iPhone 14 Pro Review - The Small Details

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe world's been buzzing about the new iPhone 14 it's a very impressive phone and there are a lot of little details that I found that I want to share with you guys so let's start off with the screens the iPhone 14 Pro Models get much brighter this year last year's device had a fairly decent brightness Outdoors already but when you compare them side by side it's a massive difference it hits 2000 hits this year it gets Wicked bright you know sometimes when you're outside and you turn on your phone it looks kind of dim so you try to crank the brightness but it's already maxed out on the 14 pro there's no more visibility issues Outdoors it does get a little warm though when it's blasting out those 2000 nits now the most visually noticeable difference this year is going to be that pill-shaped cutout up front and they've given it the name Dynamic Island and contained on this island is a front-facing camera as well as other face ID Hardware like the dot projector and then below that island is their Pro motion ocean as well as a little retina River above the island so this island can smoothly transform between a whole slew of different notifications they're very well animated and they look super cool a lot of stuff works right out of the box but technically it's just a software widget isn't it like it seems like they could have taken a widget and positioned and animated in a way to mask the visual imperfection of front-facing camera so when I first started using it I was like can I really call this a feature like if I took this widget and just place it on any other phone out there you could do that right and what I call that a phone feature but the more I use this I realized that the value of dynamic Island and what makes it special on the iPhone is how and when the elements pop in and out because with this you get to Monitor and control or just keep track of a whole bunch of different things without it interrupting your flow like you could be doing something on your phone and these notifications will automatically bubble in so you can just kind of check up on them and poke at them if you need to and then they'll bubble out automatically when you need them without any kind of like tapping or pulling down menus it's very fluid and it's all done seamlessly around that cutout I think it really is a feature I think it's like the best notification system the iPhone has ever had whether or not that's enough to motivate a purchase I guess that depends on how much you value a really good notification system on the iPhone uh one other thing if you have the display tilted on the side and you say you're watching a movie or just using your phone in landscape mode some notifications will actually animate out from that Island like it'll Bubble Up do its thing show its thing and then it'll animate back into the island one of the concerns that you guys mentioned in my previous video was like how do movies and shows look with that Island because like doesn't it get in the way so normal Media or like a lot of normal media doesn't even go into that area it's only when you kind of zoom in or you're watching stuff with like a wide aspect ratio that actually even comes over to that segment now for me I'll be honest when content does spill over I kind of prefer the way the notched looks so because the notch is just like a black segment that's at the very edge of of the screen it's kind of easier to ignore or at least mentally tune out but with this because it's like this black section and there's like a sliver of action I do think it's a little harder to ignore now the front facing camera this has improved that now has autofocus it handles uh colors a little bit better but for me the thing that I noticed that I think it handles contrast much better than previous generations so as an example I have black hair with a sprinkling of gray I'm old AF but on the old iPhone when I took photos with that front-facing camera sometimes it would make it look like I had tons of gray hairs like it was somehow being tricked by the surrounding light into thinking that I had like a bunch of light colored gray hairs and it was so weird I would take photos and be like I don't look anything like this this time around on the iPhone 14 pro it is much more accurate to true life it's such a small detail but makes a huge difference in how that image looks nobody wants to look like they're 15 years older than they actually are alright the always-on displays the iPhone 14 Pros finally have aod they relate to the game but they finally made it and they've done it in a very Apple implementation when you hit the sleep wake button there's a bit of an animation and the clock will tighten up and come out to the foreground if it was hidden the flashlight and the camera buttons disappear and the lock screen will dim down now the thing is Apple's iPhones are usually very focused on Energy Efficiency and the introduction of a feature like an always on display is interesting because now the user base has access to a feature that invariably uses more energy than it did before right it doesn't matter how awesome that one Hertz ltpo display is in terms of like sipping energy this is going to suck more juice than if you didn't have an always-on display right but there is this really interesting thing I noticed with iOS 16. I'm not sure it's related but in previous versions of iOS including iOS 15 if