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- Hey, what's up, MKBHD here.
Okay, I've already reviewed the iPhone 14 Pro
and 14 Pro Max.
You can watch those at the link below the like button.
The Dynamic Island, the camera upgrade, all that.
The bottom line is
that is a far more interesting set of phones
that has a few things that are actually new to the iPhone,
which is kinda cool.
The iPhone 14 on the other hand, not so much, not so much.
This is almost the exact same phone as last year.
So do you remember those S updates we used to get,
like we'd have the iPhone 5
and then the iPhone 5s and the s for speed
because it was the same phone, but just faster?
This phone is even less of an update
than those s upgrades used to be
snd so that's what I wanna talk about
in this review is this new repackaging strategy thing
that Apple's been doing,
especially more lately with a bunch of their products.
So this year we do get an iPhone 14 and an iPhone 14 Plus.
This 14 is out now
and the 14 Plus is coming out in a month in October.
It's basically the same thing just bigger.
6.1 inches here, 6.7 inches there
and so many things are the same as last year's phone.
On the outside, the design is the same.
The iPhone 13 cases literally work with the iPhone 14.
Like this is the new Ali Abdaal dbrand grip case
on the iPhone 14.
It's pretty sweet, but then again,
here is my iPhone 13 from last year and yep, fits perfectly,
but yeah, same squared off sides,
same button placement, same camera arrangement,
same antennas, same speakers, et cetera,
and then on the inside,
it's literally the same chip from last year.
It's the A15 Bionic again, technically a slight bump up
with the extra GPU core that was in the 13 Pro,
but I mean, yeah, last year's chip, too.
Now technically you could say these are all things
that I liked about the iPhone 13, so hey,
if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
That's Apple,
but that also means
that a lotta things that could have stood to improve
that could have gotten better also didn't change.
So it's the same display with the same brightness
and the same 60 Hertz refresh rate in an $800 phone.
It would be so unlike Apple,
but I really would've loved to have seen like 90 Hertz here,
but yeah, same storage options, same battery size,
same charging speeds, same Lightning port.
The way I see it, it's an iPhone 13 again
a year later with some tiny improvements.
Matter of fact, here is a full, comprehensive list
of every single thing that's technically new.
Okay, Crash Detection, satellite connectivity,
display resolution, eSIM, new colors,
better thermal design, better repairability design,
new primary camera, and new selfie camera.
Well this should be easy.
So Crash Detection is cool.
It uses some new sensors inside the phone
and combines a bunch of data from the GPS and microphones,
et cetera to notice if you've been in a car crash
and if you have, it'll notify emergency services
without you having to do anything.
It's cool, it's a nice feature,
I hope I never have to use it.
And then if you're out in the middle of nowhere
with no cell service and you still need help,
the iPhone 14 series can now communicate with satellites
in case of emergency to help you get your location
and your needs to someone at a dispatch center.
That's coming to the US and Canada in November.
That's another nice feature that I hope I never have to use.
The display is technically a slightly higher resolution
with slightly thinner bezels,
but you will definitely never notice that
and the new lineup in the US is now also EIM only.
To be fair, the set up process and transferring service
from my previous iPhone's physical SIM
was actually super easy.
It took maybe two minutes tops
and most other phones coming out today new
also support eSIM, so I'm hoping the transfer process
in the future is also smooth, but yeah,
no physical SIM card tray here in the states.
There also is this new blue color.
Then again, most of you,
like an extremely high percentage of you,
have said that you use a case on your phone,
so I wonder how many of those are clear cases
and then Apple did mention an improved thermal design
inside this phone for the same A15 Bionic chip,
which can help performance at the edges of normal use cases.
So like playing a game for a really long time
or navigating with high screen brightness
with the phone in your dashboard
in your car on a hot sunny day,
things that might get extra warm
have an added layer of protection against throttling.
I think that's something the pro users will care more about,
but I definitely won't complain that it's also here
and the better repairability design
was mentioned also near the end of the keynote.
