iPhone 13 Pro review: attention to detail

Key Takeaways

this is the iphone 13 pro and pro max they look exactly the same as last year's iphone 12 pro models and you could argue that they have only small updates compared to those phones but the improvements are actually really noticeable if you're the kind of person who notices phone quality this is a phone for people who care about the details [Music] just like with the regular iphone 13 and the iphone 13 mini the two biggest improvements to the 13 pro and pro max are with the camera and battery life but the pro adds a third improvement to its screen technology saying there are improvements to camera and battery life and screen sounds pretty standard right that's actually the challenge for apple this year because the updates for the battery and camera are meaningful and that screen change is the update that a lot of iphone pro users didn't even know they were missing now the design is almost exactly the same as the iphone 12. really the only important difference is that the 13 pro is a little bit thicker and so cases from the 12 aren't going to fit especially around the camera bump then there is the notch it is smaller now but only horizontally and apple didn't really do anything with the extra space like show you a battery percentage so you're not really getting any more usable stuff out of your screen and i would have gladly traded the old slightly larger notch for a better selfie camera but now the selfie camera hardware isn't updated here but it does get a bunch of the new camera software features i still think this design is beautiful and a huge improvement over the curved iphones that we've had since the six this is an iterative upgrade over the iphone 12 but if you have an older iphone it's going to be a massive one for you oh and there is a new one terabyte storage option which is a ridiculous amount of storage for a phone but it actually may be necessary for people who use prores video on these iphones alright that's enough preliminaries let's get into battery life battery life is definitely better now look i've only had these phones for about a week or so and i'm trying to test all four new iphones so don't consider these results fully conclusive apple claims that the 13 pro should get 90 minutes more of usable time and two and a half hours more on the pro max which was already a battery champ now i mostly use the smaller pro just so i could get kind of a worst case scenario and even when we were running around all day taking photos and 4k video and also tethering other phones to it i went to bed with 20 left on this phone and that was like four or four and a half hours of screen time too the next day i clocked nearly seven hours of use this battery makes me feel a lot more confident leaving my external battery pack behind than i did last year i am going to follow up with testing from both the promax and the iphone 13 mini later on on theverge.com apple says it achieved this better battery life through processor enhancements and because the screen is more power efficient but really i think the biggest factor is that the batteries are just plain bigger the processor in the iphone 13 pro is the a15 bionic and it gets five gpu cores compared to the regular iphone 13's four cores but apple won't really say what the extra core does beyond make things faster and obviously it's fast new iphones are always fast i think the most important new thing that the a15 does is enable a bunch of new camera features okay so what should we talk about next cameras or screen camera screen camera you know i'm really into the screen and okay yeah that's the right answer let's talk about cameras [Music] the very first thing to note is that the camera systems on both the 13 pro and the 13 pro max are identical you don't have to buy the big expensive 6.7 inch screen to get the good camera this year now all three cameras on the back have gotten pretty big upgrades and that matters because usually it's just the main wide angle sensor that gets all the attention it gets that attention because it's the one that we use the most and it's typically the best camera on a phone this year the wide angle is still 12 megapixels but apple has increased the sensor size and increased the pixel size to 1.9 microns which is about as big as we've seen on a phone and it's got an f 1.5 aperture all of that adds up to this sensor can take in a ridiculous amount of light more light means better pictures now when the scene has plenty of light to go around say in bright outdoor situations or even average indoor light i have to admit that you're gonna be hard-pressed to find differences between the 13 pro the regular 13 or sometimes even last year's iphone 12. these are all very good cameras [Music] but when it gets dark the differences start to be night and day sorry for the pun but let's go out into the night so i can show you what this big sensor can do this is where the iphone 13 pro really comes into its own in low light even compared to the regular iphone 13 this thing is much more confident it doesn't need to switch into night mode as often and when it does it takes those photos much much faster [Music] in addition to this big sensor apple also made changes to how it does computational photography to use smart hdr to process photos i see less image noise in low light more dynamic range in low and even medium light and apple