The iPhone 12, 12 mini and 12 Pro or Pro Max were the first iPhones of this newer Apple
design, released in 2020, and you might be surprised to hear that they are not all that
different from the current iPhone 14 line.
Let’s take a look at the Specs, performance, and features to see if an iPhone 12 makes
sense for you and where you can get one in 2023.
SO, this whole video came from the idea that I wanted to pick up an iPhone 12 Pro for a
couple of very specific reasons.
It has been some time since I have used an iPhone 12 Pro and I wanted it for some beta
testing and for an upcoming video that will feature…..well, I won’t tell you about
that yet….
But this iPhone 12 Pro got me thinking about the whole iPhone 12 line.
Let’s just start with where you can get them, today, and then I will tell you about
how they perform.
The iPhone 12 is the oldest iPhone that Apple still sells brand new on the Apple Store.
The 12 mini and 12 Pro are not options you can get new from Apple but there are options
for getting one, like I did.
You can pick up an iPhone 12 with 64GB of storage starting at $600 dollars directly
from Apple, which, honestly, is not bad for what you get as you will see later, but you
can do better!
You can pick up an iPhone 12 mini or 12 renewed from amazon right now starting at 300 dollars
for the mini and 400 dollars for the regular sized iPhone 12.
This mini and this 12 I have here are renewed devices and they came in fantastic condition,
I mean really good for a
couple year old used device.
Elaborate.....
For the 12 Pro, you can find a renewed version of that for about $560 on amazon and $669
for the Pro Max.
For the 12 Pro, I actually decided to pick one up from Apple’s refurbished site for
about $660 dollars, which is only $60 more than the cost of the iPhone 12 new from apple.
The difference between using refurb from apple and renewed from Amazon is going to come down
to the warranty and maybe the condition of the device.
The amazon devices usually have a 90 day warranty and the condition can be a range good to great.
With Apple refurb, the device basically looks brand new, has a battery with 100, or near
100% health, and has a full 1 year warranty from Apple.
All 3 of these devices came in great condition for the most part, this 12 could be a little
better, but if you recall, the iPhone 12 line is when Apple stopped including power adapters
with the iPhone so you will need to pick one up and that is where today’s sponsor comes
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So, the iPhone 12 line does not look that different from the iPhone 14 line and that
is because this flatter, squared off edge design started with the iPhone 12 and continues
today.
Of course this 14 Pro Max I have here has the dynamic island compared to the notch on
the 12 but other than that, it can be difficult finding a significant difference between them.
Of course, The design was not the only first for the iPhone 12 line, there are a lot of
things you will find on the iPhone 14 that started with the 12.
Starting with the front of the iPhone 12s, we have the Ceramic Shield covering the display
which apple says is 4x more resistant to breaking, and underneath, all of the iPhone 12s got
OLED displays for the first time with up to 1200 nits of peak brightness with HDR, the
exact same peak brightness as with the iPhone 14 and 14 plus.
Size wise, from the mini to the plus or max size they are 6.4”, 6.1”, and 6.7”
In most use cases, you can’t see a difference between the displays on the 12 and 12 Pro,
compared to the iPhone 14.
The displays look great.
On the back side, This is where MagSafe entered the iPhone line with up to 15w of wireless
charging using a MagSafe certified device, along with the squircle camera bump and camera
bezel bump, and …lens bump……Yep, 3 bumps.
But, it’s what’s in the bumps that matter and the cameras on the iPhone 12 line are
still great.
iPhone cameras have been generally great for years now to the point where it is really
hard to see the year over year differences between them.
Well, how about a 2 year difference between the 12 and 14…..
Sure there are some differences in focal distance and aperture but look at these and see what
you think…..
In this first photo of the flower bed, besides the slightly different framing, I really can't
tell the difference on my Mac.
In the second photo of the tree, I can see a difference in the dynamic range with the
14 Pro doing a bit better and the 12 has a bit of a bluish cast across the whole photo
You can see that also in this flower thing.