It's a little thing,
but it's actually pretty surprising from Apple,
which is that the glass back is now a separate piece
from the rest of the internals,
making it easier to replace.
Cool but easily the biggest physical change
with these new iPhones is going to be the cameras.
So there's a slightly new 12 megapixel primary camera.
The ultra wide is exactly the same hardware
and a new 12 megapixel selfie camera with auto focus.
Now I spent a bunch of time looking back
and forth at pictures I took on the iPhone 14
and the iPhone 13 trying to pinpoint the improvements.
It's like a game of spot the differences
and there are some differences, but they are so slight.
So this new camera is still 12 mega pixels,
but it is a larger sensor,
so the individual pixels are bigger
and should let in more light
and then the max aperture went from F 1.6 to F 1.5.
In regular daytime lighting,
there is pretty much no difference,
like the iPhone is perfectly capable of crisp, detailed,
natural looking photos when there are no challenges,
just like every other $800 phone always has been.
Really the only difference I'm seeing
is maybe color temperature.
The iPhone 14 can take some occasionally cooler photos
and is noticeable
if you have the right colors in the picture,
but here's a shot from the iPhone 14 Pro
with the 48 megapixel pro raw shot for context.
Here you can actually see a bit of a difference.
It's a slightly different focal length,
but also more importantly,
there's lots more fine detail here
and just for fun, here's the Pixel 6 Pro's.
Same shot, another great detailed photo,
but just looks like a different style,
but as expected, most of the differences between these
that I found were more on the edge cases
of normal photography that more challenging
or extreme lighting situations, mostly in low-light,
and so some of this is enabled
by the slightly larger sensor and faster aperture.
Some of this is also enabled
by the new image processing pipeline that they've tweaked
and fiddled with that they also named Photonic Engine.
On stage, they were saying things
like 49% better low-light performance,
which I'm not exactly sure what's meant by 49%.
Is it 49% faster shutter speed
or 49% less noise in low-light?
Unclear, but as I go through the photos I took on both,
I gotta say, there's still remarkably similar, okay?
Again, I was looking for the differences
in the amount of noise in the shadows or dynamic range,
but really what I mostly found
was slight differences in color temperature,
sometimes one might be a little brighter than the other
and sometimes it's really hard to tell them apart,
even pixel peeping.
I even looked at shutter speeds, which may sometimes reveal
that you actually have a faster shutter speed
from the bigger sensor 'cause it's taking in more light
and while I found
that they were nearly the same for every shot,
the iPhone 14 was typically maybe five to 10% faster.
The one thing I did find
was that in the absolute darkest shots
in the worst conditions,
there was sometimes a difference
in how much time it would require
to get a night mode exposure,
like for this one, it took three seconds from the 13
but two seconds from the 14,
even though the 13 actually ended up focusing more correctly
and had a bit of a sharpness advantage in this shot,
sometimes you just gotta get the shot
a little quicker if possible
and then this one from the ultra wide,
it was a one second night mode exposure from the 13
but just a regular snap from the 14,
so it's the exact same hardware.
I guess that's the difference
for the Photonic Engine and image processing.
Even so, the image is a toss up,
like it's a little more processing happening
on the iPhone 14 side, maybe a little more sharpening,
a slightly different color cast, but that's it
and then on the video front, it's even more similar,
so they take basically the same video,
but the iPhone 14 does have a feature called Action Mode.
That's not coming to the 13s for some reason,
even though it feels like a software feature,
but it's basically a super aggressive stabilization
for running around and chasing stuff
on top of the already pretty good stabilization
from the iPhone video.
And I will say the stabilization part works very well,
but the video itself can be quite noisy.
Also, it seems like in almost every environment,
it's just asking for more light all the time,
like you get this dialogue box
that says more light required,
but it still lets you shoot,
but the footage is super grainy and soft,
especially from the ultra wide that it defaults to.
But also, I'm in an incredibly well lit studio
and sometimes it would ask for more light even in here.
