- Apple kind of surprised everyone
with the iPhone 14 Pro, right?
I mean, there had been tons of rumors
about the notch turning into a cutout, or two cutouts,
but no one was expecting the dynamic island.
And while it was getting clearer
that Apple would have to follow the rest of the industry
and using bigger camera sensors eventually,
I certainly wasn't expecting the company
to reboot the entire
iPhone computational photography system
as the Photonic Engine.
There's a lot of that sort of thing in the iPhone 14 Pro.
Apple's late to having an always on display,
but this one's way more on than other phones.
In the United States, Apple's going all in on Essen,
which no one else is really doing.
There's a basic satellite connectivity system,
which isn't quite like anything else we've heard about.
But Apple's going to ship millions of these phones,
with the service coming later this year.
All in all, there are more beginnings of big ideas
in the new iPhone 14 Pro
than we've seen in an iPhone for a long time.
That's the easiest way to think about the iPhone 14 pro,
it feels like the first step towards a lot of new things
for Apple and the iPhone,
and maybe the first glimpse
of an entirely new kind of iPhone.
But that doesn't mean all these things are perfect yet.
Let's take a look.
(bright music)
We have to start with a Dynamic Island, right?
The name is ridiculous, but it's fun.
Everyone's talking about it, which is not normal
for a smartphone status indicator system.
That's a win, that's where I live every day.
But let's just agree that we're gonna call it the island
and move on.
So the island replaces Apple's notch.
It's where the front camera and the face ID system lives,
since they've got to take up someplace
in the front of the display.
Here's the thing about the notch though,
in almost every review,
going back to the iPhone 10,
I've said, "Hey after a couple minutes,
"you don't notice the notch."
The island is different.
You are supposed to notice it.
It's located lower on the screen than the notch.
And if you run your phone in light mode, like I do,
it's actually a high contrast interface element.
It's a black pill shape in the middle of white screen.
It's right there.
You're going to see it.
Especially since it's animating and moving all the time.
Now it's better in dark mode.
In fact, I would go so far as to say
this is the first iPhone
you should definitely run in dark mode because of it.
So why did Apple go from the notch is there,
but you can all but ignore it, to the dynamic island is here
and you are going to pay attention to it?
Well, it turns out that over the years,
there have been like three or four
different status indicator systems added on to iOS.
Plugging in a charger or flipping the mute switch
brings up an overlay.
Having a call in the background
puts a green pill in the corner.
The maps app is a blue pill.
Connecting AirPods is another overlay.
Some things like timers and music playing in the background
haven't really had status indicators at all.
The island is Apple's way of replacing and unifying
all those older status systems
with a new home for system alerts,
and making it work for things like music
and the new live activities API
that's coming to iOS 16 later this year,
which will allow apps to share even more background info
for things like your flight status or a sports score.
The simplest way of understanding the island
is that it's basically a new widget system
built on top of that live activities API.
And the widgets can have three views,
the main view, this expanded view,
and this ultra minimal icon
when you've got two things going at once.
Here's a list Apple sent over
of all the things that will support the island at launch
before live activities arrives
and third parties can use it too.
So that's the concept.
The execution is obviously where the action is.
And like all first versions of anything,
Apple's made some choices that really work,
and some others that, eh.
So here's a big choice that really works,
and it's just like purely Apple.
One of the reasons that it's called the island
is that it's meant to float over the rest of the system.
It's a layer on top of iOS.
It's supposed to feel more like hardware than software,
almost like a secondary display
that can get bigger or smaller.
To get this to feel right,
apple's actually using a new
dynamic sub-pixel anti-aliasing system
that makes the edges of the island up to three times crisper
than all the other animations in iOS.
Here's a macro shot of the individual RGB sub-pixels
of the display being anti-aliased
to create a sharp edge for the island.
In normal room lighting, this really works.
It feels like the cutout on the display
is getting bigger and smaller.
And the animations like this drop effect
for when the island splits in two are super fun.
In sunlight or brighter light,
yeah, you can see the camera sensors,
and the illusion kind of goes away, but it's still cool.
Other big thing that works is that
moving all these disparate status indicators to the island
and making them worth paying attention to
is actually pretty great.
It's nice having call info right on the screen.
It's genuinely useful having your timers right there,
making things like Airdrop and Face ID
all show up in consistent ways in the same place
make those things easier to understand, which is great.
The thing that kills me is that in a keynote,
and in all the ads, Apple shows the island is a thing
that's worth interacting with.
It's always moving, and going back and forth
between the main view and the expanded view.
In reality, it is not like that at all.
The island isn't a primary interface element.
It sits over whatever app you're actually using.
And apps are still very much the main point of the iPhone.
In fact, tapping on the island
doesn't open that expanded view.
It just switches you back
to whatever app that controls the widget.
To get the expanded view, you have to tap and hold.
This feels exactly backwards to me.
Now Apple knows I feel this way.
The idea apparently
is that things should be as simple as possible.
And going back to the app is the simplest thing.
Nah, I don't know.
I think a tap should pop open the widget,
and I definitely think
you should at least be able to choose.
This is kind of the whole tension of the island.