you had a light colored background you would have black text on the home screen it makes sense right you have a light colored background darken the text for legibility right but for whatever reason with iOS 16 they changed it so let me show you real quick if you have if you have a light colored background the text of all the stuff in the home screen is still white it's crazy and what they've done is they've put this drop shadow underneath all the white text and this just does not make sense from a design perspective it's just like why would you do this and this has never existed before any iOS version until I was 16. and during the beta I was looking this like this doesn't make sense I couldn't figure out why they would do this but maybe just maybe they're encouraging people to use dark backgrounds to counteract the extra battery consumption that comes from and always on display I'm just saying it's interesting that this feature was introduced just when always on displays came to the iPhone now I can't measure exactly how much juice is being used by the aod but in terms of overall battery performance the new iPhones put up excellent run times but not any longer than the iPhone models from last year at least not with my testing Loop okay the camera system so with the iPhone 14 pro it seems to be one of the biggest camera upgrades they've made in a while you now have a 48 megapixel sensor paired with their new photonic engine image processing and with that sensor you can shoot massive 48 megapixel Raw photos you get a lot more detail in these shots a lot more pixels and a lot of flexibility to work with that file in post and for a hot second I was like these photos look so good I will never shoot anything other than raw going forward but reality kicks in for one it's like two to three seconds in between each shot there's like a lot of processing for such a beefy file so it's slow to take shots but secondly they're huge files it's like 80 to 100 Megs per image it's way too much for regular photos but that new sensor does awesome stuff for even normal photos so these are going to get bent down to 12 megapixel files and in normal lighting conditions you get really clean looking images excellent depth of field and the dynamic range is so much better on the 14 pro than it was on the 13 Pro it's particularly noticeable when you're shooting up against a bright sky it's much better this year and you also get a nice 2x Zoom just by punching into the sensor it's lossless it's basically like an optical zoom but the biggest claims from Apple's presentation were about low light Photography they were making claims of like double and even triple the performance in some cases now for my testing the main camera has clearly gotten better at low light on the iPhone 14 pro the shots are brighter with better details and they're cleaner but there's still a good amount of noise in the shots and an even bigger Improvement is with the ultra wide angle lens compare this to the 13 Pro I don't know if it's like three times better but it's definitely a noticeable step up but the low light shots are a little flatter than before they almost feel like they have a pixel-like characteristic to them instead of a more contrasty look like the s22 ultra but the takeaway is that the camera systems this year are much better there's also action cams so this is some very aggressive image stabilization it does work as advertised but there's a few things I noticed one you lose out on resolution and in image quality it caps out a 2.8 K which isn't bad but you need a lot of light to make it work so Outdoors is best but secondly it defaults to the ultra wide camera so if you activate action cam it'll go for that wide angle shot and the image is less sharp than the regular camera but I'm assuming it goes to the wide to have as much footage to work with for that kind of crop for the stabilization but it's not as clean of a shot action cam is very effective but it feels like it's just for extremely shaky circumstances okay the performance of this new chip so on the iPhone 14 Pros they have the a16 bionic instead of the a15 bionic we see on the regular iPhone 14. fantastic performer and benchmarks but the most interesting thing to me was when I was testing the iPhone 14 pro Max with gentian impact so this is a very demanding game arguably the most demanding mobile game available still and the 14 pro Max is the best thermally performing device I've ever seen with that game now every device struggles pushing out out sustained performance on Mac settings it's just gentian it's very demanding but on the iPhone 14 pro Max it's able to go the longest before it throttles and after that throttle point it still has the highest frame rate it's very impressive that this can outperform a dedicated gaming phone in the Android space uh okay a quick note on pricing so when the US the 14 pro and 14 pro Max haven't gone up in price in Canada it's been bumped up a little bit but globally it does feel like these have gone up a decent margin in terms of what they cost but there was this very interesting graph or chart that I found on Reddit it shows the percentage of yearly income that you would need to spend to purchase an iPhone 14 across various countries and when I saw this I was like oh my God this is eye-opening because it is so expensive to buy iPhone 14 in some countries like can you imagine spending 30 or 40 percent of your yearly income to buy an iPhone that's nasty seriously okay