claims that it is more accurate with shadow exposure and i definitely see it in night mode the 13 pro is just more willing to let dark parts stay dark the regular 13 and the 12 just sort of over brighten everything now there are scenes where the 13 pro also makes things too bright but it's not that often and in general night mode shots are sharper on the 13 pro are all these details things that everybody is going to notice no probably not even on a big phone like the pro max it takes a lot of squinting to see these fine details but if there's any place where it actually makes sense to call a phone pro as in for professionals it is this main camera [Music] a new feature that apple has added this year is photographic profiles apple insists that these are not filters but rather they let you apply a creative style to every shot that you take basically if you don't like the iphone's middle of the road look you can find something that looks more like a samsung or a pixel photo without having to do any post processing editing work profiles work on both the 13 pro and the regular iphone 13s and understanding what they are exactly is a little complicated apple's computational photography process smart hdr takes a bunch of different frames and then combines them into the end result part of that process involves making choices about white balance color contrast and so on another part of that process is the iphone semantically recognizing different things in the scene people and grass and sky and cats so when you set a photographic profile the iphone makes different choices during the smart hdr capture process about white balance and color and contrast and so on it also uses that semantic recognition to make better choices for specific parts of the scene like skin tone this is why apple argues that it's not a filter because it's not applied evenly across the entire image what all this really means is that if you prefer a more opinionated camera like you get from samsung or google you can do that now with the iphone by default you can customize any one of these profiles and as you move the sliders to customize them the profile name automatically changes to something descriptive for your new settings which is pretty neat and then the profile sticks and it becomes your new default so this is a verge iphone review which means that at some point we have to talk about file formats so here we go you cannot shoot with photographic profiles on and have raw output on at the same time and unlike a raw photo where you can make all sorts of choices in the edit photographic profiles lock your choices into the file as it's saved as you shoot the photo now in theory it might be possible for apple to save all of that extra data for you to be able to change all of your choices later but apple told us that it would create such a huge file that it wouldn't be worth it and that people who do want to edit after the fact can just choose raw is all that complicated well yes and no no because you can set profiles and forget them they just become the new default and you don't need to think too much about them but yes because this is yet another button on apple's camera app which is getting increasingly complicated and has an almost fractally expanding set of different kinds of shooting states it is very easy to get lost in all these settings i'm serious their camera app is bust like this little arrow here is the worst user interface element i have seen from them and i don't know how long it's like what how what what what i do like the upgrades to the telephoto lens apple's not playing the 100x space zoom samsung game it's just 3x which is the equivalent of 77 millimeters now what that means is you're not going to get really great far zoom anything over you know 6 or 10x digital is pretty bad but it is very good at taking portraits i'm not talking portrait mode i'm talking portraits one thing to keep in mind with the telephoto lens is that going up to 3x means that it now takes in just a little less light so it's really not that great in low light situations even with optical image stabilization it's not bad but especially when you set it next to the main camera you will notice the drop off you can do night mode and telephoto though which works best for still subjects digital zoom is here and it's 15x and yeah it looks like digital zoom at 15x now as for video a lot of the footage you've been watching the footage you're watching right now is from an iphone 13 pro max and it is very good it's very good in bright light it's very good in hdr conditions and it's very good in low light we are very impressed with the video on this camera but where things fall down a little bit is if you use the ultra wide or the telephoto in low light they just they can't stand up to the quality of the regular wide angle camera then there's cinematic mode it's basically portrait mode but for video i'm going to talk a lot more about it in the regular iphone 13 review video so go watch that but for here what you need to know is that it doesn't work very well in low light so did you see the background there the cinematic mode just kept trying and missing to blur it because it was too dark in brighter light cinematic mode is actually fun to play with and the results are sometimes impressive and sometimes you can just see it kind of breaking just like it does in portrait mode photos but since this is a pro