The world has changed a lot since 1966 when I dug my Dad’s Brownie Hawkeye out of the closet, read the crinkly manual in the box and rode my bike down to Gemmel’s Pharmacy to spend my allowance on a roll of B&W 620 film. I graduated to a WWII era Leica C3 (Dad’s) after a couple of years then bought my first SLR at 15. I learned to use a darkroom in high school and read all the photo magazines available to keep track of all the new stuff. I never owned a compact camera other than an instamatic or two. After I went digital in 2002 and film was no longer a budget item, I started carrying a compact digital camera for daily use. Around 2010, my phone upgrades started featuring a camera that took photos in good light that were great for email and looked pretty good posted to the web. I also started to see more people using their phones to take photos while we were travelling. Having a phone myself, I silently mocked them for their lack of dedication to image quality even though I realized that their pictures were destined for web and email viewing and that they were going to be perfectly happy with the results. I continued shooting with an advanced pocket camera until mid-2014 when I picked up a Lumia 929 Windows phone with a rather remarkable 20MP camera. That was the last year I upgraded my compact camera and the last year of my silent mocking of phone shooters (iPad shooters were and still are fair game). That was when I started noticing compact P&S cameras were becoming less common in the wild. On trips, I still saw a fair number of DSLRs and an increasing number of Mirrorless cameras, but pocket cameras were becoming rare and the ones I saw tended to be older models. Occasionally I would see and advanced bridge camera, one of the slick Lumix compacts or the Sony RX100 series, but by 2018 or so, it was a dwindling number of ILCs (interchangeable Lens Camera) and an increasing number of phones. Upon returning to travel after the pandemic started to lift, I can’t recall seeing more than a couple people with compacts and fewer ILCs that before. The surviving compact camera models are pretty remarkable and trump the image quality of a typical smartphone for about $300 – $400. Once the top-end phones get past the $600 mark, they start pulling away in image quality with the exception of zoom range. Once you get to about $800 or $900 (Pixel 6 Pro) or above (iPhone 13, Samsung S22), multiple cameras with expanded optical zoom ranges and near magical image processing match the capabilities of all but a few compacts (that also cost over $1000). Phones are harder to hold than a compact, but the compacts are notoriously bad at browsing the internet, map navigation and phone calls.
As illustrated, discreet camera sales down 87% from 2010 to 2019 and taking a further hit during the Covid era, the problem isn’t supply. Manufacturers have reduced forecasts every year since about 2008 when the first significant smartphones with cameras came out. You are right that most “picture takers” just want a picture. Smartphones did that and allowed sharing. This decimated the compact camera market almost overnight. The chart shows that the more sophisticated interchangeable lens cameras fared better since the image quality of even the best early smartphones was significantly less that DSLRs of the same era. Late in the last decade, sensor technology boosted the capability of the advanced cameras and smartphones to incredible levels. At a cost. People who needed or appreciated the quality afforded by interchangeable lens cameras shouldered the cost. The improved sensor and processor tech wasn’t cheap and the cost of competing with vastly improved smartphones became prohibitive for compact camera makers. Sales forecasts and actual sales of fixed lens compacts sank like a stone, not because there weren’t enough cameras, but because there wasn’t demand. In 2019 15.2m cameras were sold. In the same year, 1.5b smartphones were sold and people took pictures with them. Lots and lots of them. Forecasts show that cameras are making a bit of a comeback but most recovery will be in interchangeable lens units as people introduced to photography and videography on their phones are inspired to up their game. There will be compact P&S cameras for a long time and even the basic are good and will get better. Tech works that way, The difference from 15 years ago is that interchangeable lens cameras are much more expensive since only the higher end of the species is expanding and compacts vs. smartphones are now a matter of preference rather than a desire for better quality.
Things have changed and change will continue, but those changes make it a great time to be a photographer.