Apple finally revealed their iPhone 13 lineup, but they conveniently left out many things
about both the regular iPhone 13’s and the 13 Pro’s, both good things and not so good.
Some of these will affect which iPhone model, storage options, and accessories you should buy
so make sure to pay attention as we go through everything we’ve found about these new phones.
The start with some simple ones, the first which is a bummer to me personally,
and that's the fact that All of the new iPhones are thicker and heavier this year.
The mini is only 5% heavier, and it was already lightweight so it doesn’t matter much,
the regular 13 is 6% heavier or 10 grams,
still not too bad, but the iPhone 13 Pro which was already heavy now weighs 204 grams,
or the same exact as the Note 20 ultra which is much larger with a huge battery and s-pen.
And the Pro Max which was already a big boy now weighs 240grams,
that's starting to get close to a Galaxy fold 3 or iPad Mini 6,
and that's thanks to a thicker stainless frame with bigger batteries and camera bumps.
Speaking of those bumps, Apple kept showing off renders of them but what they didn’t actually
mention is that they are massive and so much larger and thicker than the iPhone
13 camera bumps, which themselves are bigger than iPhone 12 models.
These things stick out so much that Apple is now putting rings on the outside of their cases
to protect the huge lenses, so if you’re someone who hates big bumps
or when your phone rocks on your desk keep that in mind.
On the flip side we have the notch which for the first time since its release in the iPhone X has
been changed. Apple said it's now 20% smaller thanks to a reduction in width, but what they
conveniently left out is that it is actually taller than it was before. I know something
looked off when I saw it and it reminded me of the hideous Pixel 3 unibrow, but now we know why.
Let's mention a few positives before we get into more negatives. If you’re someone that paid an arm
and a leg to replace broken or cracked back glass, Apple care can now be used to replace cracked
back glass for only $29 instead of the previous $100, or a massive $599 on an iPhone 13 Pro Max.
With that, these new iPhones now support dual esim’s,
so if you’d like you can finally skip using a sim card at all, but don’t expect 3 seperate to work.
With that, it looks like Apple is stopping shipping iPhone with sim cards altogether.
With even though Apple didn’t mention it, it does seem like they are using brand new 5G modems
on these iPhones for 2 reasons. The first the whole 13 lineup has additional bands,
which also means the 13 and 13 mini have the same exact data speeds as the Pro models,
but with that we’re seeing a good battery life improvement for streaming video which
likely means this new modem is a 5nm one like the snapdragon X60 or possibly a different one instead
of the power hungry X55 in the iPhone 12’s, but more on battery life discoveries in a bit.
And now onto something that I was extremely excited about, but after digging into fine
print I’m definitely way more disappointed, and that is the brand new cinematic video mode.
This is an absolute breakthrough in video tech that absolutely destroys what samsung
has been doing for a few years now. Instead of baking in this unnatural
blur that ruins your video when it goes off you can apply and adjust the effect
in post, and you can select if you want it to follow faces and rack focus automatically
or select people that you want to be the main focus, and even change focus between objects.
You can also adjust how much blur it adds so it doesn’t look too fake,
or completely remove it if the scene doesn't work out. There is nothing out there that matches this
level of control other than a real camera, so its no wonder that Apple spent so much time on it,
but there's just one catch they didn’t mention, and that's the fact that it
only work when shooting 1080P video and only at 30 frames per second.
Now I understand why much of the video looked soft when they showed it off, and I can understand why
its limited to 1080P, there's just so much data that needs to be processed and of course they’d
want to upsell you on the iPhone 14 Pro which will probably do it in 4K, but its still a
bummer to go back to 1080P after shooting 4K since the iPhone 6s, yea that was a while ago.
Now they also confirmed the long rumored ProRes recording making the
iPhone a more pro video device. They cleverly mentioned that the 13 Pro can shoot prores,
meaning the regular iPhone 13 can't, which is acceptable,
but they also snuck in that the 13 Pro can shoot cinematic video OR ProRes, meaning not both,
so you either get the cool blur or less compression artifacts, and there's one more catch.
