iPhone 14 Pro Review: This Will Be Copied!
foreign [Music] [Music] 14 pro so this might be a little bit inside baseball but typically when you're testing a new product an unreleased product from Apple they tell you to keep the testing a secret don't let anyone know you have it don't display it publicly don't show it to anyone that would be breaking the NDA and that's still true about this new iPhone 14 pro but I'll tell you what I was able to walk around take pictures text people pay for things with Apple pay and nobody even blinked an eye because it looks exactly the same as the iPhone 13 Pro this is still of course a new phone though for a new year and so really there are three major things that are new with the 14 pro those being the internals the display and the cameras and so I'm going to sort of chapter those things off to go over each of them but of course also worth mentioning is this new MKBHD Edition Chevron hoodie finally finally available in the MKBHD store mkbhd.com it's very comfortable but also hoodie season [Music] yeah on and on so there's not a whole lot of new pieces in this new phone but there's technically more in this one than the Baseline iPhone 14 because this one actually gets the Silicon upgrade to the new a16 bionic and six gigs of RAM top of the line new four nanometer system on a chip from Apple you could tell though when they gave the presentation in the keynote that it must be a pretty minor bump from the a15 bionic because they went straight to comparing it to the a13 bionic from a couple years ago in real life though so far it's benchmarked very similar to an a15 bionic just slightly above as expected and that's meant for me Rock Solid performance fluid animations and are pretty reliable all-day battery life from both the 14 pro and 14 pro Max but I'm going to get more into battery in a minute also technically new to the internals is a new set of sensors it's an improved gyroscope and a better accelerometer to be able to tell if you've been in a car crash or Not Crash detection cool feature so it'll detect if you've been in a car crash or not and then if you don't respond to the prompts on screen it'll automatically call Emergency Services great I'm not going to test that I'm sure some other YouTubers will find a way to test it but actually my question really was like okay if you're going to test it what sort of things do you test and I guess the answer is accidental triggers like you know how you'll if you run up a flight of stairs or something and you have automatic workout detection on the Apple watch it'll go oh have you started a workout because you've got an elevated heart rate and you just started to running no just me I don't know I was just wondering if there's other times I might accidentally think that's something else like a car crash might have happened maybe you've got a dbrand case on it and you just drop it on the floor or something I don't know it hits the ground hard enough thinks it might have crashed but then the more you look at it the more you realize there's a bunch of different sensors and factors where it sees okay your GPS location was going 60 miles an hour until it hit zero miles an hour and the microphones heard a loud noise and the barometric pressure changed when the airbags went off and also the gyroscope saw that there was a hard stopping force it knows you run a car crash one more thing that used to be in the iPhone that's not anymore and this one is a physical SIM card tray this is actually for the US only and these phones are now e-sim only esim isn't exactly a new thing but not having a physical SIM tray anymore does have its pros and cons pros mainly being okay it's one less place for water to get in one less moving part but cons being that for international travel if you just wanted to grab a SIM card real quick instead of going through the carriers that's no longer nearly as easy I'm going to keep an eye on this because I imagine Apple intends to eventually expand this to all iPhones instead of what it's now which is just starting in the US only but then the last internal change for the iPhone 14s all of them is satellite connectivity this is an edge case extra feature that you're honestly hoping you never ever have to use but in the off chance that you're stranded somewhere with absolutely no cellular service at all you're nowhere near a cell tower the iPhone's antenna is now impressively can also communicate with straight up satellites instead of cell towers so it'll take longer and you'll need a clear view of the sky and the UI will literally help you point your phone at a certain satellite overhead but it will let you send messages to a dispatcher or local emergency services to help get to your location and what you need help with that is also pretty clutch I will also not be testing that but that's it for internals uh notice I didn't talk much about the externals like I usually do in phone reviews because if we're being honest they're pretty much the same uh there are some new colors the space black which is my favorite in years and there's also a new purple color from certain angles you can hardly even tell it's purple but if it hits the light you know for a pro phone that's a solid purple I guess really only the camera bumps change they are definitely slightly larger and thicker than the 13 Pros but bottom line is when an iPhone 13 Pro can fit in an iPhone 14 Pro's case and you know it's pretty close in return okay so now we're really getting into the meat of what you really start to notice on these new phones iPhone 14 pro and 14 pro Max have some slightly updated 6.1 inch and 6.7 inch OLED displays respectively so there's still excellent displays on paper with slightly thinner bezels that you won't notice and slightly higher resolution that you also won't notice and an even higher brighter 2000 nits Peak brightness that you absolutely will notice when looking at the phone on like a bright sunny day it looks great at 100 out in the sun but the two things you'll notice the most often here are