Are they? These are some shots from a presentation video about iPads with one sentence at the end saying it was shot with iPhones. They never said anything about it in the video.
If they shot it with RED and a similar lens for those shots and said "shot with RED camera" would that be considered faking it?
I think you're hiding the ball with these questions. Nobody expects something shot with a RED, with whatever lens, to look bad. They're some of the best cameras ever made.
Phones, on the other hand, have long not been considered equal to dedicated camera hardware. Apple would like to change that perception, so they hitch the dedicated fancy hardware to their phone and say "look how good our phone is," without properly calling attention to the fact that it doesn't look the same without the fancy hardware they are suggesting you shouldn't need to use.
Further, the average person would see "shot on iPhone" and think "they held up an iPhone and recorded this," not "they hooked the iPhone up to professional-grade equipment and recorded this."
The language is deliberately misleading, and the efforts to insist that it somehow isn't just because it is technically true are deeply unconvincing.
You miss the point with the RED: it's normal with any camera to use a different lens to achieve certain shots, and nobody calls it fake.
They did not say "look how good our phone is" for those shots or suggest they were made just by holding the phone up. That's an absurd injection. It's weird to call something deliberately misleading when you're the one saying it.
It's like saying they're not allowed to use a tripod, a dolly, any lights, do any color grading, etc. without it being called fake. It's literally just how you do photography.