uh there you have it the iPhone 14 pro reviewthe world's been buzzing about the new iPhone 14 it's a very impressive phone and there are a lot of little details that I found that I want to share with you guys so let's start off with the screens the iPhone 14 Pro Models get much brighter this year last year's device had a fairly decent brightness Outdoors already but when you compare them side by side it's a massive difference it hits 2000 hits this year it gets Wicked bright you know sometimes when you're outside and you turn on your phone it looks kind of dim so you try to crank the brightness but it's already maxed out on the 14 pro there's no more visibility issues Outdoors it does get a little warm though when it's blasting out those 2000 nits now the most visually noticeable difference this year is going to be that pill-shaped cutout up front and they've given it the name Dynamic Island and contained on this island is a front-facing camera as well as other face ID Hardware like the dot projector and then below that island is their Pro motion ocean as well as a little retina River above the island so this island can smoothly transform between a whole slew of different notifications they're very well animated and they look super cool a lot of stuff works right out of the box but technically it's just a software widget isn't it like it seems like they could have taken a widget and positioned and animated in a way to mask the visual imperfection of front-facing camera so when I first started using it I was like can I really call this a feature like if I took this widget and just place it on any other phone out there you could do that right and what I call that a phone feature but the more I use this I realized that the value of dynamic Island and what makes it special on the iPhone is how and when the elements pop in and out because with this you get to Monitor and control or just keep track of a whole bunch of different things without it interrupting your flow like you could be doing something on your phone and these notifications will automatically bubble in so you can just kind of check up on them and poke at them if you need to and then they'll bubble out automatically when you need them without any kind of like tapping or pulling down menus it's very fluid and it's all done seamlessly around that cutout I think it really is a feature I think it's like the best notification system the iPhone has ever had whether or not that's enough to motivate a purchase I guess that depends on how much you value a really good notification system on the iPhone uh one other thing if you have the display tilted on the side and you say you're watching a movie or just using your phone in landscape mode some notifications will actually animate out from that Island like it'll Bubble Up do its thing show its thing and then it'll animate back into the island one of the concerns that you guys mentioned in my previous video was like how do movies and shows look with that Island because like doesn't it get in the way so normal Media or like a lot of normal media doesn't even go into that area it's only when you kind of zoom in or you're watching stuff with like a wide aspect ratio that actually even comes over to that segment now for me I'll be honest when content does spill over I kind of prefer the way the notched looks so because the notch is just like a black segment that's at the very edge of of the screen it's kind of easier to ignore or at least mentally tune out but with this because it's like this black section and there's like a sliver of action I do think it's a little harder to ignore now the front facing camera this has improved that now has autofocus it handles uh colors a little bit better but for me the thing that I noticed that I think it handles contrast much better than previous generations so as an example I have black hair with a sprinkling of gray I'm old AF but on the old iPhone when I took photos with that front-facing camera sometimes it would make it look like I had tons of gray hairs like it was somehow being tricked by the surrounding light into thinking that I had like a bunch of light colored gray hairs and it was so weird I would take photos and be like I don't look anything like this this time around on the iPhone 14 pro it is much more accurate to true life it's such a small detail but makes a huge difference in how that image looks nobody wants to look like they're 15 years older than they actually are alright the always-on displays the iPhone 14 Pros finally have aod they relate to the game but they finally made it and they've done it in a very Apple implementation when you hit the sleep wake button there's a bit of an animation and the clock will tighten up and come out to the foreground if it was hidden the flashlight and the camera buttons disappear and the lock screen will dim down now the thing is Apple's iPhones are usually very focused on Energy Efficiency and the introduction of a feature like an always on display is interesting because now the user base has access to a feature that invariably uses more energy than it did before right it doesn't matter how awesome that one Hertz ltpo display is in terms of like sipping energy this is going to suck more juice than if you didn't have an always-on display right but there is this really interesting thing I noticed with iOS 16. I'm not sure it's related but in previous versions of iOS including iOS 15 if you had a light colored background you would have