everything-in-focus photos, though. Can't replicate that with a DSLR / DLSM, unless it's an (almost) static composition and you do focus stacking in post