It's much more noticeable and useful than the notch,
but you're not really supposed to interact with it.
It's background information.
All those questions about whether
you're gonna get fingerprints all over the camera,
like, well, as it stands,
you don't touch this thing very much at all.
But because it's so much more prominent,
you're looking at it all the time.
I'm using it with a bunch of apps that haven't been updated.
So it kind of covers up some content
because it sits lower on the display.
So right at the second,
the trade off between how noticeable it is
and how useful it is is a little out of whack.
It doesn't quite do enough to always be in the way.
Now I think all this might change
when that live activities API rolls out later this year,
which is the other big thing Apple did right.
It made this system available to third party developers.
But right now the dynamic island
feels like one of those things
that needs a year of refinement and developer attention
before we really know how important it is.
The big feature of the iPhone 14 Pro camera system
is the new 48 megapixel main camera sensor.
Apple's actually a few years late to this trend.
Samsung has used 108 megapixel sensors since 2020,
and Google added a 50 megapixel sensor
to the Pixel 6 Pro last year.
The basic idea is the same all around,
to take better photos,
you need to collect as much light as possible.
And to do that, you need bigger pixels.
But at some point making the pixels physically bigger
gets hard, so instead you just add a lot more pixels
and use software to group them into giant virtual pixels.
This whole thing is called pixel bidding.
And the math on Apple's bidding is straightforward.
It uses four pixels to create a single virtual pixel,
which means that 48 megapixel sensor
generally shoots 12 megapixel photos.
Apple's also reworked its entire photo processing pipeline
and rebranded it the Photonic Engine.
The big change here is that the deep fusion
pixel by pixel analysis that happens
in mid and low light now happens earlier
in the process on uncompressed data.
It's never really been easy to see how much it's doing.
And well, it's the same on the iPhone 14 Pro.
Honestly the 14 Pro and 13 Pro take really similar photos.
Here's Verge video producer, Mariya Abdulkaf
in a really dim bar.
The 14 Pro is a little cooler,
and it captures a tiny bit more detail at 100%,
but you really have to go looking for it.
These photos of Mariya outside look pretty much the same.
But if you zoom in,
you can see the 14 Pro is getting a bit more detail,
and it has a nicer background blur
because of the substantially larger sensor.
This is all really nice, but in Instagram sizes,
it is not particularly noticeable.
Here's that same photo on the Pixel 6 Pro, by the way,
you can see it captures even more detail
with its Pixel Bend 50 megapixel sensor,
along with a wider range of colors.
This is about as different as the Pixel
and the iPhone have been in a few years.
They both grab a lot of detail
and have great low light performance,
but the pixel six pro makes very different choices
about highlights and shadow,
while the iPhone is way more willing
to let highlights blow out,
and even let some natural vignetting creep in.
Both of these photos are terrific,
and the one you prefer is entirely down to
subjective preference.
Where the iPhone 14 Pro falls down
is really in the details of the processing.
Apple's been ramping up the amount of noise reduction
and sharpening over the years.
And the 14 Pro has the most aggressive sharpening
and noise reduction yet.
Sometimes it just looks bad.
This night skyline shot is kind of an over processed mess
compared to the Pixel.
Compared to the Samsung S22 Ultra,
the iPhone is a little less predictable.
The S22 Ultra consistently holds onto more color detail
in low light, and it's not as heavy handed
with that noise reduction and sharpening.
In bright light, the differences between the 14 Pro
and the S22 Ultra are more subtle,
but Samsung still does a better job with detail.
In true Samsung fashion though,
you get much punchier and warmer colors
compared to the more natural look of the iPhone.
I mean, look at these sunset photos.
Samsung's color ideas are sometimes
from an entirely different planet,
but photo for photo, the S22 Ultra is more consistent
with better fine detail.
Now Apple isn't just pixel bidding its sensor,
it's also cropping it to generate what it calls
an optical quality 2X zoom.
Basically it's just taking the middle 12 megapixels
off that 48 megapixel sensor.
If you shoot in pro route the full 48 mega pixels,
and just cut out the center of the image,
you don't get the same photo.
You don't get the benefit of pixel bidding in 2X mode,
so it gets into a little trouble in lower light situations,
but it's nice to have,
and it's a really nice middle ground between the standard
and the 3X tele.
That 2X crop is now the default for portrait mode,
which doesn't seem to have improved all that much.
Both the S22 Ultra,
and even the regular S22 take better portrait photos.
Samsung's really nailed cutting the subject
out of the background, down to individual strands of hair,
and 14 Pro isn't quite there yet.
You can also switch the whole camera to ProRAW mode,
and shoot in full 48 megapixel glory,
which generates massive DNG files
anywhere between 50 and 80 megs each.
If you're the sort of person who wants to do this,
this is incredibly exciting
but normal people should probably not shoot
48 megapixel photos on their phone.
The other big update is to video, but, you know,
I called in the expert for that.
- Hmm.
I'm just kind having a hard time telling the difference.
The iPhone 14 Pro, of course has great video.
I mean, colors are punchy, and bold,
with just the right amount of sharpness.
But all of the same could be said about the iPhone 13 Pro.