All cameras have some kind of bias but apple photos or lightroom or whatever can help clean
that up.
In this studio shot, the 12 tries to brighten it up a bit but the 14 likes to keep the shadows
a bit darker.
Cameras on any of these devices are good and for a point and shoot person you are not going
to see much difference.
Of course the Pro models do get a few more features like a zoom lens, OIS on more lenses,
Li-dar which can help with night shots, HDR, and pro raw with the 12 Pro, and the 14 pro
gets cinematic mode, action mode, macro, and maybe something else.
But for most people, for most photos the iPhone 12s are going to look great!
Now, on the inside of the iPhones is where it gets interesting.
This is where 5g just got real!
The iPhone 12 line was the first to get 5g wireless which was supposed to revolutionize
the world with high speed, low latency connections to allow doctors to remotely control robots
to perform surgery on your insides…..ya, that was the promise of 5G.
Well, almost 3 years later this revolution just hasn’t happened but sometimes you can
get faster speeds.
Depending on if you get connected to the ultra wide bands you can see multi gigabits per
second which allows you to do so much with your iPhone like downloading a podcast, watching
YouTube video, or scrolling instagram………wait……I don’t think you need 2gbps to look at instagram
or really anything that a phone does, but I guess it’s nice to have and you don’t
need an iPhone 14 to get it.
Battery life was probably one of the iPhone 12’s weak points.
I think the general consensus is that it was not as good as it should have been, especially
on the mini, and that the 13 line fixed most of those issues.
Apple says you should get 15-20 hours of video playback, depending on the model and I'm not
sure how to interpret that.
You may want to spend a couple dollars and pick up a magsafe battery pack for days that
you might need an extra boost.
And now the performance.
Before I show you this, how much faster do you think the iPhone 14 line is compared to
the iPhone 12 line?
It may surprise you because benchmarks don't always tell the full story.
The iPhone 12 line has the Apple A14 chip inside, all of the iPhone 12s have the same
chip with a 6 core processor and a 4 core gpu.
The 12 and 12 mini have 4gb of ram and the 12 pro has 6gb of memory.
The iPhone 14 has the A15 chip inside and the 14 Pro has the A16.
Both of them are 6 core processors with 5 GPU cores and 6gb of memory.
Looking at single core performance using geekbench 6, we can see that the iPhone 14 is only about
10 percent faster than the iPhone 12 and the 14 Pro is about 25% faster than the 12.
With multi-core you can see a bigger difference with the A15 being about 33% faster and the
A16 being about 50% faster.
And if we move to graphics, we can see about a 46% to 50% increase over the A13.
So clearly there is an upgrade in performance with the newer chips compared to what's in
the Iphone 12 line, but these are really just generic benchmarks that dont always equate
to real use.
In regular use of the iPhone 12 searching the web, checking email, scrolling twitter,
writing notes, calendaring, taking or editing photos, watching videos, listening to podcasts
or whatever it is you do with your iphone, it feels, the same as the iPhone 14.
It just does.
The graphics power of the iPhone 12 is so good that I didn't feel any slowdown or lag
when playing games like call of duty mobile, or NBA 2k23, or any other game.
The iPhone just plays…… and the day to day performance for everything you do will
be just fine.
I think that about covers the iPhone 12.
Are there some other differences between the 12 line and the 14?
Sure, like Satellite SOS, Pro Potion on the Pro, crash detection, or dynamic island, but
nothing that significantly changes the function or the use of the iPhone.
Whether you are on a budget or just don't care about having the latest and greatest,
the iPhone 12 line will do everything you need it to do.
So, what do you guys think?
Are you looking at picking up an iPhone 12?
Check my links and let us know below.
If you are interested in my thoughts on getting the M1 Macbook air now, check out this video
right over here.
Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it, hit subscribe if you want and I'll see you
next time,
iphone 14 has macro