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- Hey, what's up?
I'm MKBHD here, coming at you
from a hotel room in Cupertino, California
because today was Apple's September Event.
And this is your first look, your hands-on
and your impressions and honest thoughts
and everything you need to know about the iPhone 14 lineup.
And while the phones do look pretty similar to last year,
there is a lot of interesting stuff kind of tucked in
and I've got a lot of thoughts on it.
But as you might know, the September Event,
it is the iPhones and iPhone accessories.
And so, we did get new AirPods and a new set of watches,
including a new Apple Watch Ultra
that I also got hands-on time with,
that'll be a separate video,
I'll link it below the like button
so you can check it out when it's live,
or hopefully you're already subscribed here
with notifications turned on,
in which case, you'll see it right away.
But that's gonna be a different video.
But for now our new iPhones in 2022,
we have the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus,
and then the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max,
RIP to the mini iPhone, you had a good run.
So the new baseline iPhones,
as you can imagine are pretty similar.
It's just one is much bigger than the other one.
So the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus
have 6.1 inch and 6.7 inch displays respectively.
My prediction on waveform was that
all the prices would stay the same,
and that turned out to be correct.
So the iPhone 14 is 799
and the bigger 14 Plus is 899.
And really what you'll notice is these two phones
look very similar to last year,
with some bumps and refinements here and there, of course.
But they both have the same A15 Bionic chip as last year,
the same design, the same notch on the outside.
I'm actually convinced that a case
that fits the iPhone 13 will fit the iPhone 14.
But the green is gone and there is a new light blue
that matches my shirt extremely well.
But there's three main things that are new here,
the display, the cameras, and connectivity,
if that makes sense.
So the connectivity is the quirkiest one,
as you can imagine, you know how iPhones forever
have always had a little SIM card tray on the side?
Well, in the U.S., starting with the iPhone 14,
they will not have SIM card trays anymore,
they will be moving entirely to eSIM,
electronic SIM, which is fine, I guess,
I mean, they work well,
it's typically very easy to upgrade phones
or even swap between carriers.
But I have to wonder naturally if this is also going to act
as a little bit of an extra wall in the walled garden
because now how hard is it gonna be
to switch from an iPhone to a non iPhone?
Just something to think about.
But anyway, the iPhone 14's also got satellite connectivity
for SOS, and this is actually really impressive.
So in areas where you don't have any cellular connection
but you still need to send a message,
you will be able to talk to satellites
to still get a message sent.
So now satellite connectivity
is notoriously pretty difficult,
you'd need a big radio
or at least something with large external antennas
and you need an unobstructed view of the sky
and you have to point it directly at a satellite.
I mean, you've probably seen
what a Starlink dish looks like.
So now Apple's built this sensitivity
into the iPhone 14's antennas,
and they've actually built a piece of UI in
where it'll actually help you point directly at a satellite
and it will help you send that emergency message,
it'll actually package it up into a smaller format,
and within 30 seconds to one or two minutes,
it can send a message,
even when you have no cellular connectivity.
It's an edge case, hopefully, you'll never have to use it
but that is pretty cool that it can get it done.
And the details were,
it will be coming to the U.S. and Canada
launching later this year, and it'll be free for two years,
and then that's all we kind of know.
But as far as things you'll actually use every day,
the displays are the same size and resolutions as before
but they do get a bit brighter,
now, 1200 nits max for HDR content.
Everything else is the same.
And then there is a new camera system,
a larger 12 megapixel main sensor
with sensor shift stabilization,
a wider F1.5 aperture for better photos,
and hopefully better sensitivity in low light,
and there is a new 12 megapixel selfie camera
on the front with auto focus.
Plus they've introduced this whole new Photonic Engine,
again, they name everything,
but really that's just a better image processing pipeline
from end to end, which should improve, across the board,
low light sensitivity and nighttime photos,
things like that.
And there's also a new Action Mode feature in the camera
that does much more dramatic stabilization
on super shaky videos.
I definitely gotta try this out for myself,
it seems like it works best with certain types of shots
like the ones they use in their demos, but we'll see.
Basically, the way I see it
is these new iPhone 14s and 14 Pluses
are essentially an iPhone 13 Pro one year later,
minus the telephoto camera
and minus the ProMotion OLED dressed in aluminum.
