iPhone 13 PRO Review - The Final Verdict//iphone2021

                            iPhone 13 PRO Review - The Final Verdict//iphone2021

iPhone 13 pro you've read all the news .you've read all the features. you've read all the tests

so I'm here now to bring it all together, there are two sides to this story let's

start with the dark side the iPhone 13

pro and pro max are purposefully not as ambitious as they could be you could very easily see these not really as new phones in themselves but more as just a continuation from the iPhone 12 pros.

They look almost the same they feel, almost the same the software's almost, the same you can understand why there's this strong sentiment that Apple isn't trying their best especially next to companies like Samsung and Xiaomi who are practically reinventing themselves each year and there's a good reason for this I think.

Apple is hyper-aware of how smartphones at least ones that look something like this can only get so good don't get me wrong. There are plenty of upcoming phone features that I'm excited about like, I don't know 200-megapixel cameras and more advanced battery technologies and so on

 But from the perspective of apple who's not trying to sell a few million phones to enthusiasts but hundreds of millions to the masses. A lot of these things that you and I might be excited about just aren't gonna matter and might, actually just make the experience worse like yes in the future apple could start dialing up its screens to 4k resolution.

But what proportion of people are actually going to be able to tell yes they could try and further upgrade the speakers for surround sound but the only thing that the majority will notice is how this has suddenly just made the bezels thicker, okay not that thick come on yes they could start adding an even more battery but if you've seen ur battery 

Test of these phones you'll know that all the iPhone 13s have enough battery to last today already and so as far as most users are concerned their phone would then just be unnecessarily bulky.

Do you see what I'm getting to I'm pretty sure Apple has the money the research and development teams and the direct control of every aspect of the way their phones run to have made more sweeping changes than they did this year for the 13s but

why would they? I think Apple knows full well that there are only a few more meaningful steps they can take with the iPhone before an average consumer will

stop caring like the day they get rid of the notch entirely that iPhone will sound like crazy the day they make the cameras completely flush with the body the day they finally increase the megapixel count from 12 these will feel like something new but once you've made all of these big changes what then given that an average user is now only considering an upgrade once every three years and that current iPhone users are probably going to be buying an iPhone next anyways as long as it's better than their last one apple has very little incentive to rush getting these features onto their phones I'm not saying technology's dead at all

 But these iPhone 13s have solidified this idea in my head that Apple is well on their way planning out their next landmark product probably something to do with augmented reality and that the importance they're going to give to their smartphones as the main desirable product is going to start to fall clearly I mean look this is a 12 pro max this is a 13 pro max.

This is happening they even package their phones now as if they're replacement devices for if something goes wrong as opposed to products that are actually bringing something completely new to the table. I reckon apple already have a full roadmap of which features they're saving for which iPhones for at least the next five-six years which is almost definitely timed in such a way that it will lead them to when the next big thing is good enough to release and so how this differs to most companies like Xiaomi and Samsung is that these companies don't have the brand loyalty to be able to withhold features like this they're competing much more directly with each other and so they need to make sure that each phone is as packed as they can with whatever technologies are available at the time on the market.

But the reason I've given you this entire spiel is not to say that it makes these phones bad as we've seen yes apple does have an incentive to purposefully hold back which does mean that new things get added at a fairly slow measured pace like let's be honest most people would have to look twice to make sure that they are in fact using a 13 pro and not a 12 pro but the benefit of the way they do things is that it gives them the time and the space to not have to rush these features the fact that Apple is in this powerful position that they've managed to distance themselves from other companies who literally have to fight toe to toe to see who can pack their feature list with as much stuff as possible allows them to make sure that when they do deliver something it's good.

 I mean just compare

 apple's cinematic mode to the portrait mode video on literally every other company's phones don't get me wrong cinematic video is not a finished product i'm getting to it but there is a clear gap and it just so happens that the things that they've decided to focus on this time with the 13 pros are really important things and they've genuinely made those things so good that i think most people would actually struggle to even properly take advantage of them especially with this pro max so to show you what i mean right up until i switch to the iphone 13 pro max my sim card has primarily been in the iphone 12 pro max in between various different android phones throughout the year and i would describe my experience with this phone as flawless not the most exciting mind you there's plenty of androids that i've had more fun with but every app i wanted to use has just worked every photo i've tried to take has turned out how i thought it would every social media post i made looks the way that i intended it to on other people's devices and none of this has changed with the 13 pro but there's been four key improvements

 so first up the battery, the battery life on the 12 pro last year was pretty good

battery life on the 12 pro max was very good but even then I have had two or three times over the last year where my phone has run out and I've just sat there watching the life leave its body thinking of the things that I would do for just another 10 minutes but that's not going to be a problem here.

