Canon R1 has been announced

[neuroanatomist]

AF is basically the same hardware wise. Just more firmware stuff, but it's minor incremental stuff.

It seems you don't understand how the cross-type AF works. They use alternating row pairs of dual pixels in orthogonal orientations. It's not a firmware change, it requires the splitting of the DPAF photosites to differ from row to row on the sensor, meaning a new architecture was required for the entire sensor, since cross-type AF is available across the full FoV.

The R5 II is much closer to what an R1 should actually be. If they tossed that camera in an R1 form factor with all that proccessing power and features. That would be the buissness and a real competitor Nikon and Sony. An all around flagship for every situation and every photographer with no compromises.

I wonder why Canon didn't do as you suggest, and make the R1 with a higher MP sensor?

I suspect it's because the company that has led the camera market for over two decades, through a 90% contraction in the market and a transition from DSLR to mirrorless while maintaining dominance of that market the entire time, knows a lot more about making and selling cameras than any of us.

Personally, I thought they were making a mistake in discontinuing the EOS M line. It was the most popular camera line for a while, at one point 17% of all cameras sold in the world were M bodies. Canon killed it off anyway. They kept their near-50% market share, and last year they held over 40% of the mirrorless market share (a very solid lead over Sony at 32% and Nikon at 13%) despite killing off the M line. So much for my opinion about what Canon should or should not do.

The bottom line is that they have an excellent track record of producing cameras their customers will buy. It is very unlikely that the R1 will be an exception to that, the whining and second-guessing occurring on the internet has occurred with most new Canon releases. If any of that was actually relevant or impactful, Canon's sales would have slipped. They haven't.

[Fast Glass]

I know exactly how the AF works, I can read literature too. It is a minor incremental improvement fitting a R3 II. This is not game changing or the quad pixel AF kind of improvement.

You may be anti resolution because you look at it with a very narrow set of circumstances and so does Canon. But it is exceedingly useful not just for enlargement, but gives noise reduction software an easier time to weed out detail vs noise, it gives photographers extra room to crop and maintain good resolution, it gives other photographers the detail for huge enlargement. Myself I have a 42" wide printer, the 50mp images have a clear advantage in prints this size. It is YOUR opinion relatively high resolution isn't all that useful. But that's your opinion, not facts. The fact is it makes a big difference for pro's, the very target audience of the R1. The people who print big, people who sell images, people who use top of the line glass with the best techniques and spend the time and effort to get world class images. Of all the photographer, pro's are the ones who will benefit the most and use high resolution.

But, it's the whole package deal, this is an R3 II. It is priced accordingly and I'm not mad it exists. But calling it a R1, that just so far away from what it is. It's really an R3 II, and a minor incremental upgrade at that.

A real R1 is best in class in everything, that's what it was promised as. And it's just far away from that.

In my mind, they have still yet to create a camera that can truly differentiate itself from the R3 and worthy of the R1 name.