[Music] hey what's up mkhd here okay i've already reviewed the iphone 14 pro and 14 pro max you can watch those at the link below the like button the dynamic island the camera upgrade all that the bottom line is that is a far more interesting set of phones that has a few things that are actually new to the iphone which is kind of cool the iphone 14 on the other hand uh not so much not so much this is almost the exact same phone as last year so do you remember those s updates we used to get like we'd have the iphone 5 and then the iphone 5s and then s for speed because it was the same phone but just faster this phone is even less of an update than those s upgrades used to be and so that's what i want to talk about in this review is this new repackaging strategy thing that apple's been doing especially more lately with a bunch of their products so this year we do get an iphone 14 and an iphone 14 plus this 14 is out now and the 14 plus is coming out in a month in october it's basically the same thing just bigger 6.1 inches here 6.7 inches there and so many things are the same as last year's phone on the outside the design is the same the iphone 13 cases literally work with the iphone 14.
Like this is the new ali abdowl dbrand grip case on the iphone 14 it's pretty sweet but then again here is my iphone 13 from last year and yep fits perfectly but yeah same squared off sides same button placement same camera arrangement same antennas same speakers etc and then on the inside it's literally the same chip from last year it's the a15 bionic again technically a slight bump up with the extra gpu cores that was in the 13 pro but i mean yeah last year's chip too now technically you could say these are all things that i liked about the iphone 13 so hey if it ain't broke don't fix it right that's apple but that also means that a lot of things that could have stood to improve that could have gotten better also didn't change so it's the same display with the same brightness and the same 60hz refresh rate in an 800 phone i mean it would be so unlike apple but i really would have loved to have seen like 90 hertz here but yeah same storage options same battery size same charging speeds same lightning port the way i see it it's an iphone 13 again a year later with some tiny improvements matter of fact here is a full comprehensive list of every single thing that's technically new okay crash detection satellite connectivity display resolution e-sim new colors better thermal design better repairability design new primary camera and new selfie camera well this should be easy so crash detection is cool it uses some new sensors inside the phone and combines a bunch of data from the gps and microphones etc to notice if you've been in a car crash and if you have it'll notify emergency services without you having to do anything it's cool it's a nice feature i hope i never have to use it and then if you're in the middle of nowhere with no cell service and you still need help the iphone 14 series can now communicate with satellites in case of emergency to help you get your location and your needs to someone at a dispatch center that's coming to the us and canada in november that's another nice feature that i hope i never have to use the display is technically a slightly higher resolution with slightly thinner bezels but you will definitely never notice that and the new lineup in the us is now also e-sim only to be fair the setup process and transferring service from my previous iphone's physical sim was actually super easy it's like maybe two minutes tops and most other phones coming out today new also support esim so i'm hoping the transfer process in the future is also smooth but yeah no physical sim card tray here in the states there also is this new blue color then again most of you like an extremely high percentage of you have said that you use a case on your phone so i wonder how many of those are clear cases and then apple did mention an improved thermal design inside this phone for the same a15 bionic chip which can help performance at the edges of normal use cases so like playing a game for a really long time or navigating with high screen brightness with the phone in your dashboard in your car on a hot sunny day things that might get extra warm have an added layer of protection against throttling i think that's something the pro users will care more about but i definitely won't complain that it's also here and the better repairability design was mentioned also near the end of the keynote it's a little thing but it's actually pretty surprising from apple which is that the glass back is now a separate piece from the rest of the internals making it easier to replace cool but easily the biggest physical change with these new iphones is going to be the cameras so there's a slightly new 12 megapixel primary camera the ultrawide is exactly the same hardware and a new 12 megapixel selfie camera with autofocus now i spent a bunch of time looking back and forth at pictures i took on the iphone 14 and the iphone 13 trying to pinpoint the improvements it's like a game of spot the differences and there are some differences but they are so slight so this new camera is still 12 megapixels but it is a larger sensor so the individual pixels are bigger and should let in more light and then the max aperture went from f 1.6 to f 1.5 in regular daytime lighting there is pretty much no difference like the iphone is perfectly capable of crisp detailed natural looking photos when there are no challenges just like every other 800 phone always has been really the only difference i'm seeing is maybe color temperature the iphone 14 can take some occasionally cooler photos and it's noticeable if you have the right colors in the picture but here's a shot from the iphone 14 pro with the 48 megapixel pro raw shot for context here you can actually see a bit of a difference it's a slightly different focal length but also more importantly there's lots more fine detail here and just for fun here's the pixel 6 pro same shot another great detailed photo but just looks like a different style but as expected most of the differences between these that i found were more on the edge cases of normal photography that more challenging or extreme lighting situations mostly in low light and so some of this is enabled by the slightly larger sensor and faster aperture some of this is also enabled by the new image processing pipeline that they've tweaked and fiddled with that they also named photonic engine you know on stage they were saying things like 49 better low light performance which i'm not exactly sure what's meant by 49 like is it 49 faster shutter speed or 49 less noise in low light unclear but as i go through the photos i took on both i gotta say they're still remarkably similar okay again i was looking for the differences in the amount of noise in the shadows or dynamic range but really what i mostly found was slight differences in color temperature you know sometimes one might be a little brighter than the other and sometimes it's really hard to tell them apart even pixel peeping i even looked at shutter speeds which may sometimes reveal that you actually have a faster shutter speed from the bigger sensor because it's taking in more light and while i found that they were nearly the same for every shot the iphone 14 was typically maybe five to ten percent faster the one thing i did find was that in the absolute darkest shots in the worst conditions there was sometimes a difference in how much time it would require to get a night mode exposure like for this one it took 3 seconds from the 13 but 2 seconds from the 14.
