The Transition to 5G: A Mixed Bag for iPhone 12 Users

As we move towards a world where 3G is becoming increasingly outdated, and the promise of 5G is becoming more accessible, it's natural to expect faster speeds, lower latency, and a better overall mobile connection experience. However, in the US, the rollout of 5G has been slower than expected, leaving many users disappointed.

During my recent vacation at Disney World, I was eager to test out the iPhone 12's 5G capabilities, but unfortunately, it was not available everywhere. In fact, I was stuck with LTE for most of the trip, which made it difficult to take full advantage of the device's features, such as ordering food, making reservations, checking wait times at different rides, and even viewing photos taken throughout the day. The lack of a reliable 5G connection was particularly frustrating in a theme park like Disney World, where cell connectivity is essential.

When I returned home to Chicago and tested the iPhone 12's 5G capabilities for the first time, I was underwhelmed. In my tests, I found that I was getting at best the same speeds as an LTE connection and often significantly worse. While this may not be a deal-breaker for everyone, it's certainly disappointing considering the promises of 5G.

One notable feature of the iPhone 12 Pro is the pill-shaped cutout on the back, which houses the millimeter wave antenna. Millimeter wave is designed to provide high-speed connections in small areas with high congestion, such as stadiums, airports, or theme parks. However, this technology is not widely available in most parts of the country, and even when it is, the speeds are often limited.

Despite these limitations, Apple has made significant strides in terms of battery life on the iPhone 12 Pro. In my testing, I was able to get all-day battery life, even with heavy usage of GPS-heavy apps, the camera, and other resource-intensive features. This is a welcome relief for users who were previously plagued by poor battery life.

For me personally, the refreshed design of the iPhone 12 Pro is a major draw. After years of incremental updates, the new industrial look is a breath of fresh air. The shiny body with frosted glass over aluminum is not only visually appealing but also feels premium in the hand. I'm particularly fond of the option for a third camera lens, which may not be as impressive as the other two, but is still a nice feature to have.

Another highlight of the iPhone 12 Pro is its ability to record 4K video at 60 frames per second with Dolby Vision HDR. For users who work with video, this is a major advantage. Additionally, I'm excited to see how Pro Raw will perform on the new Pro devices later this year when Apple finally launches it.

Ultimately, while the iPhone 12 Pro has some notable drawbacks, such as the limited availability of 5G in most areas, the overall package is still an incredibly powerful and capable device. If you're considering purchasing a smartphone and want to future-proof yourself for the next few years, the iPhone 12 Pro may be worth the extra cost.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on everybody ian here for code the mac and back in 2012 apple released what would arguably become my favorite iphone this guy the iphone 5. it looked great felt great in the hand it was just kind of a really futuristic looking device and it moved us from a world of 3g to lte and now 8 years later apple is kind of revisiting that same playbook except now with the iphone 12 series they're doing the same thing just turned up a little bit now i had the pleasure of using this for a little over a week now took it on my family vacation to disney world to really put it through its paces and i have to say i think this may be my new favorite iphone and a lot of it has to come down to the fact that this iphone looks and feels a lot like the old iphone except made more modern made more futuristic and definitely polished up quite a bit now one of the big reasons that i love the iphone 12 pro is the overall design of it much like the iphone 5 sharp boxy edgy design the iphone 12 lineup ditches the rounded bubbly nature of the 6 through 11 lineup really and brings us back into this boxy squared off design that i've really loved for a long time the difference being that back in 2012 the iphone 5 featured an almost all aluminum body and those chamfered edges to really make it feel better in the hand but the iphone 12 pro apple has ditched all of that in favor of a super highly polished stainless steel body as well as an all glass back with this nice matte texture that really feels great in the hand and for as great as the iphone 12 pro looks in pictures and videos seeing it in person and actually holding it in your hand makes it that much better and whether you want something more understated like the graphite or the silver option or something a little more flashy like the gold model or this pacific blue color which is the color of the year in their pro lineup there's kind of a device that can fit any personal taste or personal aesthetic as far as your smartphone goes regardless of which color option you prefer the 12 pro has a very premium feel and part of that has to do with the fact that it is a little bit heavy now if you're coming from an iphone 10 or newer device or one of