No Stupid Questions

You are not well informed.

Apple has pushed chip tech so much with in house chip designs.

Samsung made folding phones.

Sony supplies cameras for a lot of other brands.

What is with the reluctance of these massive tech companies from using the latest tech in their phones?

Money. They can sell 2018s latest and greatest and uninformed consumers will love it because it has a premium feel and aesthetic and price tag

Apple was never leading edge - their goal is to incorporate when it works well

But you’re both cherry picking and wrong. There’s huge lists of features on every new phone, you’re picking two and deciding that means no innovation. Take a look at the dozens of other features on models from each manufacturer.

SiC batteries that offer 6-8k mAh

You’re complaining about battery chemistry that you believe is innovation, yet current batteries are much larger. Why switch if the technology is not as good yet?

What surprises me is that Samsung isn’t trying to get better hardware to get more market share.

You say this about the company that invented folding screen phones? lol

Apple is pioneering better SOC than anybody else.
But apart from that you are perfectly right, none of the big 3 companies are actually pioneering anything anymore.
Google never was, but leaned on 3rd parties that made some very good Nexus phones, ending with the Huawei made P6.
Now Google is only pioneering making a cheap camera look good heavily retouched with AI.
Now the pioneers are mostly Chinese, while Samsung seems to be falling behind.
Google Pixel was never a front runner, iPhone was traditionally in some areas mostly software, while Samsung was in both software and hardware.
If you want the coolest newest stuff, it seems China is ahead with Xiaomi, Honor, Vivo etc.
The Samsung S25 Ultra is still absolutely a great phone, and I think recognized as the leader to beat, as a well rounded high end package.

Regarding camera I think it's getting damned hard to say which is best, comparison tests with many photo's seems to swing between one phone maker to another, and movie stabilization also vary, even with good camera.

I think Samsung is still clearly ahead of Google and Apple, and the Chinese phones too have strengths and weaknesses. I like Xiaomi a lot in their flagship killer range, but on the top tier, they still have problems with camera stabilization Samsung handles better IMO.

The thing that impresses me most, is how much phones still improve in a single generation.
Maybe not enough to ditch the old one, but definitely enough to make the new model worth considering even when you can get last years model at a pretty hefty discount.

Ask any apple fanboy/fanatic and they will tell you, and they will be correct: Apple rarely leads the charge. They wait and they bide their time, and they watch how a technology is applied and how it works well and how it fails, and then they engineer a solution that they believe to be a smoother user experience to everyone else, and only then do they drop a new tech.

Budget phone makers are trying to stand out and captivate a much smaller market segment, so they have to go big or go home, or else no one will care.

The big guys are so big that they can actually use the market itself as market research, and the big guys are so big they can hold out until they know they have a stable, proven solution.

There was a video by PolyMatter recently on the economics of why Apple cannot yet move the bulk of iPhone manufacturing away from China (available on Nebula and on YouTube). This is perhaps the singular quote which helps answer your question, around the 02:35 mark:

Any country can assemble the iPhone. But Apple doesn't need to make an iPhone, it needs to make 590 every minute, it needs 35,000 per hour, 849,000 per day, 5.9 million per week. That's the challenge facing Apple.

The sheer scale of Apple's manufacturing -- setting aside Samsung's also humongous scale -- means that there might not be a supplier for that quantity of large image sensor or new-tech batteries. Now, Apple could drive that sort of market, and they probably are working on it. But as the video explains, Apple's style is more about finding an edge which they can exclusively hone, up to and including the outright buying out of the supplier. This keeps them ahead of the competition, at least for long enough until it doesn't matter anymore.

In some ways, this might sound like Apple has a touch of Not Invented Here Syndrome, but realistically, consumers expect that Apple is going to do something so outlandish and non-standard that to simply be jumping onto a bandwagon of "already researched" technology would be considered a failure. They are, after all, a market leader, irrespective of what one might think about the product itself.

Historical example of heavy R&D paying dividends until it stopped being relevant: Sony's Trinitron CRT patent expired just around the time that LCDs started showing up in the consumer space. Any competitor could finally start producing CRT TVs with the same qualities as a Sony Trinitron TV, but why would they? The world had moved on, and so had Sony.

In brief, Apple probably can't deliver to the world a new iPhone with massive image sensors right now. But that certainly doesn't mean they wouldn't have their camera team looking into it and working with partners to scale up the manufacturing, such as by increasing yield or being very clever, probably both. Ever since that one time an iPhone prototype was found in a Bay Area bar, their opsec for new prototypes has been top notch. So we'll only know when we know.

Most people don't really care about cool tech, they want a phone that just works

The latest tech isn’t proven to last, might be harder to integrate, might require making design choices that affect the production line, the reliability of the phone, the battery longevity, the supply chain, the operating system, etc. Using the newest tech is a surefire way to make sure you have to do a recall, if you’re the biggest companies on the planet.

A marketing prof once told me that a lot of phone companies, Apple in specific, split their projects up into several releases as a form of planned obsolescence. You're more likely to find this in matured and established brand names because they have the power of goodwill to retain their market share whereas an up and coming company relies on being innovative in the sense of being early adopters of new, sometimes not fully tested, technology.

So for example, you see 3 iPhones being released in the span of 2 years. Those were likely 1 project released in a deliberately staggered manner so that "fanboys" "early movers" "brand loyal" (basically materialistic people who either don't understand or love being manipulated by corps) will pay for 1 project that a team worked on, 3 separate times.

Samsung, being the largest manufacturer of South Korea, has an incentive to keep their production as in-house as possible. Which is why they're reluctant to license technology that they can build themselves, such as cameras.

SiC batteries would also help a lot for thinner phones like foldables (see Find N5 and XFold 5 from Oppo and Vivo compared to Samsung’s Z Fold 7) as well “thin phones” (see Samsung’s S25 Edge and Apple’s rumoured 17 Air)