This is better lit than most people's homes
where you're chasing around a baby
or a pet at a hundred miles an hour,
let alone sometimes going outside on a cloudy day
and it's asking for more light.
That's crazy.
So this may get better over time.
As of right now, it shows up less on the iPhone 14 Pro,
which makes sense
because this one has a larger primary sensor,
but, yeah, the stabilization works really well.
It's a software feature you might use.
And then there is the new selfie camera.
It is 12 megapixels and has auto focus for the first time
instead of the fixed focal distance from before.
You can get sharper shots
in some less conventional selfie situations, which is great.
It's not game changingly different.
It's another incremental improvement.
It can still struggle with properly reproducing
darker skin tones, which I mentioned in the 14 Pro review.
Here's the same shot from the Pixel 6 Pro,
which specifically has their real tone optimization,
so you can see what it means.
So at the end of the day, what are we left with?
A super incremental update
in the same body basically as before
and that's what I wanna talk about
that they've done a lot more recently.
Some might call it the Tim Cook logistics touch.
See that's been the iPhone SE formula for years.
I've talked about it in those reviews.
So the first generation iPhone SE comes out.
It's basically the body of an old iPhone 5s
but with new internals.
Then the second generation iPhone SE comes out.
It's the body of an iPhone 8 but with new internals.
And then the third generation iPhone SE again
that we just got this year again is the body of an iPhone 8
but even newer internals
and there's rumors of the next gen SE being
like the body of an iPhone XR but the new chip
and we even saw that with the MacBook Pro this year.
The 13 inch M2 MacBook Pro is the exact same body
as the 13 inch M1 MacBook Pro just with better internals.
Now it's not exactly some mystery why they do this.
There's plenty of reasons behind the scenes
why these things are good for Apple.
It reduces risk,
it reduces cost because now you don't have to develop
as much new stuff and then prices go down
and you can offer something more tried and true
that already worked in the past
but to an audience that will pay less
and also it sort of insulates them a little bit
from the supply chain challenges
of trying to make a bunch of newer stuff.
So the innovation, AKA the risk,
is saved for the even more expensive phones.
You watch that iPhone 14 Pro review
and you see the Dynamic Island,
which is a thing that's new to the iPhone.
It'll evolve over time.
You see the new 48 megapixel camera system,
which is new to the iPhone,
and you'll see the always on display,
which again is the first time they've done this.
Basically, this is all just a long-winded way
of saying the baseline iPhone
with this strategy is just boring
and that's just the way it is.
So now, for those who are thinking of actually buying one
of these phones or thinking, oh, okay,
I know everything about the phones,
I know which one I wanna get,
but one last wrench to throw into all of this
is that the iPhone 13 is still on sale
and it's 699 from Apple,
but you can probably find it even cheaper from other places
and I think that would be a fine upgrade
for a lot of people.
Like the one extra year of software updates
is maybe the only reason I would get a 14 over a 13,
but aside from that,
you really gotta think about how much the new colors
or the slightly new camera or satellite connectivity
or Crash Detection actually means to you.
And, hey, if efficiency means something to you,
then definitely check out this video's sponsor, Anker,
who makes these chargers and cables that I really like.
This is their Nano 3 charger, which uses Gallium Nitride.
That's why it's 70% smaller than Apple's 30 watt charger
and it's still powerful enough to juice up an iPhone
or an iPad or a MacBook Air if you really wanted to.
And this 541 cable, which is USBC to Lightning, is the first
that I've seen that uses bio-based materials in the cable,
so sugar cane and corn,
but it's still a high quality cable
that can withstand up to 20,000 bends
and it's actually more durable than a typical plastic cable
and these both come in five colors for your choice
to either match your iPhone 14 or mix it up a little bit.
Definitely check both of these out at the link below.
But that's been it.
Thanks for watching.
Let me know what you think
of Apple's, this repackaging regifting strategy
that they've sort of leaned into more lately.
Either way, it's Techtember, a lot more's comin' up.
Definitely get subscribed if you haven't already
and I'll catch you guys to the next one.
Peace.
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