You know, I've been using this iPhone 13 Pro for a full two months, every single day,
day in day out and i've learned a lot and in this long-term review we're going to completely ignore
the hype machine and only go off of real world usage. So by the end of this video
you WILL know whether the iPhone 13 pro is worth your hard earned cash. I think we'll
start with the part of this phone that i think is probably the most overhyped from its release...
and i am talking about the 120 hertz display. Technically speaking, a 120hz display should seem
much much smoother than the standard 60hz display of pretty much every other iPhone
that's ever come out, but in reality when we're talking about iPhone screen to iPhone screen,
there's truly not much of a difference at all and even despite what many of the reviewers have said
going from a 120hz screen back to an older 60hz screen -- they all said that you'd definitely
notice then -- and truly, truly it's just not that big of a deal. But what has been great
is that the screen can intelligently drop all the way down to 10hz when it needs to,
which has been SO great for battery life, but we'll talk more about battery life in a second,
you're going to want to hear that. And to finish off my thoughts on the screen,
the fact that it has HDR is is nice, like it's a cool feature to have, but i feel like it's just
one step above being gimmicky at this point. However, this phone can go up to 1000 nits for
screen brightness, which by the way is very, very bright and all the way up to 1200 nits when it is,
you know, showing some specular highlights in HDR mode. And that general screen brightness is truly
great. Like when i'm out in full sun and i need to see the phone screen, you can see it easily
under full sunlight and it's leaps and bounds ahead of the iPhone 8 i was using before this.
Battery life. The battery life is so, so good it -- really is incredible.
Let me put it this way: I essentially never have to consciously think about charging this phone.
You know how normally every night you when you go to bed you'll put your phone on the charger
to make sure it's got full juice for the next morning, otherwise it'd basically be dead before
you woke up? Well i never really have to think about that and oftentimes when i forget my phone
out in the living room or down in the studio i just leave it there because i know in the
morning it's still gonna have plenty of juice for the first part of the day at the very very least
now one feature on most newer phones in the last couple years that has been a notorious battery
drainer has been 5g and yes i can report on the 12 and 12 pro 5g absolutely decimated the battery
life so fast on those but what's great is on these new phones with the new antennas bigger batteries
i have not noticed that at all battery life has remained absolutely fantastic even on 5g even when
you're running google maps it's been fantastic so far... did i say fantastic enough times?
Now i know when you put these things on a speed test 5g versus LTE that the speed differences
are massive but will you notice going from a non 5g phone to a 5g phone as far as speeds go and
in normal usage not really no i'd say the one time when i've so far that i've really noticed
5g speeds is we were going on a road trip and i wanted to download a few podcasts really really
quickly because i knew we were going to go to service range soon and i had to do a bit of a
double take on how fast they actually downloaded so that was nice i did notice there but for the
most part not a huge difference now if we are talking about speed we have to talk about the A15
Bionic chip in these phones as well things will run a little bit more smoothly apps might open
a little bit quicker but again you're probably not gonna notice especially not over something
like an A14 Bionic or even an A13 bionic they're all really really fast and really really smooth
If you're coming from well... any previous iPhone this is probably going to feel a
little bit weighty at first it's it's kind of a chunky phone but funny enough i've
really grown to love the weight of it kind of like when i hold like a Leica M2 film camera
it's a tank but there's something about the weight of that that really just
strikes me as being a professional tool to create things and so yeah weirdly enough i like the
weight of this phone despite being significantly heavier than any other phone that i've ever had
so this next one is a biggie and before we get into the camera systems of this phone i want to
get into the exterior body of the whole thing and i'm going to start with the external part of this
phone that i hate the most yeah this camera bump it is huge and honestly i feel like the only phone
design to really get this right lately is the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro it pains me to say that
but it's true they've got that bar all the way across and the reason why this bothers
me is you put it down on the counter like most people do say at work and if they're
like picking away at an app here and there it's really really annoying and
also really loud now thankfully other than this one situation you're not really gonna
notice the camera bump when you're putting it in and out of your pocket it doesn't catch um
it's not weird to hold everything's totally fine so maybe i'm being a little bit nit-picky but um
that is my job and you know terrifyingly enough this phone has never once been in
a case since i bought it two full months of pretty hard use the phone has been lightly dropped it's
been put in pockets with keys i've shoved it into camelbacks with a whole bunch of other stuff while
i've been mountain biking down like single black and double black diamond mountain bike trails
and this phone still looks brand new even on the typical like high wear surface areas you
know like on the bottom edge here or on the bottom edge of that ridiculous camera bump that's where
the phone gets put down over and over and over again onto all kinds of surfaces and honestly i
cannot find one fault on this phone after two full months of use nothing nada i am super impressed
all right camera system and first off i just i just cannot believe that apple left out two
of the most basic yet the such essential features out of their native camera app it makes me so mad
but we'll talk about that in one second i have taken nearly a thousand photos and videos over
the last couple of months in pretty much every situation you can imagine and throughout all
that i can confidently say that i have never seen better images out of one of my smartphones before
ever in my life and in my opinion yes that is even true if you're coming from a 12 pro or even from
one of the newer flagships like the pixel 6 pro you would probably agree with that right Degju?
