I’ve seen multiple posts that they can’t stand the pictures that the 14 Pro takes because it’s overly processed and that even the 11 Pro is leagues better in terms of picture quality. Is this actually the case? What do you guys think?

About two years ago I was ready to finally upgrade my old iPhone and the latest at the time was the 15. I bought the 15 Pro expecting to use it for good photography, and couldn’t help but notice that the pictures seemed worse than on my girlfriend‘s 11 Pro. One day we took a picture side-by-side and sure enough, the 11 Pro blew the 15 Pro out of the water in clarity, sharpness, etc. So I downgraded to a normal 15 as I didn’t care about the camera that much anymore and that was that. Well, a few days ago we went into the Apple Store to upgrade her 11 Pro to a 16 Pro, hoping they fixed it. Not even close. I couldn’t stand it and I snapped two side-by-sides to show the staff. Please have a look at the pic. Left is obviously the 16 Pro, right our “outdated” 11 Pro. One of the staff members tried to convince me that it had to do with lens switching but I explained to him that at the same FOV there shouldn’t be such a loss in quality and we basically went back-and-forth at different zoom levels, and the 16 Pro simply could not keep up (it did of course have more zoom, but we’re talking about comparing apples to apples FOV-wise.)

I am just baffled and have been now for years. Apple, the golden child of imaging and digital graphics, lost the photography throne to Samsung and others long ago. (When we want really good photography we use our Galaxy S20 Note Ultra.) Can anybody explain this to me? I had the Apple staff go over certain settings with me, hoping maybe there was something that could improve things, and nothing worked, even forcing 48MP. How/why have they let this happen? How does their 5 year old model beat everything coming out today? WTF??!