If you buy an 128GB iPhone 13 Pro like I always do since I use icloud, they’re also
limiting that ProRes recording too 1080P like the cinematic mode, man, I guess 2021 is the
year of 1080P. If you want to shoot ProRes in 4K, you better cough up some extra cash for at least
256GB of storage, so yes this is a software limitation just to save you on storage space.
Now on the positive side, this year there thankfully no camera quality differences between
the 13 Pro and 13 Pro max like we had last year, so if you like the smaller size or want to save
$100 or put that towards extra storage your not going to lose out like you did with the 12 Pro.
With that, we’ll likely have the biggest camera quality differences than ever before between the
Pro and regular iphone 13’s. Just take another look at the size differences of the camera bumps.
Even though the 13 is inheriting the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s camera system with sensor stabilization
and the photos will be good, the Pro models are getting massive updates.
They have the new 3x zoom lenses with night mode capabilities,
the much upgraded ultrawide camera that not only captures a lot more light
but can now take insane macro shots which is not possible with the iPhone 13.
And even though Apple finally gave 4K 60 HDR video capture support to the 13,
which was just a software limitation before, we still don’t have
night mode portrait support which makes a massive difference in these kind of shots in low light.
If you guys want to see an ultra detailed camera comparison between the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro,
hit that subscribe button and with that you can help us reach our goal of 1 million subscribers,
we’d definitely appreciate it.
As you may have seen, the iPhone 13 gained 2.5 hour of battery life compared to the 12,
where as the 13 Pro only gained 1.5 hour. Now that's because the of the
new promotion display that can take more power,
but what Apple didnt’ specifically mention is that it can also use less power as well.
If we look at the detailed battery life specs, you’ll see that when watching video,
the 13 Pro actually gets 3 hours of extra video playback when reading from the device,
or up to 5 hours more when streaming than the iPhone 13. I’m not sure why theres a
bigger difference when streaming then from local storage, maybe because of the extra graphics being
more efficient, but the better battery life is definitely because of the new Promotion display
dropping all the way down to 10hz instead of being stuck at 60 like on the 13.
This means that when watching movies, the display can match
24 or 30fps to have less jutter and save battery, and the same thing for games. This is basically
like Gsync so if you’re playing at lower frame rates it will feel smoother and save you battery.
So basically even though Apple said the 13 will have better battery,
it really depends on what you do so don’t by the 13 just for that,
and with that they didn’t mention the amounts of RAM these phones have.
The 13 Pro still has 6GB while the 13 has 4GB, so unfortunately we don’t have any changes,
but we did get a change in processors which Apple was very sly with.
They were very vague in performance stating things like the fastest processor and better
than the competition, and that's because their not that much of an improvement from before,
probably the smallest upgrade in years only jumping from 4200 to 4800 multicore.
Thankfully on the graphics side, we have fairly good gains,
at least with the iPhone 13 Pro’s 5 core graphics. Leaked Geekbench metals scores
show 14,200 which is insane compared to the iPhone 12’s 9000 or close to 60%.
But if you go for the iPhone 13, that drops to 10,600 which isn’t really worth upgrading for,
so if you play games definitely go for the Pro model.
Now the last discovery is a bit of a funny one. iPhones have been fast charging to 50% in
30 min for many years now, but this year Apple didn’t mention that this is no longer the case
if you buy the 13 Pro Max. It will now take 35min to reach 50% with a 20W
power adapter because thats no longer enough to charge its bigger battery.
Now sure 5 extra min doesn’t matter, but what Apple also didn’t mention is
that the Pro Max can actually accept more than that, the 12 Pro Max accepted up to 23 watts,
so if you’re buying a fast charger for your Pro Max
pick up at least a 30 watt to get the fastest charging speed, I’ll link one down below.