Digital camera shipments worldwide

Between 2002 and 2022, digital camera shipments worldwide and US per capita ice cream consumption both declined, correlating at 0.9636 across twenty-one years. The theory that people eat ice cream only when they can photograph it was proven spectacularly wrong by Instagram, which produced more food photography than any era in history and yet failed to reverse either trend. Both the digital camera and the ice cream cone are casualties of the smartphone era—one killed by the phone's camera, the other by the phone's calorie-counting app. They decline together not because they are related, but because they are both relics of the same pre-smartphone world.

Digital camera shipments continued their long smartphone-driven decline, and 2020 knocked the bottom out further as travel photography evaporated under lockdowns — while the same housebound year drove ice cream consumption upward as freezers filled with comfort food. One line measures what people stopped photographing; the other measures what they couldn't stop eating.

Two products in gentle decline across the same two decades will produce a strong correlation. The camera and the ice cream cone are both artifacts of a pre-smartphone era, declining for entirely different reasons at compatible rates.