this is the iphone 13 pro and pro max
they look exactly the same as last
year's iphone 12 pro models and you
could argue that they have only small
updates compared to those phones
but the improvements are actually really
noticeable if you're the kind of person
who notices phone quality this is a
phone for people who care about the
details
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just like with the regular iphone 13 and
the iphone 13 mini the two biggest
improvements to the 13 pro and pro max
are with the camera and battery life but
the pro adds a third improvement to its
screen technology saying there are
improvements to camera and battery life
and screen sounds pretty standard right
that's actually the challenge for apple
this year because the updates for the
battery and camera are meaningful and
that screen change is the update that a
lot of iphone pro users didn't even know
they were missing
now the design is almost exactly the
same as the iphone 12. really the only
important difference is that the 13 pro
is a little bit thicker and so cases
from the 12 aren't going to fit
especially around the camera bump
then there is the notch it is smaller
now but only horizontally and apple
didn't really do anything with the extra
space like show you a battery percentage
so you're not really getting any more
usable stuff out of your screen
and i would have gladly traded the old
slightly larger notch for a better
selfie camera but now the selfie camera
hardware isn't updated here but it does
get a bunch of the new camera software
features
i still think this design is beautiful
and a huge improvement over the curved
iphones that we've had since the six
this is an iterative upgrade over the
iphone 12 but if you have an older
iphone it's going to be a massive one
for you
oh and there is a new one terabyte
storage option which is a ridiculous
amount of storage for a phone but it
actually may be necessary for people who
use prores video on these iphones
alright that's enough preliminaries
let's get into battery life
battery life is definitely better now
look i've only had these phones for
about a week or so and i'm trying to
test all four new iphones so
don't consider these results fully
conclusive
apple claims that the 13 pro should get
90 minutes more of usable time and two
and a half hours more on the pro max
which was already a battery champ now i
mostly use the smaller pro just so i
could get kind of a worst case scenario
and even when we were running around all
day taking photos and 4k video and also
tethering other phones to it i went to
bed with 20 left on this phone and that
was like four or four and a half hours
of screen time too
the next day i clocked nearly seven
hours of use
this battery makes me feel a lot more
confident leaving my external battery
pack behind than i did last year i am
going to follow up with testing from
both the promax and the iphone 13 mini
later on on theverge.com apple says it
achieved this better battery life
through processor enhancements and
because the screen is more power
efficient but really i think the biggest
factor is that the batteries are just
plain bigger
the processor in the iphone 13 pro is
the a15 bionic and it gets five gpu
cores compared to the regular iphone
13's four cores but apple won't really
say what the extra core does beyond make
things faster and obviously it's fast
new iphones are always fast i think the
most important new thing that the a15
does is enable a bunch of new camera
features okay so what should we talk
about next cameras or screen camera
screen camera you know i'm really into
the screen and
okay yeah that's the right answer let's
talk about cameras
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the very first thing to note is that the
camera systems on both the 13 pro and
the 13 pro max are identical you don't
have to buy the big expensive 6.7 inch
screen to get the good camera this year
now all three cameras on the back have
gotten pretty big upgrades and that
matters because usually it's just the
main wide angle sensor that gets all the
attention
it gets that attention because it's the
one that we use the most and it's
typically the best camera on a phone
this year the wide angle is still 12
megapixels but apple has increased the
sensor size
and increased the pixel size to 1.9
microns which is about as big as we've
seen on a phone
and it's got an f 1.5 aperture
all of that adds up to this sensor can
take in a ridiculous amount of light
more light means better pictures now
when the scene has plenty of light to go
around say in bright outdoor situations
or even average indoor light i have to
admit that you're gonna be hard-pressed
to find differences between the 13 pro
the regular 13 or sometimes even last
year's iphone 12. these are all very
good cameras
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but when it gets dark the differences
start to be
night and day sorry for the pun but
let's go out into the night so i can
show you what this big sensor can do
this is where the iphone 13 pro really
comes into its own in low light even
compared to the regular iphone 13 this
thing is much more confident it doesn't
need to switch into night mode as often
and when it does it takes those photos
much much faster
[Music]
in addition to this big sensor apple
also made changes to how it does
computational photography to use smart
hdr to process photos i see less image
noise in low light more dynamic range in