and especially older phones like say the iPhone 7 or the iPhone 8.
this camera system will absolutely blow the doors off of it. So with the three
lenses on the phone it is a 13 a 26 and a 77 millimeter lens set i guess you could say
and between those three i would say it's it's probably one of the most usable sets of lenses
there are other phones out there with you know super long zooms and teles and things like that
and honestly for me i think i would use them like once or twice a year whereas i use all
three lenses out of this phone pretty much all the time but i would personally love to see the main
camera sensor and lens which is a 26 millimeter equivalent lens i would love to see it closer to
a 30 or a 35 millimeter equivalent lens i often find that the main camera is just a little bit
too wide for most situations and that's got the sensor shift technology it's got the best sensor
and so that's the one i want to use the most now back when pretty much all smartphones only had one
lens having that pretty wide field of view made a lot of sense because you only had one lens to work
with but now that you've got an ultra wide that you can always crop in on if you really wanted to
i would just love to see a little bit tighter of a lens for that main shot between the larger
apertures and larger sensors and keeping the pixel density nice and low by staying at 12 megapixel
for all three sensors which actually is a really nice thing by the way but we'll get into that in
a different video it really seems as though apple listened to what photographers and videographers
like myself not only wanted but needed in order to actually trust the cameras and sensors on a device
like this to make our art to make our creations case in point i just went on a filming road trip
from my other channel lone ranger and i've been so impressed by the camera on the iPhone 13 Pro
that i actually left both of my main cameras at home and only use the 13 Pro for all of my
third party shots and the thumbnail photos but having said that when it came time to get those
very critical shots or when i had to get a very specific shot for like a thumbnail image i had to
dive into third-party apps and remember when i was complaining at the beginning of this segment about
them missing two such critical things in their native camera app well this is where those come in
and what i'm talking about is the ability to change shutter speed and white balance i don't
want to get too far into the weeds with this but it just boggles my mind that even on apple's you
know pro phones they couldn't include those two super simple adjustments in their native camera
app so when i want to get the exact shutter speed that i need to shoot nice good quality
video i've got to go into something like filmic pro which is a pricey app or when i want to shoot
a thumbnail image and i need you know say eight hundredths of a second or a thousandth of a second
and no slower than that i've got to use an app say like moment app it's workable but again i
just don't really understand why those things aren't there but beyond that they have given
us some fantastic camera hardware a plethora of resolutions and frame rates and bitrates
and color spaces it's a pretty solid device to create some pretty awesome visual content
so should you buy this phone well if you've got the cache laying around and you want the
best apple flagship phone well it's a no-brainer just go buy it but i'm willing to bet most people
watching this video aren't in that situation now if you don't have a thousand dollars burning a
hole in your pocket and you want to make sure that this purchase is really really worth it for you it
really comes down to this if your main intention with this phone is to create things with it and
you need to squeeze every ounce of quality out of those cameras and sensors that you possibly
can from a smartphone this is probably the phone for you however if you're mainly consuming content
on this phone and you're just taking regular everyday picks and video then you may want to
look at the iPhone 13 or the iPhone 12 or 12 Pro because in this case you can probably get
the phone with all of the tech that you would need and use on a daily basis without having to
spend the extra cash for those pro features that you may not use thanks for watching everybody
consider subscribing if you haven't already and we'll see on the next review video cheers