Okay, so, on the face of it the iPhone 13's look pretty similar to the iPhone 12s. These four phones a 13mini, 13, 13pro, and 13 pro-max, and each of them is almost the same shape and size as their equivalents of last year.
And I do have something that I want to call them out on — What I liked, what I didn’t like, and then if I think these new iPhones will beat the competition.
COLOR
This is just kind of how Apple rolls because unlike companies like Samsung and Huawei, who come with a practically new design language every simple year, to differentiate themselves, Apple knows that the iPhone design is iconic and so, I think they almost tried to make sure that they don’t change it too much, which makes the most obvious visual difference between generations ( usually it's first the color) but this actually the first, I’m pretty happy with what they’ve delivered this time for the normal iPhone 13 and 13 mini there are five total colors. The new pink is kind of whatever, but I like the red this time around.
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It looks like…red! And then for the Pros, every single year, Apple has a few standard colors which tend not to change because of a fun fact t, black and which is the most popular color over timer. But they also always have a hero color – the one that they always use in all the promotional material, and the one that they make sure is different so that true fans can have that – "I got the new phone feeling". It was midnight green for the 11Pro, Pacific blue for the 12Pro, and we now have sierra blue for the iPhone 13 pro. The only slightly annoying thing is that they’ve kept the same Ultra high gloss side rails from last year, which will probably make the phone almost impossible to keep clean.
SMALL NOTCH
Anyways, I’m also just glad that the notch is smaller. Ever since the iPhone 10 first came out, this notch hasn’t budged, and each new generation of Android phones have come out, its presence has become, just that little bit more unwelcome. So no they haven’t got rid of it entirely this time. But it is about 20% smaller, thanks to the earpiece being pushed up to the top bezel, and I think that’s just enough such that it keeps parity with its rivals. It means that you have just this little bit of extra usable screen on top which (who knows Apple’s feeling cheeky) might mean we get the battery percentage icon back.
STORAGE
So, I’m pretty happy with this one. But also, before I watched this launch event, I was fully ready to complain about how Apple had kept the base storage option on the iPhone 13’s at 64GB, because honestly, in 2021, that’s just not good enough. However, they’ve upgraded that too.
All iPhone 13’s start with 128GB of storage and actually the top version of the iPhone 13 Pro goes all the way up to 1 Terabyte (1TB), now, while starting at the same price as last year’s phones. Actually, cheaper in the UK! So, I’m not going to complain about that, but about when you’re using the phone?
BIGGER BATTERY
Well, I’m, well, relieved – the battery has been a priority. For the longest time, companies have had to fight with battery life.
Essentially, the bigger it is, the better for the consumer's long term, but then, the less appealing the thing becomes in the movement, because of its thickness and weight. And I think that this has plagued Apple even more so than other companies just because of how much emphasis they put on the in-hand feel. You can tell that iPhones have always tried to carefully trade that line resulting in never giving too much battery, but sometimes falling on the side of just not giving enough. But this year, for, maybe the first time, it looks like they are finely giving users some buffer room in. Both the 13 Mini and 13 Pro are getting an extra 1.5 hours of screen on time. And both the normal 13 and the 13 Pro Max are getting an extra 2.5 hours. I am going to do a full battery, maybe if not charging speed test too, though. So, if you do want to see those, then clicking on the notification button on this blog would b revitalizing. But it’s looking promising. Oh yeah!
120 HERTZ PROMOTION
And I’m so glad that this year the screens are not just brighter, but we are getting a feature that has been sorely missing for a long time on iPhones.
That the entire Tech community has been banging on about for the last three years on top, finally! Finally!! Apple has added in 120Hertz refresh rates. Instead of every other iPhone up until this point, whose screen is refreshed 60 times per second, the iPhones 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max will refresh that up to 120Hz. If you know what you’re looking for, then this is going to be the biggest jump in perceived speed that we’ve had on an iPhone.
Now, let’s be very clear about something, these are not the first phones to get 120Hz displays they’re pretty much the last. But that doesn’t change how significant the upgrade is as with quite a few things on this iPhone 13 lineup, I would see it less like Apple has just suddenly come in and added some next-level feature and a bit more like Apple has finally removed one of the phones on her side. These major caveats that we're constantly reminding people were missing every time it was mentioned the last two years of iPhones. Not anymore – you do only get 120Hz on the Pro phones, which are kind of, unfortunate given that it’s almost an assumed feature on all Android flagships, but I can, kind of, understand it. You’ve got to remember that for the entire year, while Samsung might release 50 smartphones, Apple is only 4, and so, because these 4 phones have to serve such a hugely diverse mix of customers, it makes sense from a business perspective to have at least one option that doesn’t use all the expensive Tech that there is a big portion of users who just won’t appreciate.