low and even medium light and apple
claims that it is more accurate with
shadow exposure and i definitely see it
in night mode the 13 pro is just more
willing to let dark parts stay dark the
regular 13 and the 12 just sort of
over brighten everything
now there are scenes where the 13 pro
also makes things too bright but it's
not that often and in general night mode
shots are sharper on the 13 pro are all
these details things that everybody is
going to notice no probably not even on
a big phone like the pro max it takes a
lot of squinting to see these fine
details
but if there's any place where it
actually makes sense to call a phone pro
as in for professionals it is this main
camera
[Music]
a new feature that apple has added this
year is photographic profiles apple
insists that these are not filters but
rather they let you apply a creative
style to every shot that you take
basically if you don't like the iphone's
middle of the road look you can find
something that looks more like a samsung
or a pixel photo without having to do
any post processing editing work
profiles work on both the 13 pro and the
regular iphone 13s and understanding
what they are exactly is
a little complicated apple's
computational photography process smart
hdr takes a bunch of different frames
and then combines them into the end
result
part of that process involves making
choices about white balance color
contrast and so on
another part of that process is the
iphone semantically recognizing
different things in the scene people and
grass and sky and cats
so when you set a photographic profile
the iphone makes different choices
during the smart hdr capture process
about white balance and color and
contrast and so on it also uses that
semantic recognition to make better
choices for specific parts of the scene
like skin tone this is why apple argues
that it's not a filter because it's not
applied evenly across the entire image
what all this really means is that if
you prefer a more opinionated camera
like you get from samsung or google you
can do that now with the iphone by
default you can customize any one of
these profiles and as you move the
sliders to customize them the profile
name automatically changes to something
descriptive for your new settings which
is pretty neat and then the profile
sticks and it becomes your new default
so this is a verge iphone review which
means that at some point we have to talk
about file formats so here we go you
cannot shoot with photographic profiles
on and have raw output on at the same
time and unlike a raw photo where you
can make all sorts of choices in the
edit photographic profiles lock your
choices into the file as it's saved as
you shoot the photo
now in theory it might be possible for
apple to save all of that extra data for
you to be able to change all of your
choices later but apple told us that it
would create such a huge file that it
wouldn't be worth it and that people who
do want to edit after the fact can just
choose raw
is all that complicated well yes and no
no because you can set profiles and
forget them they just become the new
default and you don't need to think too
much about them but yes because this is
yet another button on apple's camera app
which is getting increasingly
complicated and has an almost
fractally expanding set of different
kinds of shooting states it is very easy
to get lost in all these settings i'm
serious their camera app is bust
like this little arrow here
is the worst user interface element i
have seen
from them and i don't know how long it's
like what how what what
what i do like the upgrades to the
telephoto lens apple's not playing the
100x space zoom samsung game it's just
3x which is the equivalent of 77
millimeters now what that means is
you're not going to get really great far
zoom anything over you know 6 or 10x
digital is pretty bad
but it is very good at taking portraits
i'm not talking portrait mode i'm
talking portraits
one thing to keep in mind with the
telephoto lens is that going up to 3x
means that it now takes in just a little
less light so it's really not that great
in low light situations even with
optical image stabilization it's not bad
but especially when you set it next to
the main camera you will notice the drop
off you can do night mode and telephoto
though which works best for still
subjects
digital zoom is here and it's 15x and
yeah it looks like digital zoom at 15x
now as for video a lot of the footage
you've been watching the footage you're
watching right now is from an iphone 13
pro max and it is
very good it's very good in bright light
it's very good in hdr conditions and
it's very good in low light we are very
impressed with the video on this camera
but where things fall down a little bit
is if you use the ultra wide or the
telephoto in low light they just they
can't stand up to the quality of the
regular wide angle camera
then there's cinematic mode it's
basically portrait mode but for video
i'm going to talk a lot more about it in
the regular iphone 13 review video so go
watch that but for here what you need to
know is that it doesn't work very well
in low light so did you see the
background there the cinematic mode just
kept trying and missing to blur it
because it was too dark
in brighter light cinematic mode is
actually fun to play with and the
results are sometimes impressive and
sometimes you can just see it kind of
breaking just like it does in portrait
mode photos but since this is a pro