Like it's a very familiar phone.
I guess on the plus side, pun intended,
having a larger iPhone with a 1080P 60 Hertz display
means they can promise that
this will be the best battery life ever
in an iPhone, this Plus,
and I'm pretty sure this Plus is gonna be a hit.
If I know anything about
regular people's phone buying decisions,
I think spending an extra hundred bucks
for a way bigger screen is a no brainer.
So that's 799 for the iPhone 14
and 899 for the 14 Plus,
which actually comes out a month later
in October for some reason.
But then we got the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max,
which have a little bit more going on.
It's still got all the new stuff
from the 14 and 14 Plus that I just talked about,
Satellite Connectivity, Action Mode in the camera,
it's even the same two sizes,
again, 6.1 inches and 6.7 inches.
But there are three new things here and those are,
a new A16 Bionic chip and an even bigger camera upgrade,
and then this thing called Dynamic Island.
We'll get to it.
So the A16 Bionic chip inside
is even more powerful and more efficient,
as you can imagine, it's now a 6-core chip
built on a 4 nanometer process.
They're quoting 40% better than the competition, sweet.
And there's also actually a slight display upgrade as well.
This is up to 2000 nits max brightness outdoors,
which is class leading and the Pro iPhones now, finally,
finally have an always on display,
so you can see still the time,
and if you have notifications
and even updated info on your widgets
while your phone is locked,
and just sitting around on a table or charging,
that I like a lot.
But the big upgrades, like I said,
are gonna be the camera and the cutout at the top.
Okay, so the camera system is all new and it is bigger.
Like you can tell just by looking at it
that everything in here is bigger,
it protrudes more off the back of the phone,
but, yeah, technically speaking,
this is the first time in about a decade
that we're actually getting a megapixel bump,
this is a new 48 megapixel main camera sensor
on the 14 Pros, so it's still gonna bend down
at two 12 megapixels for normal shots,
you'll get 12 megapixel images out of it,
but you'll hopefully be able to reap the benefits
of higher detail, better low light sensitivity
from a bigger sensor.
But also, if you want to shoot 48 megapixel photos,
you can, you just gotta shoot ProRAW,
then you'll get 48 megapixel shots.
And then they also added a new 2X button into the camera UI,
which might not seem like a big deal
but that turns out to just be an exact crop
using the middle 12 megapixels of the sensor itself.
So you can hit that 2X button to zoom in
basically with optical quality,
which is much better than before.
Plus you still have the further 3X telephoto lens.
The sun is setting real hardcore down here,
so sorry if I start to look orange
but I'm definitely looking forward
to testing out these cameras.
I've already been shooting a lot with the iPhone 13 Pro
on the new Auto Focus channel,
you might have seen that,
if you've subscribed you've noticed I've been experimenting
with the cameras over there, but it'll be interesting to see
if we notice the difference by starting to shoot those
with an iPhone 14 Pro
and also comparing it to things like the Pixel
and the S22 Ultras of the world.
But then, let's talk about this Dynamic Island thing.
So, okay, I kid you not, when they first announced this,
that they were gonna name it a Dynamic Island,
literally the entire theater like audibly laughed,
there was a laughter out loud from the crowd.
And I thought it was hilarious,
like, why would they name the pill?
But then they explained it and the more I've used it
and the more I've actually played with it
and understood it since, makes a lot of sense,
and I actually really like it.
So basically what's happening here
is Apple's shrunk down all the selfie camera
and the parts of the Face ID system down by about 30%.
And so, they'll fit in this pill-shaped cutout
in the top of the screen.
Fine, if they'd stopped here,
that would be an incredibly minor update.
I mean, it's literally just aesthetic, not worth mentioning
since we see selfie cutouts all the time for years now.
But then they went a step further with it.
So since it's an OLED
and you can turn off any pixels to appear pitch black,
they decided to play with
extending the edges of the pill with more UI.
So if you have ongoing notifications or live actions,
stuff like music playing or timers in the background,
or an Uber notification or whatever,
those will show up
and it has this nice little animation
to extend and shrink and move around the cutout,
and it works really, really well.