There is another side of this argument, though I’m getting there, the point I’m making is if we are to do that – better battery life this year, whilst also able to have these smooth high refresh rate screens, then that is an enormous win.
A15 CHIP
I’m also just generally excited to see what this new A15 chipset can do. If you watched the launch event you’ll have seen that this new chip has a 50% faster CPU and a 30% faster GPU. Those are crazy numbers! But if I’m being really honest, I think the way that Apple has pitched this is a little bit misleading like you look closer, you’ll realize that what they’re is not 50% faster than last year, like you’d kind of, assume because of how they’re effectively picking scenarios that suit their chips ones in which their past A15, was already ahead of Android, and then running those same scenarios again or when you look at that, the A15 is even more ahead.
Long story short, we don’t know how much faster the A15 is than the A14, but just the fact that it is faster with a better and more reliable 5G makes me excited to test it because the A14 powered iPhone 12 Pro Max is the most reliably fluid experience I’ve had on a smartphone ever. I’ve used this thing every single day for almost a year now, and that was effective when I was trying to see how many objects it could handle on-screen at one time. It got to at least 20,000 before it started chugging. And even though you might not even actually notice the extra power and day-to-day tasks, you probably will when it comes to the camera.
CAMERA IMPROVEMENT
So, for starters, it enables them to use cinematic videos modes. You see Apple has had portrait mode photos for a while now, and when it was first introduced in the iPhone 7 plus that in itself was a pretty strenuous task – you to process the data from two separate cameras; you had to create a depth map, and then apply different levels of blur to different parts of the image according to that depth map. However, 5 generations of chips later, we finally have enough processing power to be able to perform a similar type of computation 30 times per second.
Now, I will say that this footage looks a little soft around the edges, where you can tell that this is shot on a phone and not a Pro DSL camera. But, look at it from what we can see right now, this is far more advanced than I ever expected the first generation implementation to be. And I’m telling you now; this is the beginning of something huge. When this Tech improves, using phones to make movies is going to be a complete no-brainer; they’re cheaper, they’re so much smaller, and they’re smarter. Like, shooting cinematic video with this iPhone, you’re already having the ability to refocus video after you’ve taken it. If I shoot out a focus video on this camera, I’m screwed, plus, this phone can use its ultra-wide camera to anticipate when someone is about to walk in the frame of the main camera and get the focus ready for them.
I don’t know how well it works yet, but if this is very big news. Plus, I’m just glad that Apple is experimenting. My single biggest complaint about the iPhone 12’s cameras was that, yes they’re polished but they’re also just a bit boring compared to the competition. This goes a long way towards fixing that. But also, every single one of the new iPhone 13’s has a feature called sensor-shift stabilization. It means that instead of the lens moving to try and counteract your hand movements, it’s the camera sensor behind that lens doing the moving. We already saw this on the iPhone 12 Pro Max last year, and it’s not a dramatic improvement, but it edges the phone closer to what I’d call human stabilization, by which I mean that you can already get phones like the Vivo X60 Pro Plus that has an actual gimbaled system inside their camera for footage so smooth, that is locked in position. I don’t think Apple wants this that little bit of motion they’re just trying to make it smoother. But there’s a slightly more fundamental hardware improvement this time around.
Every single camera on every single of these new iPhone 13’s has been upgraded. So, for the iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, you have a new main camera with a larger sensor that lets in 47% more light, and then also, an upgraded ultra-wide camera too, I guess, try and keep parity. And put simply, BIGGER SENSORS = MORE LIGHT = BETTER PHOTOS. Based on these sample photos that Apple’s given, though, I would say that it still feels like there’s a big gap between the main camera and the ultra-wide.