the dynamic Island and the always-on display the always-on display is the perfect example of the classic apple late mover strategy like this is not a new feature this has been on hundreds of phones before for many years but now it's finally coming to an iPhone and so it's being done the apple way this time the thing is I don't really know that there's any advantages to this apple way so the always on display looks like this so you hit the power button you sleep the phone you put it down the brightness drops the ltpo OLED display goes all the way down to one Hertz and you get to see the clock and notifications roll in as if your lock screen is still on just at a lower brightness this is a pretty bright always-on display though you can see that right like it you get used to it after a few days but I constantly was looking over at my phone on my desk thinking it was still on which is like a lower brightness but yeah it looks like that all the time the transition from the home screen to the always on display is really nice it's got this smooth fade animation and I think that's the Apple Way like the clock if it's behind something will graduate to the front of the oasan display and it maintains all the colors and skin tones and whatever wallpaper you were using so it's not faded or black and white you still have all your color if you've got music playing then your album art is front and center it is extra beautiful but I don't really care about any of that to be honest and there's also no extra customization like I've seen some really creative always-on displays over the years that let me customize and dial in even differently from the lock screen and I really love using them apples is just a toggle in the display settings on or off that's it me personally I'm gonna be turning it off on this phone because it also seems to be affecting battery life slightly more than I expected now the always-on display specifically doesn't show up in the battery settings so I'm kind of just estimating here based on my behavior everything else looks normal but I am getting slightly worse battery life than I've expected and then I've had on the 13 Pro for the past year and so I assume that's this that's a little extra brightness gone a long way it does still know when to turn off don't get me wrong if it's in a pocket it turns off if you're in sleep mode it turns off even when you have an Apple Watch on and you walk far enough away from the phone that it knows you can't see it anymore it turns off the always-on display but it does just sit here on my desk all day showing me stuff and I I don't really use it all that much so yeah I'm gonna pass but you know what is new on the screen that I absolutely love and will never pass on the dynamic Island baby what a terrible name they felt the need to name the notch it is such a minor feature in the grand scheme of using a phone but it's a good one it's a really good one so here's what's happening remember the rumors of the new Pro iPhone replacing the notch with an eye shaped cutout in the top of the display with all those renders people made well that's actually what this is it has one circular cut out on the right for a new selfie camera and one pill-shaped cutout on the left for the new face ID Hardware which they've shrunk down by about 30 percent to fill in this smaller area and then instead of just doing that Apple has cleverly decided to fill in the gap between them with black pixels and make it one big pill so then the idea is Apple would much rather think about the pill as software than Hardware so they built a whole bunch of software features around it so it just has a resting state like this which doesn't show up in screenshots or screen recordings it's just a gap but there are about 30 different things that it does to indicate ongoing activities and background activities and things that are all beautifully animated and super smooth these fluid physics it's so friendly and approachable and all of these things that it does show up in screenshots and Screen recordings the best part is pretty much everything works straight out the box as you'd expect it to so I had this moment during the first impressions video where I was like oh can't wait for Apple music to use it but then Spotify to take like a year and a half to actually update their app to work with this but nope everything works straight out the box including Spotify because that already uses the now playing API they already had a lock screen widget same with SoundCloud same with YouTube music and Pocket Casts so you have album art and the color matching waveform up there while the media is playing if you tap it it'll open the app that's playing and if you long press it you actually get a widget that pops up with some media controls I can scrub and everything pretty much the exact same widget that would appear in the lock screen so this feels kind of backwards I think a tap should open the widget and then a long press should open the app and that would just make more sense but whatever the point is it just works right off the rip matter of fact here's everything that the dynamic Island does right out the box on day one so it does system alerts like for incoming calls connecting air pods plugging into a charger switching the ringer to silent mode or volume on face ID unlocking connecting air pods and a whole bunch more there's our full list and then it's also a UI for live activities happening in the background so an ongoing call or music playing in the background any media a timer counting down Maps directions as you navigate in the background what voice memos recording screen recording all that stuff so here's a full list of that as well and then any third-party app that uses the now playing or call Kit apis which there are many it also has a little spot for the indicator for microphone and camera access right in between the pill and the cutout it really becomes next level when you have multiple background activities happening at once because then it low-key kind of becomes like a