I really don't understand why Canon didn't continue with high and low resolution 1 series cameras. I can't imagine wildlife shoots other than those in a blind or in a nature reserve, not cropping. It just seemed wrong to not offer 1 series features in a higher resolution body but the R5 is getting closer - no fancy joystick though.
Jack
The day the X came out 8.09 years ago, it was hot here. Reached 95 degrees in the early afternoon, causing some sweaty hours refreshing the status page on the web sales page after we'd been able to pre-order earlier in the morning. That part sounds familiar here in 2020.
The messaging materials were quite different. The ones Canon put out that morning were the sort not uncommon among Asian electronics conglomerates of the day. They were aspirational and deliberately vague. In the mid-90s through to about 5 years ago, large Asian firms tended to have US ad agencies develop branding campaigns concentrating on a general, universal concept. To flesh out that concept into tactical details, showing how a product allowed a user to exploit that concept would be to ruin the art of it. The belief was that to explicitly explain the concept would be to destroy its power, as an artist would ruin the value of an oil by narrating each stroke. You add on top of that a very serious cultural translation incompatibility between the electronics client and the agency, and, well, you got some pretty odd branding stuff. There were whole websites dedicated to this. Today we have "See Impossible," which, well, yeah. What you could take away from the campaigns of the day was generally a gist of where the company believed it was heading and why.
Canon's general branding message, starting about 13 months before the launch was "Imagin8ion." Under that theme, the product message on that day with the 1DX was that it was the crossover product. In a world where 18 megapickles was considered more than adequate, this was credible. You may recall that this was right when the 5D3 was launched, the successor to the break-out video rig the 5D2. Canon appeared to be attempting to create an uber camera that it could produce at efficient scale and sell as the top dog to all the niche markets. From a manufacturer's incremental cost perspective, this made a lot of sense; and is the primary answer to Jack's question above.
But this world that Canon partly predicted and partly conceived - the one where 18 MP was adequate for all things; and where a video rig would be used for landscape shots - was never stable. It would have been more stable had the pesky competition not gone and released a number of bodies that made clear we were missing some things others were being given: resolution, dynamic range, video features, and even, eventually, frame speed. But from that hot day in June onward, there doesn't appear to have been an effort among the product managers of the 1 series to be everything to all in its later revisions. Canon evidently did believe that 18 MP was adequate for all markets. They were mistaken, we now know, but they appear to have genuinely believed it.
Products starting design processes that summer wouldn't come out until 2016. The releases in 2016 show us what Canon believed at the moment they were launching the 1DX, and this included the 1DX II, which really doubled-down on the low resolution. It did not attempt to become more useful for landscape or other genres requiring more resolution. The 5D IV was released in that year's late August, and exploded the X concept utterly. It showed that the 5DsR wasn't a fluke. Canon's very perception of the camera world had shifted, and we learned this had happened without us knowing four years earlier, right when the marketing materials were pushing the crossover concept.
This should have been good news for Jack. Canon was making cameras for markets again, rather than just levels of cameras for everyone. But then - and now - there is stubborn confusion among pros and would-be pros about the brand status of the 1 series. Is it the best? Is it the best for a particular purpose? Canon has answered this as clearly as Canon gives answers: The 1 series is the best for the purpose of taking low resolution shots - which is most important for PJs, sports togs, and non-reach-limited wildlife shooters - and getting those images off the camera quickly. The coming R5 may be better by a significant margin for other purposes, and maybe even some of the ones listed above. It is not in the nature of a large Japanese electronics firm to tell you this explicitly. That would destroy the artistic effect of its assembled collection of cameras. Your high resolution best camera exists, and it isn't and won't be in a 1 body. The "cladding" that beefs up the 1 series body to look like a man's man's camera may be applied to a higher-end R body in the future, but it will likely be to suit the man's man market, not the landscape/product photography pro market.
Today is 69 degrees and sunny in a wet woods here in Vermont. I'm going to take my two young kids out there right after I finish typing this and try to "see impossible" or "imagin8" or something. With an EOS R on an adapter on a 1.4x teleconverter on a 600 f/4 II. An insanely inappropriate combination for now, awaiting the release of the R5 in just 6 days.