So then you can tap on the icon to open that app
and take action or you can actually hold down
to surface extra information for what's happening,
which basically just looks like the widget
that would be in your notifications,
just without having to pull down your notifications.
This is cool, it is pretty cool.
It works right away with a bunch of the stock Apple apps,
Apple Maps, the Timer, the Voicemails, and all that stuff.
But they say it'll also work with third-party apps.
Now this will be up to them
how fast they wanna implement it,
fingers crossed that my favorite apps,
like Spotify and things like that, get on it quickly.
We'll see.
But yeah, this immediately takes the whole pill cutout thing
to a new level.
The more I played around with it, the more I was impressed.
I was trying it with multiple background activities
happening at the same time,
and basically what happens is it would show both,
so let's say if you have a timer and maps navigation
and music playing all happening in the background,
the Dynamic Island would low key
turn into like a little multitasking UI
and let you quickly switch between these ongoing things.
It was already very intuitive.
It also just seems to be pretty generous
about where you're tapping.
So obviously, if you tap exactly on
just the camera cutout itself,
well, nothing will happen
because those aren't actual pixels,
it's just the camera cutout.
But your finger is big enough
that it naturally hits some of the pixels around the top
and the bottom of the cutout,
so it's still knows to respond
pretty much anytime you just tap the black bar.
And there's also some active pixels in between,
you can kind of see them at just the right angle.
So if you touch in there, it still responds,
it's really good.
I think a lot of people are gonna really love this.
You remember back in the day
when there was like all these really friendly wallpapers
that would take advantage of like a hole punch cutout
that would go viral 'cause it's like,
oh, that's a really thoughtful way
of hiding a hole on the screen.
This is just like a next level upgrade,
moving version of that, it's really thoughtful,
playful, friendly and intuitive.
So it's just a leveled up version of that.
So even if the cutout looks a little worse sometimes
when playing full screen videos or playing games,
I feel like it kind of makes up for it
by being so useful so often.
Also I hope this is the last time
I ever have to say the word Dynamic Island out loud.
It's stupid that they had to name it
but that's how Apple rolls, so they named it.
But yeah, that's the new Pro phones.
Also, there's this new purple color,
kind of a dull lavender type of purple,
but again, same prices as last year too,
999 and 1099 starting, and they go up to one terabyte.
There's not a lot of crazy, innovative hardware design
going on here, nothing's folding in half,
there's no super fast, high end, fast charging
or wireless charging,
it's just a bunch of little refinements again.
At this point, we know what the iPhone is,
Apple knows what the iPhone is,
and they tend to be late on the train
to picking up on things and then doing it in the Apple way,
that's pretty much exactly what's happening with the cutout.
And that's what the iPhone 14s are.
Also, they sneakily left
some of the 13s still in the lineup,
the 13 mini and the 13 baseline are still available,
if you want them, 599 for the 13 mini and 699 for the 13.
Now I don't have the new boxes yet
but I think it's pretty safe to assume
that none of the new boxes will have chargers in them
because they haven't for years now.
And that's where the sponsor of this video comes in, Anker.
You've heard of them.
So they've got these two things
that pair perfectly with the new iPhones,
the new Anker Nano 3 and the new 541 cable.
So the Nano 3 charges with gallium nitride,
which allows it to be way smaller.
This little brick is a 30 watt charger,
which is good for the iPhone or the iPad
or the watch or even the MacBook Air.
But it's literally 70% smaller than Apple's 30 watt brick.
And the USB-C to Lightning cable is the first I've seen
to use bio-based materials, including sugar cane and corn.
But it still feels exactly like a good high quality cable
because it is one, it's built to withstand 20,000 bends,
there's a three or six foot version,
and they both come in five colors,
including this lilac purple.
You can check 'em out at the link below
and pick up your own.
But that's been it for this hands-on
and the first look at the new lineup.
Let me know what you think of the new iPhones.
Honestly, I think regular people
are gonna love the Dynamic Island,
but let me know what your thoughts are,
and I also believe that the Plus is gonna be a hit.
But I'll see in the comments below
what you guys are feeling.
And also, of course,
check out the other videos when they come out,
link below, when I talk about the watch.
Okay, that's been it, thanks for watching,
catch you guys later, peace.
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