black text on the home screen it makes sense right you have a light colored background darken the text for legibility right but for whatever reason with iOS 16 they changed it so let me show you real quick if you have if you have a light colored background the text of all the stuff in the home screen is still white it's crazy and what they've done is they've put this drop shadow underneath all the white text and this just does not make sense from a design perspective it's just like why would you do this and this has never existed before any iOS version until I was 16. and during the beta I was looking this like this doesn't make sense I couldn't figure out why they would do this but maybe just maybe they're encouraging people to use dark backgrounds to counteract the extra battery consumption that comes from and always on display I'm just saying it's interesting that this feature was introduced just when always on displays came to the iPhone now I can't measure exactly how much juice is being used by the aod but in terms of overall battery performance the new iPhones put up excellent run times but not any longer than the iPhone models from last year at least not with my testing Loop okay the camera system so with the iPhone 14 pro it seems to be one of the biggest camera upgrades they've made in a while you now have a 48 megapixel sensor paired with their new photonic engine image processing and with that sensor you can shoot massive 48 megapixel Raw photos you get a lot more detail in these shots a lot more pixels and a lot of flexibility to work with that file in post and for a hot second I was like these photos look so good I will never shoot anything other than raw going forward but reality kicks in for one it's like two to three seconds in between each shot there's like a lot of processing for such a beefy file so it's slow to take shots but secondly they're huge files it's like 80 to 100 Megs per image it's way too much for regular photos but that new sensor does awesome stuff for even normal photos so these are going to get bent down to 12 megapixel files and in normal lighting conditions you get really clean looking images excellent depth of field and the dynamic range is so much better on the 14 pro than it was on the 13 Pro it's particularly noticeable when you're shooting up against a bright sky it's much better this year and you also get a nice 2x Zoom just by punching into the sensor it's lossless it's basically like an optical zoom but the biggest claims from Apple's presentation were about low light Photography they were making claims of like double and even triple the performance in some cases now for my testing the main camera has clearly gotten better at low light on the iPhone 14 pro the shots are brighter with better details and they're cleaner but there's still a good amount of noise in the shots and an even bigger Improvement is with the ultra wide angle lens compare this to the 13 Pro I don't know if it's like three times better but it's definitely a noticeable step up but the low light shots are a little flatter than before they almost feel like they have a pixel-like characteristic to them instead of a more contrasty look like the s22 ultra but the takeaway is that the camera systems this year are much better there's also action cams so this is some very aggressive image stabilization it does work as advertised but there's a few things I noticed one you lose out on resolution and in image quality it caps out a 2.8 K which isn't bad but you need a lot of light to make it work so Outdoors is best but secondly it defaults to the ultra wide camera so if you activate action cam it'll go for that wide angle shot and the image is less sharp than the regular camera but I'm assuming it goes to the wide to have as much footage to work with for that kind of crop for the stabilization but it's not as clean of a shot action cam is very effective but it feels like it's just for extremely shaky circumstances okay the performance of this new chip so on the iPhone 14 Pros they have the a16 bionic instead of the a15 bionic we see on the regular iPhone 14. fantastic performer and benchmarks but the most interesting thing to me was when I was testing the iPhone 14 pro Max with gentian impact so this is a very demanding game arguably the most demanding mobile game available still and the 14 pro Max is the best thermally performing device I've ever seen with that game now every device struggles pushing out out sustained performance on Mac settings it's just gentian it's very demanding but on the iPhone 14 pro Max it's able to go the longest before it throttles and after that throttle point it still has the highest frame rate it's very impressive that this can outperform a dedicated gaming phone in the Android space uh okay a quick note on pricing so when the US the 14 pro and 14 pro Max haven't gone up in price in Canada it's been bumped up a little bit but globally it does feel like these have gone up a decent margin in terms of what they cost but there was this very interesting graph or chart that I found on Reddit it shows the percentage of yearly income that you would need to spend to purchase an iPhone 14 across various countries and when I saw this I was like oh my God this is eye-opening because it is so expensive to buy iPhone 14 in some countries like can you imagine spending 30 or 40 percent of your yearly income to buy an iPhone that's nasty seriously okay uh there you have it the iPhone 14 pro review\n"