New Rumor: EOS-M announcement in 2021

A new rumor from CanonRumors suggests that the EOS-M will get an announcement this year and that it may be a pivot to a new direction.  We may see the device that had a slew of patents applied for it, which we first discovered here, or it could be that Canon is not quite ready to drop APS-C altogether.

To be honest, the idea that the RF mount APS-C camera body but no APS-C lenses could take on the powerhouse APS-C mirrorless manufacturers such as Fuji and Sony is very strange.  I will call Canon many things, but outside of an M50 Mark II exception, usually "stupid" isn't one of them.  Whether or not you believe that EOS-M was dead, Canon would be handing a market to Sony and Fuji with barely a whimper.   Canon simply does not do things like that.

I firmly believe that EOS-M is in a holding pattern.  The M50 Mark II could show that Canon simply doesn't have the engineering resources to do a better job right now.  I believe that Canon feels it's good enough to sell and doesn't need anything else.   While it can't take on an win on specification battles against Fuji and Sony, it's in the good-enough category that it can at least be competitive, when considering size, weight, and value.  Canon is facing a resource problem with the RF mount as they need to as quickly as possible catch up and surpass the apparent advantages of Sony, flesh out a full lens lineup, and at the same time, keep a wary eye on Panasonic and Nikon. It stands to reason that EOS-M would be left behind while the RF system consumes all of Canon's resources.

Will the EOS-M die? Yes, sooner or later it will.  Sooner or later Canon will have full-frame lenses, and camera bodies down to a low price comparable with APS-C.  When you combine that with smartphones rising in capabilities; you have a world that will not need APS-C anymore.  However, that may not be for quite a while.