phone i'm just gonna say that you really
shouldn't be too distracted by cinematic
mode especially since it's locked to
1080p at 30fps
i'm not saying that it's a gimmick but i
will say that it's gimmick
adjacent
just like with portrait mode and photos
at the beginning i think it's going to
be a few years before cinematic mode is
truly useful for anything beyond casual
use and despite apple's very fun
promotions and videos i have a hard time
believing that real movies are going to
be made with this
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and now it's time for more file format
stuff all of the depth information in
cinematic mode gets written to the file
so that you can edit it all in post you
can change the focus points throughout
the video and even change the f-stop for
the whole video
but only in apple apps like photos and
final cut will be able to do that apple
isn't making that file format public for
adobe or lumafusion to adopt and also
sometimes when you airdrop the file
apple's just going to bake the depth
choices into the file so they can't be
changed later by anything
finally the ultrawide camera also got
improvements so it performs a little bit
better in low light even though again
it's not as good as the main camera
but thanks to auto focus on the ultra
wide its newest trick which is exclusive
to the pro models is that it can do
macro shots
when you bring the camera very close to
a subject it automatically switches from
the wide over to the ultra wide but it
tries to keep your framing you can get
as close as two centimeters and from
what i can see it's a fun little feature
and the results are a lot better than
the throwaway macro cameras that we've
seen on a ton of android phones lately
i dig it in fact
i dig this whole camera system it beats
the next best smartphone camera in low
light and the next best smartphone
camera just happens to be the iphone 13
or last year's iphone 12 pro max they're
the same thing really i have no idea if
the upcoming pixel 6 is gonna be able to
compete with this but right now this is
the best camera system on a smartphone
now can i talk about the display yeah
okay
so
apple has finally switched to a display
with a variable refresh rate the
branding is super retina xdr display
with pro motion it's an ltpo oled which
means that it's super low power and the
screen can refresh as slowly as 10
frames per second when you're looking at
something static like text and that
saves battery life or it can ramp all
the way up to 120 frames per second for
smooth animation and scrolling and that
is twice the 60 hertz standard that you
get on other iphones
i personally believe that apple has
gotten away with not putting a high
refresh rate on an iphone for so long
because ios itself is very smooth
without very much jank in its animations
so it's hard for me to show or explain
why having the screen be smoother is
really important when i scroll the text
stays readable instead of turning into a
blur things moving around on the screen
when you swipe around are just smoother
but mostly it feels like a direct
interaction with what's on the screen
because the phone can literally change
its refresh rate to match the movement
of my finger
just like a real piece of paper in the
real world accelerates faster when you
move your hand faster so many android
phones have had high refresh rate
screens for so long that i really think
it was overdue on pro iphones
i don't care about the excuses whatever
they are i think apple should have
figured this out sooner but i'm very
glad that it's here now and the
implementation is great
ios will watch third party apps and
adjust the frame rate of the screen to
match what they need for video or games
or whatever apple tells me that many
apps are going to get promotion
automatically and for those that don't
because of the way that they're
developed there's going to be an api
that they can update to one thing apple
didn't do with this screen is the thing
that android phones have had forever
which is an always on lock screen so you
can get glanceable information when the
phone is just sitting on a table i love
it apparently apple doesn't but i don't
know there's always next year now i
understand if this promotion refresh
rate stuff sounds like fuzzy premium
experience nice to have things right
but that's exactly what it is and that's
exactly what i expect out of a thousand
dollar phone
it's a no it when you see it kind of
feature
i definitely notice it and i think
phones without a higher fresh rate
screen feel
juddery
promotion is the perfect example of what
you get when you get the iphone 13 pro
and pro max instead of the regular
iphones
they're nicer but not in ways that might
be immediately obvious
the two big differentiators on the pro
phones this year are the camera and the
screen and both have improvements that
are
really only visible when you pay a lot
of attention so does all that mean that
the iphone 13 pro is an enthusiast phone
like the way android has had enthusiast
flagship phones for a while well
yes this is a phone for people who love
phones and look it is totally okay and
normal to not pay this much attention to
your phone but
maybe you do
i certainly do and i gotta tell you
i like what i see
hey everybody thanks so much for
watching of course there's a review of
the regular iphone 13 and the 13 mini
and i barely touched on ios 15 at all
but lucky for you heim gardenberg has
written a great review that's on
theverge.com