phone i'm just gonna say that you really shouldn't be too distracted by cinematic mode especially since it's locked to 1080p at 30fps i'm not saying that it's a gimmick but i will say that it's gimmick adjacent just like with portrait mode and photos at the beginning i think it's going to be a few years before cinematic mode is truly useful for anything beyond casual use and despite apple's very fun promotions and videos i have a hard time believing that real movies are going to be made with this [Music] and now it's time for more file format stuff all of the depth information in cinematic mode gets written to the file so that you can edit it all in post you can change the focus points throughout the video and even change the f-stop for the whole video but only in apple apps like photos and final cut will be able to do that apple isn't making that file format public for adobe or lumafusion to adopt and also sometimes when you airdrop the file apple's just going to bake the depth choices into the file so they can't be changed later by anything finally the ultrawide camera also got improvements so it performs a little bit better in low light even though again it's not as good as the main camera but thanks to auto focus on the ultra wide its newest trick which is exclusive to the pro models is that it can do macro shots when you bring the camera very close to a subject it automatically switches from the wide over to the ultra wide but it tries to keep your framing you can get as close as two centimeters and from what i can see it's a fun little feature and the results are a lot better than the throwaway macro cameras that we've seen on a ton of android phones lately i dig it in fact i dig this whole camera system it beats the next best smartphone camera in low light and the next best smartphone camera just happens to be the iphone 13 or last year's iphone 12 pro max they're the same thing really i have no idea if the upcoming pixel 6 is gonna be able to compete with this but right now this is the best camera system on a smartphone now can i talk about the display yeah okay so apple has finally switched to a display with a variable refresh rate the branding is super retina xdr display with pro motion it's an ltpo oled which means that it's super low power and the screen can refresh as slowly as 10 frames per second when you're looking at something static like text and that saves battery life or it can ramp all the way up to 120 frames per second for smooth animation and scrolling and that is twice the 60 hertz standard that you get on other iphones i personally believe that apple has gotten away with not putting a high refresh rate on an iphone for so long because ios itself is very smooth without very much jank in its animations so it's hard for me to show or explain why having the screen be smoother is really important when i scroll the text stays readable instead of turning into a blur things moving around on the screen when you swipe around are just smoother but mostly it feels like a direct interaction with what's on the screen because the phone can literally change its refresh rate to match the movement of my finger just like a real piece of paper in the real world accelerates faster when you move your hand faster so many android phones have had high refresh rate screens for so long that i really think it was overdue on pro iphones i don't care about the excuses whatever they are i think apple should have figured this out sooner but i'm very glad that it's here now and the implementation is great ios will watch third party apps and adjust the frame rate of the screen to match what they need for video or games or whatever apple tells me that many apps are going to get promotion automatically and for those that don't because of the way that they're developed there's going to be an api that they can update to one thing apple didn't do with this screen is the thing that android phones have had forever which is an always on lock screen so you can get glanceable information when the phone is just sitting on a table i love it apparently apple doesn't but i don't know there's always next year now i understand if this promotion refresh rate stuff sounds like fuzzy premium experience nice to have things right but that's exactly what it is and that's exactly what i expect out of a thousand dollar phone it's a no it when you see it kind of feature i definitely notice it and i think phones without a higher fresh rate screen feel juddery promotion is the perfect example of what you get when you get the iphone 13 pro and pro max instead of the regular iphones they're nicer but not in ways that might be immediately obvious the two big differentiators on the pro phones this year are the camera and the screen and both have improvements that are really only visible when you pay a lot of attention so does all that mean that the iphone 13 pro is an enthusiast phone like the way android has had enthusiast flagship phones for a while well yes this is a phone for people who love phones and look it is totally okay and normal to not pay this much attention to your phone but maybe you do i certainly do and i gotta tell you i like what i see hey everybody thanks so much for watching of course there's a review of the regular iphone 13 and the 13 mini and i barely touched on ios 15 at all but lucky for you heim gardenberg has written a great review that's on theverge.com