And outside of a much sharper image
in low light from the telephoto,
I'm not really seeing a large jump
in performance between the two.
But Apple has three gimmicks for us this year.
First, there's now an active mode
that is supposed to provide more stable footage.
The Pixel 6 Pro had a similar feature,
but I find that video footage from most flagship phones
in 2022 is already pretty stable,
certainly stable enough for mobile viewing.
So I never used it there, and I probably won't use it here.
Second, there's this sort of smooth zoom feature
that smooths out the transitions
when you're switching between lenses.
It's cool once you notice it,
but I think the most folks won't notice it at all.
And lastly, there's 4k cinematic mode.
It blurs the background just well enough
that I actually found myself always trying that mode first
when filming a video of a person's face.
With anything else, I mean, plants, signs, forget about it,
it's just not that smart yet.
But does it matter that it's in 4k?
For me, it kind of does,
but I'm a person who's gonna take that footage into premier.
Anyone else?
I don't think it matters.
Overall though, the 14 Pro's video is not upgrade worthy
if you're coming from an iPhone 13 Pro.
And I think it would've been a little bit more beneficial
if Apple spent more time attempting to get rid of
all of those light reflections at night.
And you know, Apple while you're at it,
why don't you add a button to your native camera app
that allows you to switch between the front facing camera
and the rear camera when you're filming a video?
I mean, Samsung has had this feature
for as long as I can remember.
It's time the iPhone gets it too.
Okay, back to the review.
- Apple's made some other big changes to the iPhone 14 Pro.
The phone now has an always on display mode,
which Android phones have had always on displays
for a long time now.
It's fine.
The display refresh drops to just one hertz,
and the brightness goes super low to say battery life.
Apple's done some really nice work here
to keep wallpaper colors accurate in the low power mode.
But honestly, I've been fooled into thinking
my phone is awake one too many times,
and I might prefer a much simpler pixel style
black and white clock.
I hope we see some customization options here in the future.
Other than that, the display is slightly brighter
than before, it can hit a peak brightness of 1600 nits
up from 1200 in 13 Pro.
And in bright sunlight,
it can go all the way up to 2,000 nits.
You all know I think Apple's mobile displays
are consistently the best in industry,
and it's no different here.
This is the part of the video
where I'd usually talk about connectivity.
But, you know, can we all just admit
that the 5G hype balloon basically popped.
Like I turn it off and just use LTE
because those networks are less congested, sorry.
Let me know when the self-driving cars
are doing robot surgery or whatever.
Anyway, Apple's made a big move to drop SIM trays
from iPhones in the United States,
which means it's time everyone got used to eSIM,
which lets you access mobile networks
without needing a physical SIM card.
You can sign up for up to eight different networks
on the iPhone 14s.
It's pretty rad.
My iPhone 14 Pro transferred my AT&T account
over from my 13, right over Bluetooth.
And I added my GoogleFi account with just a handful of taps.
Now it's not nearly as easy to move eSIM info
from iPhones to Android phones and back again.
And carriers are certainly gonna place some
weirdo lock-in games here, because they're carriers,
and weirdo lock-in games are kind of why they exist.
But being able to add new networks
quickly and easily to your phone also theoretically means
we can all force the carriers to compete a little more.
That's definitely a good thing.
Speaking of connectivity,
Apple's emergency satellite connectivity system
isn't rolling out until later this year.
But Allison got an early demo on the Apple campus,
and it looks pretty slick.
The system walks you through a series of questions
to help first responders understand your situation.
Then it shows you where to point the phone
to access satellite.
We've got way more on that in her review of the iPhone 14.
Speaking of Allison,
she's also been testing the iPhone 14 Pro,
while Becca and I have tested the iPhone 14 Pro Max.
And all three of us sort of feel like the battery runs down
a little bit faster than the 13 Pro.
Now, to be fair, all three of us were running around
taking lots of photos and videos,
and generally testing the hell out of these phones
for the past week.
But you know, we test a lot of phones like that.
Apple says the 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max
should gets slightly better battery life than the 13 Pros.
And yeah, I still got through a full day with a 14 Pro Max.
So maybe it was just the always on display taking a toll.
But it's something I'll be keeping my eye on in the future.
So that's the iPhone 14 Pro.
The way I've been thinking about it
is that the iPhone 13 Pro
was the culmination of a lot of ideas for Apple.
It was confident and complete and kind of hard to criticize.
The iPhone 14 Pro on the other hand
is the clear beginning of lots of new ideas,
like the dynamic island, the new camera,
even that satellite connectivity system.
Because these ideas are new,
they're inherently incomplete, so there's lots to criticize.
But they're worth criticizing,
which is its own kind of victory,
and a sign that Apple isn't holding still
with the future of the iPhone.
I'm into that.
What I don't know is if all these new features
are worth it yet.
If you're the sort of person
who's willing to accept some rough edges
to be on the bleeding edge,
you're gonna have a lot of fun with the iPhone 14 Pro.
You'll be figuring it out right alongside Apple.
But for everyone else, might be worth holding off of a year.
- Look at these clouds.
Oh my God.
Look at that.
Look at those.
Oh my God.
This stuff over here.
Come on.
That is just so special.