If you already have an iPhone 12, you can skip the 13.But there's a lot of other things that have changed about this phone for people with older phones.😂😂😂
This is the iPhone 13 and the 13 mini-review.
So the funny thing about keeping the same design as last year is people can immediately dismiss it as a pretty minor update. The phone looks and feels and operates almost exactly the same as last year, just with a few extra grams so it feels a little more dense in the hand and a quarter of a millimeter of extra thickness. But also, they did happen to do their three biggest upgrades on the 13 on the three most important parts of a phone: the screen, the battery, and the cameras. It was pretty good for a minor update. On another hand, same Lightning port down here at the bottom, same speakers, there's a slightly lower button placement, and the cameras, which have a diagonal orientation now. But, most people will be putting a case on the phone anyway, so they probably won't notice any of these things for more than a second. Another part is the notch at the top. It is smaller, but here's how it's smaller. It's all the same sensors, all the same, Face ID stuff, same selfie camera, but they've rearranged them and compressed them a bit and the earpiece is now up top in the middle. So the total area is about 20% smaller, but that's entirely horizontally. The new notch is actually slightly taller than last year. The display being brighter, Apple didn't really do anything with it. It's the same icons up top. There is no battery percentage option. The icons are the same size. They just rearranged the notch.
We'll have to wait a little longer for Face ID to get any faster, or work out more angles, or for them to add maybe a Touch ID fingerprint reader underneath the glass, or an always-on display or any of that stuff. But the insides are where you start to see those upgrades. So there's a new chip inside. It's the A15 Bionic. It's a very powerful, fast, high-end chip again. The new iPhone is zippy and quick as usual, but It's more efficient. So this year, they've combined the new chip with an actually physically larger battery, and that's why the phone is slightly thicker and heavier. So Apple in their event was quoting 1 1/2 more hours of use in the 13 mini and 13 Pro, and then 2 1/2 more hours in the 13 and 13 Pro Max. Five hours of screen on time without a problem. That's a really big improvement. So, the battery is a meaningful change to something that everyone who gets this phone will actually care about. But it still charges pretty slow, 20 watts over Lightning, 15 watts over Mag Safe, and only 12 for the mini.
If you were thinking about getting an iPhone mini, this would be the best year to do it just because number one, the battery life of the 12 mini was the weak point, and now it's much better. It goes from bad to perfectly normal. And this is suspected to be the last year that Apple does a mini iPhone for a while because of relatively weak sales. So this is probably the last of a dying breed of smallish pocketable phones with flagship specs and flagship cameras. So this is a good year to get the mini. So this year's iPhone is mostly about the cameras. iPhone 13 has all new cameras throughout the whole line, and there's both a noticeable difference in camera quality and camera features. The sensors are all bigger and the primary camera now has the sensor-shift stabilization that was only in the Pro Max last year. And those new sensors have massive pixel sizes and they're letting in a ton of light. In regular lighting, it won't make a huge difference. So if anything, they're a little bit sharper, but it does mean it was actually able to observe slightly quicker shutter speeds in dim lighting versus the 12. 4K video also still looks pretty great. Again, it'll make more of a difference with low light and keeping that shutter speed fast. Also, there's still plenty of flaring in the nighttime video. Now with a slightly lesser ultra-wide and no telephoto, this one's not as good, but it's close. But It could change in like a week or two whenever the Pixel 6 comes out. But let's talk about the new features though, So there are some new camera features, number one is called Photographic Styles, and these are really interesting. So there's yet another new button in the Camera app. You hit the arrow to expand settings and this is like multi-frame looking thing. And this lets you switch between five preset "Photographic Styles," as Apple calls them, that are all slightly but noticeably different. There's the Standard style, which looks like every other iPhone, pretty flat. But then there's Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. So it says it's adjusting, as you can see, tone and warmth, and then you can fine-tune these even further with that slider to dial them in the way you like. And then once you do, you start taking pictures, and that setting sticks. That picture profile will stay as many times as you close and open the Camera app until you go back in and change it again.
So then the other feature is in the video department and it's called Cinematic Mode. So it is yet another new mode added to the camera. Now you've got portrait mode photos, regular photos, regular videos, and then Cinematic Mode shows up right next to that. This is going to be the best way for creators to have the most control over their videos and make better stuff for their YouTube channel. Cinematic Mode is shooting Dolby Vision HDR and is doing constant processing to add that fake blur behind subjects. It's like portrait mode but for every frame. That's a lot of processing. So it's limited and completely locked to 1080p 30fps. But it struggles in lower light, and the fact that you can't use the ultrawide at all, and the fact that the depth of field is only adjustable in the post in Apple-made apps, Cinematic Mode, for now, is a really basic 1080p portrait mode video with a manual exposure slider.
Finally, the iPhone 13 is a really good smartphone, They took a phone that was already damn good last year, didn't change much aesthetically, some new colors, whatever, and they changed the things that actually count the most to the final user: screen, battery, and cameras. And that's a pretty good minor update. It's funny the disappointment so many people have is, "It's called the 13 but it looks like the 12, and so it should have been called the 12S.".Again it has a lot of things for people with older phones.