the plus models of the older phones the weight of the 12 pro won't be quite as shocking but if you're coming from something like a six a seven an eight or maybe even the new se the weight of the 12 pro is going to be a huge jump now the flat edge design of the iphone 12 pro does make it feel a little bit bigger in the hand compared to the 11 pro the 12 pro actually feels like a thicker device but in a true side to side comparison they're effectively the same one difference though is the fact that the 12 pro is a little bit taller from bottom to top making the whole device a little bit larger bringing the screen size up from 5.8 inches up to 6.1 inches the fact that the sides of the device are flat also allows the screen to go out a little bit closer to the edge helping to add to that 3 10 of an inch increase now that three tenths of an inch wasn't a huge jump in overall size but i did notice myself stretching a little bit from time to time trying to reach a button the good news though is the fact that because of the dice has these flat sides holding it is a little bit easier it's a little more comfortable and i felt a little more confident which meant that i was okay reaching across the device to tap a button or do something on the opposite side of the screen without worrying that i might drop it now one final aesthetic thing to note is the fact that the 12 pro has this stainless steel band around it which is a huge fingerprint magnet so if you're somebody who really doesn't like to see fingerprints on your device this one's probably going to make you pretty sad the regular 12 and the upcoming 12 mini do have an aluminum side on them which would be better at preventing fingerprints but the trade-off is the fact that on the back of the 12 pro you get this nice kind of frosted matte glass whereas on the regular 12 and 12 mini it's going to be a polished shiny glass which means it's also going to collect fingerprints now for me personally i don't really look at the sides or back of my device with any kind of frequency so it really didn't bother me but one thing on the back of the device that i did notice is the new camera system and if you're anything like me one of the big reasons you want to upgrade your phone every year is for those camera improvements and while this year's camera improvements are only a slight iteration on last year's 11 pro if you're on a device older than an 11 or an 11 pro the updates here in the 12 pro are huge now the camera system was one of those things that i definitely noticed over the course of our vacation times when i wanted to take a photo inside where there was a little bit lower light the iphone 12 pro performed amazingly it was quicker to take photos low light shots took less time to actually take the shot so instead of being like a three second night shot it was now a two second or a second and a half night shot meaning that i was going to get better photos with less time less blur and less green now some of those improvements are thanks to the slightly wider aperture on the main lens as well as the new lidar sensor which helps for faster focusing and depth sensing in lower light situations the improvements to the ultrawide sensor also another thing that i definitely noticed in this year's camera with last year's 11 pro taking a photo with the ultra wide in anything other than bright sunlight basically resulted in really dark kind of vignetted images with lots of noise lots of green but on the 12 pro the sensor is both improved and it now supports night shots which allow you to take pictures in much lower light and actually get something that's usable and with much better color much better overall clarity and accuracy and just something that looks much more appealing now the third lens on the back of this the telephoto is one thing that really differentiates the 12 pro from the regular 12. and while there weren't many significant differences between the 11 pros telephoto lens and the 12 pro telephoto lens having that option there in itself really made it nice to have that new perspective that different perspective when taking shots it also enables you to do some other things with portrait mode to get two different portrait mode zoom levels depending on what your needs are and portrait mode is definitely improved on the 12 pro with the lidar sensor helping to kind of sense where things are in a scene so you don't end up with weird cutouts around glasses or arms or in hair and instead you end up with really really satisfying really really well done portrait mode shots unlike what we've seen in some of the past years which is a huge benefit for people who take a lot of photos with their phone the final major camera improvement to discuss has to do with video and that's because the iphone 12 pro now supports dolby vision hdr now without getting into all the technical details what it really means is you can shoot video with the iphone 12 pro at 4k 60 frames a second and enjoy the benefits of hdr like brighter brights darker darks and overall a wider range of colors this makes things look that much more lifelike and that much more realistic compared to last year's iphone 11 pro you can definitely see the difference especially when you're shooting things that have bright lights or the sun in them or a really deep