even though the 13 actually ended up focusing more correctly and had a bit of a sharpness advantage in this shot sometimes you just got to get the shot a little quicker if possible and then this one from the ultrawide it was a one second night mode exposure from the 13 but just a regular snap from the 14. so it's the exact same hardware i guess that's the difference for the photonic engine and image processing even so the image is a toss-up like it's a little more processing happening on the iphone 14 side maybe a little more sharpening a slightly different color cast but that's it and then on the video front it's even more similar so they take basically the same video but the iphone 14 does have a feature called action mode that's not coming to the 13s for some reason even though it feels like a software feature but it's basically a super aggressive stabilization for running around and chasing stuff on top of the already pretty good stabilization from the iphone's video and i will say the stabilization part works very well but the video itself can be quite noisy also it seems like in almost every environment it's just asking for more light all the time like you get this dialog box that says more light required but it still lets you shoot but the footage is super grainy and soft especially from the ultra wide that it defaults to but also like i'm in an incredibly well-lit studio and sometimes it would ask for more light even in here this is better lit than most people's homes where you're chasing around a baby or a pet at 100 miles an hour let alone sometimes going outside on a cloudy day and it's asking for more light that's crazy so this may get better over time as of right now it shows up less on the iphone 14 pro which makes sense because this one has a larger primary sensor but yeah the stabilization works really well it's a software feature you might use and then there is the new selfie camera it is 12 megapixels and has autofocus for the first time instead of the fixed focal distance from before you can get sharper shots in some less conventional selfie situations which is great um it's not game changingly different i mean it's another incremental improvement it can still struggle with properly reproducing darker skin tones which i mentioned in the 14 pro review here's the same shot from the pixel 6 pro which specifically has their real tone optimization so you can see what i mean so at the end of the day what are we left with a super incremental update in the same body basically as before and that's what i want to talk about that they've done a lot more recently some might call it the tim cook logistics touch see that's been the iphone se formula for years i've talked about it in those reviews so the first generation iphone se comes out it's basically the body of an old iphone 5s but with new internals then the second generation iphone se comes out it's the body of an iphone 8 but with new internals and then the third generation iphone sc again that we just got this year again is the body of an iphone 8 but even newer internals and there's rumors of the next gen sc being like the body of an iphone 10r but the new chip and we even saw that with the macbook pro this year the 13-inch m2 macbook pro is the exact same body as the 13-inch m1 macbook pro just with better internals now it's not exactly some mystery why they do this there's plenty of reasons behind the scenes why these things are good for apple it reduces risk it reduces cost because now you don't have to develop as much new stuff and then prices go down and you can offer something more tried and true that already worked in the past but to an audience that will pay less and also it sort of insulates them a little bit from the supply chain challenges of trying to make a bunch of newer stuff so the innovation aka the risk is saved for the even more expensive phones you know you watch that iphone 14 pro review and you see the dynamic island which is a thing that's new to the iphone it'll evolve over time you see the new 48 megapixel camera system which is new to the iphone and you'll see the always on display which again is the first time they've done this basically this is all just a long-winded way of saying the baseline iphone with this strategy is just boring and that's just the way it is uh so now for those who are thinking of actually buying one of these phones you're thinking oh okay i know everything about the phones i know which one i want to get but one last wrench to throw into all of this is that the iphone 13 is still on sale and it's 6.99 from apple but you can probably find it even cheaper from other places and i think that would be a fine upgrade for a lot of people like the one extra year of software updates is maybe the only reason i would get a 14 over a 13 but aside from that you really got to think about how much the new colors or the slightly new camera or satellite connectivity or crash detection actually means to you and hey if efficiency means something to you then definitely check out this video's sponsor anchor who makes these chargers and cables that i really like this is their nano 3 charger which uses gallium nitride that's why it's 70 smaller than apple's 30 watt charger and it's still powerful enough to juice up an iphone or an ipad or a macbook air if you really wanted to and this 541 cable which is usbc to lightning is the first that i've seen that uses bio-based materials in the cable so sugar cane and corn but it's still a high quality cable that can withstand up to 20 000 bends and it's actually more durable than a typical plastic cable and these both come in five colors for your choice to either match your iphone 14 or mix it up a little bit definitely check both of these out at the link below but that's been it thanks for watching let me know what you think of apple's this repackaging re-gifting strategy that they've sort of leaned into more lately either way it's september a lot more is coming up definitely subscribe if you haven't already and i'll catch you guys the next one peace [Music]
