TechTakes

Not a sneer, but a link for Baldur Bjarnason for the week:

Why Halide’s Process Zero is an important tool for iPhone photography enthusiasts

Recommend checking it out for his high praise of the AI-free iPhone camera app, but to make it relevant to this community, I'll pull out the opening section:

Knowing how much work Lux Optics puts into their apps, Halide and Kino, I don’t think their recent Process Zero was implemented as a reaction to the ongoing backlash against “AI”. After all, now that people are increasingly negative about generative models, releasing a new photography mode that bypasses “AI” processing feels like a clever marketing stunt.

Personally, I suspect it was at least partially done for marketing purposes - beyond the wide open "AI-free" market niche, the ability to disable Apple's built-in image processing gives users plenty of control over how they can develop photos.