shadow you get a lot more detail on the iphone 12 pro than you have in any device in the past now outside of the new design and the updated camera stuff a lot of things that change with the 12 pro are actually fairly marginal first off there's the fact that now the starting storage capacity is 128 gigabytes meaning that if you were to compare it to last year's 11 pro or even this year's 12 you get double the storage at that base tier meaning you have room for more photos more videos or more apps on top of that the iphone also continues to get faster this year rocking the a14 bionic chip but in reality i never felt like the a13 in my 11 pro was any kind of slouch or couldn't handle things so the fact that the 14 is faster and has a better neural engine really just means it can do more processing on device for things like photos and videos than for any other really heavy intensive type tasks another relatively minor change this year is the addition of apple's new magsafe technology in the iphone 12 lineup now while i don't necessarily love the fact that apple has taken the magsafe name which i love from their old laptops and repurposed it into a wireless charging technology the fact of the matter is it's kind of cool to have a really easy really convenient way to wirelessly charge your device without having something plugged directly into the lightning port freeing that up for things like headphones or microphones if that's something you're into and also allowing you to still use your device while it's wirelessly charging and not put as much strain on those cables magsafe is pretty simple to use you just take the wireless charging puck stick it on the back of your device and thanks to a ring of magnets in the back of the phone or in apple's cases that support magsafe things will just automatically line up and allow you to charge at up to 15 watts now the only drawback to that is the fact that the charger in the box for the iphone 12 and 12 pro is a usbc to lightning cable meaning you're going to have to drop at least 40 bucks to get in the door on the magsafe technology but it does kind of add a little bit of convenience if that's something you're into now the final kind of tentpole feature of the iphone 12 lineup is the fact that they're once again giving us some new cell capabilities now back with the iphone 5 they basically added lte to a 3g world and took a few years for that to really catch on now with the iphone 12 this year they're doing the same thing but they're moving us from lte to 5g and the promise of 5g sounds really great faster speeds less latency things that make using the mobile connection on your device that much better unfortunately in the us at least 5g is just really not there over the course of our entire vacation it would have been great to have a better more reliable cell phone signal but instead i was stuck with lte the entire time and that's at disney world where a cell connection really is kind of imperative for things like ordering food making reservations checking the status of wait times at different rides and even looking at different photos that have been taken over the course of the day in fact i wasn't even able to test a 5g connection with this phone until i made it back home to chicago and when i did the results were actually pretty surprising most of the time in my tests i was able to get at best the same speeds as an lte connection and often times significantly worse so while i think the promise of 5g is definitely there and having 5g available in the future is really nice i definitely would not buy a 12 or 12 pro based on where 5g is now but instead maybe buy it as something to future proof yourself if you're going to hang on to this phone for a couple of years now one other thing worth mentioning as far as the 5g connection is that on the us models of the phone there's this pill shaped cutout and that's for the millimeter wave antenna millimeter wave is basically a really short range really high speed connection that's really kind of designed for implementing in very small areas things like baseball stadiums airports or really big tourist locations like a theme park and the idea here is they can offer this crazy fast speed but again it's only in spots where there's a lot of congestion a lot of people possibly using their device and that speed is really critical now one side effect of 5g and most phones on the market right now is the fact that it takes a huge toll on the battery life of those devices but apple's done some really great hardware and software integration to make 5g on the iphone 12 lineup really not have a huge impact on the battery and in my testing i've been able to get all-day battery life time and time again now in the past i've often found that using my device on vacation led to needing to charge you know midday or bring a power block with me so i could kind of top my battery up but the 12 pro i was able to use it all day every day in full sun bouncing between gps heavy apps and the camera and never really have to worry about the battery life impacting whether i was able to do something later on in the day in fact of the six days that i was there i only had one day where i plugged in before the day was out and that was really just to top it up because i knew we were going to be out a little