There is no doubt that smartphones will continue to improve in photo and video capability and increasingly satisfy the needs of consumers and some professional requirements. However, this article caught my attention:

http://www.macworld.com/article/3027155/apple-phone/report-iphone-7-will-sport-dslr-quality-camera-3d-mapping-3x-optical-zoom.html

Firstly, I'd like to see a photographer provide an assessment rather than a tech analyst, and secondly, define "DSLR quality" in this context!

Smartphones will never have the capability to produce quality pictures that cameras have. They're OK if no one wants to print large pictures. You can't take pictures of animals or other things far away with a smartphone. You can't get close ups of flowers, insects, etc. with a smartphone. Smartphone are for people who want to send pics right away, not for serious photographers. However, there are DSLRs that have Wi-Fi and make it possible to send photos soon after they've been taken. To me, this seems to be the best of both worlds. You can send a pic right away, but you still have the quality that's needed for large prints.

Couldn't disagree more.

RAW, in and of itself, is not "better". Neither is JPEG.

They are just different formats that users might choose between, to best meet their particular purposes for any particular situation.

If I need rapid turn-around time, short deadlines, I'll shoot JPEG or RAW+JPEG in order to have the JPEGs immediately available. In this case, JPEG is "better".

But most of the time I shoot RAW because, shooting fast and furiously under highly variable conditions, it's sometimes necessary to make adjustments later in post-processing. In this case RAW is "better".

Sure, I'd rather "get it right" in-camera... that would be ideal. But it's simply not always possible... And when that's is the case I want the RAW files to work with, for their greater latitude and tolerances.

Someone else, shooting other things differently from me, might be perfectly happy with JPEG and never need RAW. Or, vice versa.

I agree, though... One can only answer this question themselves. And it's pretty easy to do so. Just set your camera to RAW + JPEG for a while so that you get both and can compare. Post-process your RAW files and see if you can produce better end results doing that, compared to the JPEGs straight out of your camera. I bet much of the time you'll find the JPEGs perfectly adequate. But there also will be times when things don't go quite as planned or for other reasons you can do a better job tweaking things from a RAW file.

And it's not just that the extra latitude of RAW is useful to correct "mistakes". For example, I shoot a lot of action/sports. With moving subjects, there's simply no way to use "HDR" type techniques to deal with excessive dynamic range in scenes... such as strong back-lighting. When my original file is a RAW, I have a lot more latitude to adjust exposure and tweak white balance, to double-process an image (or triple-process, etc.)

This is similar to taking a series of bracketed shots and then later combining the "correctly exposed" portions from each into a single image, to produce something greater than the camera can do on it's own or any filter can possibly deal with. Except that since my subjects are moving, there's no way to actually bracket the shots with multi[le exposures in-camera.

So instead, in effect I "bracket" my RAW conversions in post-processing. This wouldn't be nearly as possible if I were instead working from an 8 bit JPEG image.... The quality of the results is much better working with 16 bit RAW and TIFF. In other words, I'd rather do my editing using a palette of 281 [i]trillion[/i] colors, than with a mere 16 million! That makes for noticeably better quality, even when my final image will be 8 bit file (since that's what's needed for online display or most printing processes).

That sounds a bit silly, I know... 281 trillion colors. But if you don't understand the difference between working with 8 bit versus 16 bit, here's a fairly brief explanation: http://www.photoshopessentials.com/essentials/16-bit/