It’s not like they issue the absolute limit of the state of the art in each phone, and new scientific breakthroughs drive what’s in the next phone.

There are occasional breakthroughs in technology but they don’t make it into phones until they become cheap and reliable.

So this year manufacturing processes are really scaled up on Perfect Camera iteration 1005. There are also devices out there that already have iteration 1008 but they are niche and expensive and buggy.

In two years, 1008 will be more reliable and manufacturing will be scaled up for it. They will introduce it into a phone in 2026 and you will roll your eyes and say “gee where did they pull that from!”

But it’s a continuous ramp of improvement: mostly driven by how successfully and how quickly small improvements move from lab experiment to full scale manufacturing.