bit later now ultimately the iphone 12 pro to me is an absolutely incredible device after three years of the iphone 6 style design followed by three more years of the iphone 10 style design which basically looked like the six style design the refreshed industrial look of the iphone 12 pro is just really really welcoming and for a device that's considered kind of a premium device the iphone 12 pro is just about as premium as you can get when it comes to a smartphone now for me personally i just prefer the look of the iphone 12 pro i love the shiny body with the frosted glass over the aluminum body with the shiny glass i think it just looks really really good on top of that i really like having the option for the third camera it's something that you can't get on the 12 but you get on the 12 pro even if that third camera isn't as impressive as the other two it's nice to have that option available on top of that the fact that you can do 4k 60 with the dolby vision hdr is really nice because i do a lot of video stuff and i also am really excited to see what pro raw looks like on the pro devices later this year when apple finally launches that and all those things together really make the 12 pro just worth that extra little bit over the iphone 12. let me know what you guys think in the comments down below while you're down there be sure to give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you're not already hit the notification bell so you don't miss any uploads until next time i'm ian for called the mac i'll catch you in the next one youwhat's going on everybody ian here for code the mac and back in 2012 apple released what would arguably become my favorite iphone this guy the iphone 5. it looked great felt great in the hand it was just kind of a really futuristic looking device and it moved us from a world of 3g to lte and now 8 years later apple is kind of revisiting that same playbook except now with the iphone 12 series they're doing the same thing just turned up a little bit now i had the pleasure of using this for a little over a week now took it on my family vacation to disney world to really put it through its paces and i have to say i think this may be my new favorite iphone and a lot of it has to come down to the fact that this iphone looks and feels a lot like the old iphone except made more modern made more futuristic and definitely polished up quite a bit now one of the big reasons that i love the iphone 12 pro is the overall design of it much like the iphone 5 sharp boxy edgy design the iphone 12 lineup ditches the rounded bubbly nature of the 6 through 11 lineup really and brings us back into this boxy squared off design that i've really loved for a long time the difference being that back in 2012 the iphone 5 featured an almost all aluminum body and those chamfered edges to really make it feel better in the hand but the iphone 12 pro apple has ditched all of that in favor of a super highly polished stainless steel body as well as an all glass back with this nice matte texture that really feels great in the hand and for as great as the iphone 12 pro looks in pictures and videos seeing it in person and actually holding it in your hand makes it that much better and whether you want something more understated like the graphite or the silver option or something a little more flashy like the gold model or this pacific blue color which is the color of the year in their pro lineup there's kind of a device that can fit any personal taste or personal aesthetic as far as your smartphone goes regardless of which color option you prefer the 12 pro has a very premium feel and part of that has to do with the fact that it is a little bit heavy now if you're coming from an iphone 10 or newer device or one of the plus models of the older phones the weight of the 12 pro won't be quite as shocking but if you're coming from something like a six a seven an eight or maybe even the new se the weight of the 12 pro is going to be a huge jump now the flat edge design of the iphone 12 pro does make it feel a little bit bigger in the hand compared to the 11 pro the 12 pro actually feels like a thicker device but in a true side to side comparison they're effectively the same one difference though is the fact that the 12 pro is a little bit taller from bottom to top making the whole device a little bit larger bringing the screen size up from 5.8 inches up to 6.1 inches the fact that the sides of the device are flat also allows the screen to go out a little bit closer to the edge helping to add to that 3 10 of an inch increase now that three tenths of an inch wasn't a huge jump in overall size but i did notice myself stretching a little bit from time to time trying to reach a button the good news though is the fact that because of the dice has these flat sides holding it is a little bit easier it's a little more comfortable and i felt a little more confident which meant that i was okay reaching across the device to tap a button or do something on the opposite side of the screen without worrying that i might drop it now one final aesthetic thing to note is the fact that the 12 pro has this stainless steel band around it which is a huge fingerprint magnet so if you're somebody who really doesn't like to see fingerprints on your device this one's probably going