Yeah, it's actually way more complicated to work with an iPhone professionally than they make it sound. There's realistically no scenario where a production chooses to shoot on iPhone vs traditional equipment without some sort of sponsorship or help/request from Apple directly.
The scenarios are right in the ad: dust, snow, rain. So to remind people it is IP68 protected. Finally they have embraced more or less true ad and didn’t submerge it into a pool full of water or some sort of “action jumps” from cliffs into ocean somewhere in Hawaii.
No “professional” rig can go that far. Or yeah, it can. But cleaning and repairing will cost more than just buying a new device.
Smartphones (not just iPhone, lots of them) are becoming an ultimate on-the-go filming device for influencers, bloggers (especially travel ones), and other types of creative professionals. With addition of LOG footage it unties hands even more and lets directors choose their desired coloring and white balance.
As for making it work professional, actually it is much cheaper than one might think at first. In the ad they have showed “the endgame setup”: expensive frames, tripods, stabilizers. Nowadays all that stuff can be found for reasonable money, just from different brands.
I remember how I got my Zhiyun stabilizer for iPhone. I almost never use it thanks to built-in stabilization and my laziness but it works better than built-in stabilizer for Osmo Pocket 3, i.e. cinematic-level quality. Making movies on smartphones these days is not a fever dream but reality! You lose some bitrate here, some resolution there but at the end of the day you get watchable “something”.
Back in the days David Lynch (R.I.P.) shot his Inland Empire fully on digital Sony camcorder. Back in 2006 it was unheard of because digital could barely go to 480p, and film looked much better. But Lynch himself liked to say that “film is dinosaur” and digital workflow is much straightforward. Nowadays we have moved to new digital frontier: portable digital with 4K and 8K quality and studio apps for editing at the palm of your hand