multitasking app switcher at the top of your phone so one background activity looks like this but then if I have a second one if I go start a new background activity it splits the island into two so now you can pick between them and then quickly swap between them with a single touch that's so sick I think as cheesy as the name is like I'm about done saying the words Dynamic Island out loud but I think this will be one of the most copied features in the smartphone World in like 18 months pretty much guarantee it like we even already saw some MIUI mods on Twitter where people trying this on other phones but the thing is it's going to be surprisingly hard to copy it exactly like this on this level it seems pretty innocuous pretty simple but there is a lot going on here like there's a new display engine in the a16 bionic that handles all these animations and there's a lot of them that really pull this whole thing together there's physics to it you just you poke the cut out and it wobbles and moves around a little like it's alive and since there are real cutouts like holes in the display for the camera and the face ID system it has to be touch sensitive in areas around the actual cutout so that it can still register Taps when you touch a dead zone on the screen and for the most part it works pretty well is this a game changing feature in a phone for most people no is this a reason to get one phone over another I don't think so no not really is this a nice quality of life touch that a lot of people will think is really cool and really like yeah yeah I think that's true is this feature technically invented by LG seven years ago with the top screen on the LG V10 yes absolutely [Music] all right if you watch enough iPhone presentations then you know that the pro iPhone really is and has been all about the cameras fun fact they spent 23 minutes on stage at the September event talking about the iPhone 14 pro and seven of those minutes about 33 percent we're just talking about the camera and so this is the biggest change at least on paper that's been made to the iPhone camera in many years look at this graph this is a graph of the megapixel count of every iPhone camera since they first came out they've been confidently repeating the 12 megapixel sensors since the iPhone 6s but this year we got a leap we got the leap the primary camera on the iPhone 14 pro is now a new 48 megapixel sensor it's 65 percent larger than the one we had on the 12 Pro it has a second generation Focus Shift Optical image stabilization 100 Focus pixels and sits behind a new f 1.78 lens I think we can all agree that's a great set of specs that we expect great imagery from but really The more I've been playing with it it's just more about what the new 48 megapixel sensor enables that's so great so a new larger 48 megapixel sensor that's going to bend down to 12 megapixels for all your normal photos but you do get the benefits of sharpness and more light Gathering From a larger sensor that also gives you faster shutter speeds to freeze motion more often in non-perfect conditions and it lets me take low light photos with a shorter shutter time which is very convenient but the larger sensor also gives you a really nice shallow natural depth of field without portrait mode more than we've ever seen from an iPhone camera now other phones I've seen do this just as well but it presents a new set of challenges like fringing and autofocus but I've been very impressed with how well the iPhone deals with both not a whole ton of fringing on close-up subjects and 100 coverage with Focus pixels has been pretty locked in on tracking subjects and keeping things in Focus even with the shallow depth of field my only complaint really is the pretty weak minimum Focus distance things get blurred when you get close to the primary camera so you got to switch to the macro mode pretty early luckily the ultra wide has some improvements too so that's not the end of the world then a 48 megapixel sensor also enables this new 2x button doesn't seem like that huge of a deal but it's literally just cropping in on the middle 12 megapixels of this huge sensor so it's essentially like an optical zoom it's not like you're going to lose quality the way anything less than 3x would have been before on iPhones because it was cropping into an already 12 megapixel image the 48 megapixel sensor also enables this new action mode and video which is this super aggressive stabilization for really shaky video and it does this with a pretty heavy crop but it's also able to still shoot in up to 2.8 K in this mode a little Pro tip it defaults to the 0.5 x camera it's much noisier when you do this so so I I do recommend switching back to the primary for it and then if you're running around chasing a subject or even pulling it out a car window or just anytime you need some pretty heavy stabilization this is definitely nice to have if you want the full 48 megapixel files you can shoot in Pro raw and it will kick out 50 60 70 megabyte dng files which have a lot of detail and latitude to push around in Lightroom and make them look better than the straight out of Camera 12 megapixel shots but I'll leave that to the Peter McKinnon's and Tyler stalman's or many other photography creators I know are going to put this to the test one thing they didn't do with the new 48 megapixel sensor is 8k video they could have they've not been able to until they crossed the 30 megapixel threshold they got to 48 they didn't do it that of course would also probably still be pretty tough considering the max iPhone is still one terabyte which sounds like a lot but then you're also working with huge five six gig per minute prores files that take forever to get off the iPhone via this lightning port in the slow speeds and they should probably just switch to USBC and that's a whole rant for another day so I'll just stop it there but just know no AK video straight from the iPhone's camera I think I can honestly safely though put the iPhone 14 pro as the best camera system in any phone in 2022.