to make you pretty sad the regular 12 and the upcoming 12 mini do have an aluminum side on them which would be better at preventing fingerprints but the trade-off is the fact that on the back of the 12 pro you get this nice kind of frosted matte glass whereas on the regular 12 and 12 mini it's going to be a polished shiny glass which means it's also going to collect fingerprints now for me personally i don't really look at the sides or back of my device with any kind of frequency so it really didn't bother me but one thing on the back of the device that i did notice is the new camera system and if you're anything like me one of the big reasons you want to upgrade your phone every year is for those camera improvements and while this year's camera improvements are only a slight iteration on last year's 11 pro if you're on a device older than an 11 or an 11 pro the updates here in the 12 pro are huge now the camera system was one of those things that i definitely noticed over the course of our vacation times when i wanted to take a photo inside where there was a little bit lower light the iphone 12 pro performed amazingly it was quicker to take photos low light shots took less time to actually take the shot so instead of being like a three second night shot it was now a two second or a second and a half night shot meaning that i was going to get better photos with less time less blur and less green now some of those improvements are thanks to the slightly wider aperture on the main lens as well as the new lidar sensor which helps for faster focusing and depth sensing in lower light situations the improvements to the ultrawide sensor also another thing that i definitely noticed in this year's camera with last year's 11 pro taking a photo with the ultra wide in anything other than bright sunlight basically resulted in really dark kind of vignetted images with lots of noise lots of green but on the 12 pro the sensor is both improved and it now supports night shots which allow you to take pictures in much lower light and actually get something that's usable and with much better color much better overall clarity and accuracy and just something that looks much more appealing now the third lens on the back of this the telephoto is one thing that really differentiates the 12 pro from the regular 12. and while there weren't many significant differences between the 11 pros telephoto lens and the 12 pro telephoto lens having that option there in itself really made it nice to have that new perspective that different perspective when taking shots it also enables you to do some other things with portrait mode to get two different portrait mode zoom levels depending on what your needs are and portrait mode is definitely improved on the 12 pro with the lidar sensor helping to kind of sense where things are in a scene so you don't end up with weird cutouts around glasses or arms or in hair and instead you end up with really really satisfying really really well done portrait mode shots unlike what we've seen in some of the past years which is a huge benefit for people who take a lot of photos with their phone the final major camera improvement to discuss has to do with video and that's because the iphone 12 pro now supports dolby vision hdr now without getting into all the technical details what it really means is you can shoot video with the iphone 12 pro at 4k 60 frames a second and enjoy the benefits of hdr like brighter brights darker darks and overall a wider range of colors this makes things look that much more lifelike and that much more realistic compared to last year's iphone 11 pro you can definitely see the difference especially when you're shooting things that have bright lights or the sun in them or a really deep shadow you get a lot more detail on the iphone 12 pro than you have in any device in the past now outside of the new design and the updated camera stuff a lot of things that change with the 12 pro are actually fairly marginal first off there's the fact that now the starting storage capacity is 128 gigabytes meaning that if you were to compare it to last year's 11 pro or even this year's 12 you get double the storage at that base tier meaning you have room for more photos more videos or more apps on top of that the iphone also continues to get faster this year rocking the a14 bionic chip but in reality i never felt like the a13 in my 11 pro was any kind of slouch or couldn't handle things so the fact that the 14 is faster and has a better neural engine really just means it can do more processing on device for things like photos and videos than for any other really heavy intensive type tasks another relatively minor change this year is the addition of apple's new magsafe technology in the iphone 12 lineup now while i don't necessarily love the fact that apple has taken the magsafe name which i love from their old laptops and repurposed it into a wireless charging technology the fact of the matter is it's kind of cool to have a really easy really convenient way to wirelessly charge your device without having something plugged directly into the lightning port freeing that up for things like headphones or microphones if that's something you're into and also allowing you to still use your device while it's wirelessly charging and not put as much strain