Now, here’s where the iPhone 13 Pros start to pull ahead. It just feels like Apple’s making sure that the Pros feel Pro this year but then, they’ve kind of, kept the normal iPhone 13’s as the more simple iterative upgrade for people who just don’t care about their phones as much; and who just upgrade mindlessly every time their contract runs out because, on the Pro iPhones, the zoom camera has been upgraded to three times optical zoom – the ultra-wide now lets in a lot more light up to 92%, and then the main camera can let in 2.2 times more light. I don’t know how you can put on an exact number on how much better a camera is but, these are huge claims. And what makes them even more significant is that at the same time they’ve also equipped this new ultra-wide with the ability to autofocus, which allows it to double up as a close-up macro camera – a macro camera that can get up to two centimeters away from an object, and one with all that extra light that the sensor now lets in. for a lot of phones, the macro camera is a separate lens altogether. So, the fact that Apple has just added basically, a two-in-one on these phones almost gives these Pros the equivalent of having a quad-camera system. There’s also apparently the ability on these Pro to create your custom image preset for how you want your photos to look straight out of the camera. Need to test this one myself, though. And finally, you might know that last year’s iPhone 12’s could shoot photos in a format called ProRaw. You see, with normal iPhones at the point of capture, a lot of the data in that shot is thrown away because most people don’t need that but by enabling ProRaw, photos do take up about 8times as much storage; but they allow you to keep that information which means that in the future if you ever wanted to come back and edit it, it will look good even if you go crazy with the image.
Now, the reason that I’m telling this is that with the iPhone 13 Pro, you can also shoot in something called ProRes, which is a very similar concept for videos. It is cool like I believe that the smart phoned will record movies shortly but, it also will almost definitely kill your storage. they may have somewhat optimized the files, but if we went off current industry standards; if you wanted 4k high-quality ProRes video, just 10minutes would take up 100GB of storage or the entirety of a base iPhone 13Pro. Naturally, mind you this is probably why they’re giving you the option for one Terabyte (1TB) this year.
CHARGING
All that said, there are a few things I’m concerned about, first of all, is the entire iPhone charging situation.
For starters, no iPhone 13’s come with a charger. I’m not surprised when Apple makes decisions, they are generally very purposeful and they try to stick to them. But the added layer to this is that the only cable you get in the box is a USB-C to lightning cable, which means that you also need a USB-C charging brick. To use it, unless you specially bought an iPhone 11series phone, you probably won’t have it. But on top of that, it feels like Apple is pushing this narrative that MagSafe, this snap-on magnetic charging solution is the way forward except that, I’m struggling to see the benefit; it’s slow at 15watts of max power compared to the over 100watta that compare such an average releasing. It generates heat because the simple fact that you’re no longer connecting metal to metal directly means that a higher proportion of the energy is being wasted.
And more fundamentally, it’s not even more convenient. If you fully buy into the MagSafe ecosystem, then every time you want to charge, you have to off your accessory and put it back on afterward, plus, you’re still tied to a cable. It’s not like this wireless charging suddenly means you can forget about wired charging more indirectly. And then also, the second thing is this whole situation with comfort.
COMFORT
Look, I can see why Apple has gone with whole flat design with their phones – it does slick, but just speaking from experience, I strongly dislike how it feels. And it’s looking very likely that given the increased battery on all, these iPhone 13’s, they’re going to be just as sharp, but now even thicker and even heavier. Don’t get me wrong, the extra battery is great, but I’m just saying be warned because I don’t expect, well, particularly the 13 Pro Max to be particularly palm friendly. Well, find out very soon, though.
COMPETITION
All right, taking all these into account, bearing in mind that no one has actually tested this in person yet, how do these new iPhones sit versus the competition? Well, I think that the iPhone 13 Pros seem competitive. The A15 chip120hertz refresh rates combined with Apple’s optimizations all means that there is a good chance that you are looking at the new fastest phones on the market. And Apple can do that whilst improving the battery life and making the camera fun again, they’ve pretty much tacked every major complaint that I’ve had with the iPhone all in one go whilst making it cheaper in some regions. However, t the same time, I think that the normal iPhone 13 and the iPhone 13 Mini are a bit less competitive as well as the expected material differences between normal and Pro. Not having 120hertz is a huge deal for a flagship phone in almost 2022. And the fact that they miss out on a lot of the major camera upgrades too means that I could see myself telling people to either go Android or just get the Pro. It kind of feels like with the Pro, iPhones Apple is looking at the competition and they’re trying to make something that’s competitive and that’s competitive and that matches their features but for the normal iPhone 13’s it just feels like Apple is banking on the loyalty that they have to their brand as a reason to not push forward as much as they could. They even actually said that the reason they’ve shuffled the cameras into this new diagonal position is to make the phones look different because you might not be able to tell otherwise. But I’ve got a few big comparisons coming up soon which will give us more definitive answers.