don't get me wrong it's not perfect it can definitely over bake HDR sometimes in some harsh shooting conditions and the new selfie camera which now has 12 megapixels and autofocus while it handles a variety of focal lengths much better and is sharper overall it still has a tendency to overexpose people with dark skin constantly I would know but if I'm just looking for the overall versatility of the whole camera system you know the shutter speed improvements the quality of the photos the great autofocus the color consistency between the three different cameras the overall image processing pipeline improvements that have made the ultra wide much more usable and less noisy and low light and then of course the prores video that I'm literally actively running an entire YouTube channel with then yeah I'm pretty comfortable calling this the camera King again and yes I am going to be shooting the new autofocus video with the iPhone 14 Pros cameras so if you want to large helping of sample footage that's going to be the place to go go subscribe over there plus the car is going to be that's a fun one it's going to be a good video so don't miss it anyway oh also guess what guess what cinematic mode now supports 30 FPS huh that's funny Checkmate 24 FPS stands uh no but also I don't think I'm gonna be using cinematic mode that much because the natural depth of field is so good on the primary camera but yeah 30 FPS cinematic now also remember how all those event invites went out a couple weeks ago and the theme was far out and there were all these stars and we thought oh they're going to get an astrophotography mode like a nighttime photography type thing uh that didn't happen turned out they were like hinting at the satellite connectivity but like the iPhone still gets crushed when it comes to some of the like super low light nighttime shooting and especially astrophotography so I'm kind of bummed that we didn't get that but otherwise yeah complete camera [Music] so the iPhone 14 pro is still a thousand dollars and the 14 pro Max is still eleven hundred dollars to start so they are the absolute best phones Apple makes right now and there's going to be a lot of people considering an upgrade so is it worth it well in the landscape of other phones you could get for one thousand dollars this one's gonna be competitive it's going to have the best camera of the bunch I think uh it's gonna have one of the best brightest most responsive displays of any of those phones it's also going to have a dynamic Island however you feel about that but also it's going to have the classic Suite of iPhone stuff iMessage FaceTime Classics but there definitely isn't any any flashy or any Crazy Design or Hardware Innovation Happening Here There is nothing folding in half there is no super fast charging or some massive battery size Improvement the new colors which you've seen are like yeah you can kind of tell that they're a little different looking but this is a very refined update and so really the truth is if you have an iPhone 11 or later at this point then the new iOS 16 update pushing out to your phone right now is gonna make just as big of a difference to the user experience of using your phone as getting the new phone probably would so yeah I'd say you know the new lock screen the haptic keyboard all this stuff I did a video on all the new features you can check that out but yeah this is a really good phone you should get it if you either want the latest and greatest and best of a smartphone camera available right now or if you've just got a thousand dollar hole in your pocket burning away and you just have to have the latest and greatest pro iPhone that's what this is if you're not trying to get the newest iPhone then you can skip the upgrade it and fix your current phone with parts and tools by this video's sponsor iFixit they make it super easy with free repair guides and tear Downs on their channel it's not as hard as it looks also if you want to see the inside of your phone before you try to fix it check out ifixit's channel so you can see their iPhone 14 tear down when they take apart Tech so you can learn how to fix it yourself so you can check them out at the link below one sustainability note I found interesting the iPhone 14s now across the board have a slightly improved repairability design the glass on the back is now separate from the components underneath very nice but either way that's been it thanks for watching definitely get subscribed to see the straight up standard iPhone 14 review and that comes out also the Apple watch Ultra and that comes out and about a thousand other things that are all working on here at the studio because it's Tech Timber there's a lot happening see you in the next one peace [Music]
2022-09-16 18:24