on those cables magsafe is pretty simple to use you just take the wireless charging puck stick it on the back of your device and thanks to a ring of magnets in the back of the phone or in apple's cases that support magsafe things will just automatically line up and allow you to charge at up to 15 watts now the only drawback to that is the fact that the charger in the box for the iphone 12 and 12 pro is a usbc to lightning cable meaning you're going to have to drop at least 40 bucks to get in the door on the magsafe technology but it does kind of add a little bit of convenience if that's something you're into now the final kind of tentpole feature of the iphone 12 lineup is the fact that they're once again giving us some new cell capabilities now back with the iphone 5 they basically added lte to a 3g world and took a few years for that to really catch on now with the iphone 12 this year they're doing the same thing but they're moving us from lte to 5g and the promise of 5g sounds really great faster speeds less latency things that make using the mobile connection on your device that much better unfortunately in the us at least 5g is just really not there over the course of our entire vacation it would have been great to have a better more reliable cell phone signal but instead i was stuck with lte the entire time and that's at disney world where a cell connection really is kind of imperative for things like ordering food making reservations checking the status of wait times at different rides and even looking at different photos that have been taken over the course of the day in fact i wasn't even able to test a 5g connection with this phone until i made it back home to chicago and when i did the results were actually pretty surprising most of the time in my tests i was able to get at best the same speeds as an lte connection and often times significantly worse so while i think the promise of 5g is definitely there and having 5g available in the future is really nice i definitely would not buy a 12 or 12 pro based on where 5g is now but instead maybe buy it as something to future proof yourself if you're going to hang on to this phone for a couple of years now one other thing worth mentioning as far as the 5g connection is that on the us models of the phone there's this pill shaped cutout and that's for the millimeter wave antenna millimeter wave is basically a really short range really high speed connection that's really kind of designed for implementing in very small areas things like baseball stadiums airports or really big tourist locations like a theme park and the idea here is they can offer this crazy fast speed but again it's only in spots where there's a lot of congestion a lot of people possibly using their device and that speed is really critical now one side effect of 5g and most phones on the market right now is the fact that it takes a huge toll on the battery life of those devices but apple's done some really great hardware and software integration to make 5g on the iphone 12 lineup really not have a huge impact on the battery and in my testing i've been able to get all-day battery life time and time again now in the past i've often found that using my device on vacation led to needing to charge you know midday or bring a power block with me so i could kind of top my battery up but the 12 pro i was able to use it all day every day in full sun bouncing between gps heavy apps and the camera and never really have to worry about the battery life impacting whether i was able to do something later on in the day in fact of the six days that i was there i only had one day where i plugged in before the day was out and that was really just to top it up because i knew we were going to be out a little bit later now ultimately the iphone 12 pro to me is an absolutely incredible device after three years of the iphone 6 style design followed by three more years of the iphone 10 style design which basically looked like the six style design the refreshed industrial look of the iphone 12 pro is just really really welcoming and for a device that's considered kind of a premium device the iphone 12 pro is just about as premium as you can get when it comes to a smartphone now for me personally i just prefer the look of the iphone 12 pro i love the shiny body with the frosted glass over the aluminum body with the shiny glass i think it just looks really really good on top of that i really like having the option for the third camera it's something that you can't get on the 12 but you get on the 12 pro even if that third camera isn't as impressive as the other two it's nice to have that option available on top of that the fact that you can do 4k 60 with the dolby vision hdr is really nice because i do a lot of video stuff and i also am really excited to see what pro raw looks like on the pro devices later this year when apple finally launches that and all those things together really make the 12 pro just worth that extra little bit over the iphone 12. let me know what you guys think in the comments down below while you're down there be sure to give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you're not already hit the notification bell so you don't miss any uploads until next time i'm ian for called the mac i'll catch you in the next one you\n"