To develop their new T-series camera, Leica teamed up with the design team at Audi, and boy is it a beaut. Each camera body is milled from a single block of aluminum and hand-polished for 45 minutes—no seriously, you can watch the entire process—resulting in the most Apple-like camera I've ever seen.

Almost all of the Leica T's functions are controlled via its smartphone-like touchscreen interface, which you can see in action by watching Steve Huff's video review (starting around the 7:30 mark). The only physical controls to be found are a pair of thumb dials, a shutter button/power toggle, and a video-recording button.

At $1,850 for the body—and with lenses selling for $1,800 (zoom) and $1,900 (prime)—it's not the cheapest camera system around. Still, it's cheaper than the last-generation Leica M system, which is $6.6K for the body alone. This is about as affordable as Leica equipment gets.

(Of course, the T can easily become just as expensive once you start buying all of its available add-ons and accessories—but that's your choice.)

A free companion app for iOS (available now) will allow you to control these functions:

• Camera live-view
• Control capture settings
• Trigger the camera
• Start/stop video recording
• View, download and share images from the camera
• Delete images

The Leica T is expected to be available for purchase on May 26th, 2014.