The normal 13 pro is getting at least 30 minutes more screen on time than my 12 pro max was and the 13 pro max is getting closer to three more hours it's more battery than I've ever had on a smartphone and to my point earlier it's so good that I think you would struggle to use it all even if you tried you could literally keep a youtube video on for your entire waking day from the second you woke up to the second you slept and I'm not sure it would run out.

 when it comes to the second big upgrade power the iPhone 13 pros are not just more powerful than last-gen they are a hell of a lot more powerful like in my entire year with the 12 I had found one situation in one game that actually made it struggle that's it and yet these new phones coming in are a further 60 improvement in graphics performance someone recommended me to use genshin impact to show the improvement because it is one of the most demanding games you can play but I'm going to be totally honest even with this last year's iPhone already plays it without a hitch so

I can't actually tell it's a very good problem to have don't get me wrong but it's also a slight frustration in that I'm finding it hard to get excited about this seemingly enormous jump because I have literally nothing to do with it last year's iPhone 12 pro was already more powerful than a base ps4 this year's iPhone 13 pros are approaching the power of a ps4 pro whose whole premise was to play advanced games in 4k resolutions and yet most mobile games still look like this I mean I guess you should see a huge improvement in emulators like if you want to try and play Nintendo Wii games or something but ios isn't exactly emulator friendly if anything all this power is a reassurance more than it has any immediate benefit okay.

What about the new screens well for one they're incredibly bright again almost definitely brighter than you need i'm not exaggerating when i say that side by side with literally any other flagship it makes them look dim including last year's iphones funny how that works for the entire year using the 12 pro max it never once occurred to me that this phone wasn't bright enough but when you have both side by side the 13 almost makes the 12 look like it has a layer of haziness over it and of course you've heard this a hundred times already the screens of these new phones finally refresh at 120 hertz did apple take their sweet time introducing this feature absolutely they're at least two years late with it but now that it is here it doesn't feel like a first generation implementation it works more or less how you'd expect a 2021 flagship to work the frame rate of these screens is continuously ramping up and down depending on what exactly you're doing on your phone and based on your finger movements what the phone thinks you're about to be doing on your phone they do this to save battery and i've seen a fair bit of conversation online about how apple is a little too aggressive with this especially in third-party apps or in other words apple is switching down the frame rate to 60 in some situations where really it should be at 120 but i haven't personally noticed it the only thing that i would say is that samsung's 120 hertz while it is the same level of fluidity it can feel a little faster thanks to higher scrolling speeds that take advantage of it we also do have a smaller notch on the front but to be honest after my first 30 minutes it just became another one of those things that was reassuring to have and to know that i have but i wouldn't be actively noticing it because it is still a sizable notch the cameras though this is where apple has really focused its efforts this time probably fifty percent of the improvements to the iphones this year are camera related and

if you think about it the fact that they're also so much bigger makes them also the biggest design change but like with a lot of things on this phone I think that an average user might struggle to realize and it's not because they're bad they're really good cameras it's just yet another example of how apple's past phones were already able to execute the experience that they wanted to create meaning that by the iPhone 11s I think apple already had a really clear idea of what they wanted their images to look like and their phones were tuned really well to be able to achieve that so with these new ones even with supposedly much better hardware the main difference for you is really just what I'd call a slight neatening up a little bit less graininess a little bit more brightness a little bit more background blur nothing about taking normal photos.

videos slo-mo's or portraits is hugely exciting to the untrained eye that said I need to clarify if you are all about those little refinements then these cameras are technically very impressive I kid you not this 12-megapixel iPhone camera almost consistently gets more detail in than Samsung's 108 megapixels one assuming you're both on auto mode and it doesn't matter if you're shooting portraits in broad daylight or 4k video in low light it never seems to mess up or have weird software artifacts it is continuously good

But at the same time it's rarely exceptional even though these iphones are in the top bracket for most aspects if you break each specific type of scenario down they're very rarely the best it's obviously an active decision that apple's made for their cameras to just be a well-rounded experience as opposed to specialist cameras and there are times when there's a real plus like sometimes when i'm putting these phones side by side with other smartphones that can barely handle low-light video for example i'm very grateful about but equally i am now also testing a phone that i can't talk about yet but it absolutely obliterates the 13 pro in night time photos i think this intense focus on authenticity is also why i don't really find myself using the new photographic styles feature not because it doesn't work but more because it doesn't really change the style it shoots photos in the same style just with slightly adjusted parameters hey vivo did styles properly like in their last phone if you saw my video on that you had a whole bunch of very distinct very visually different photo themes to choose from that i would have loved to see on an iphone okay there's something i want to say about cinematic mode this new professional style video that all iphone 13s can take what's really interesting about it is that this is one of the first times that apple has released a half-baked feature on their phones while it is definitely ahead of what other phones are doing in this field it's also very clearly not there yet and so whilst it isn't what i'd call a key reason to get an iphone 13 i do think it's on track to be something huge it reminds me a lot of how portrait mode first looked when that came out like five years ago slightly wonky detection soft edges etc but look at where portrait mode is now while most android phones seem to be fighting this battle to see who can cram the biggest image sensor onto the back of their phones to come as close as possible to this whole crisp foreground and blurred background style of a dslr camera i think cinematic mode is a statement that apple isn't going to do that they're not going to try and fight dslrs with optics they're going to do it with computation and the fact that apple has made this feature entirely separate to normal video combined with what we know about apple strategy of less features but more emphasis on those features makes me almost certain that this is going to be a game changer that sometime in the next couple of years they will walk on stage and announce cinematic mode 2.0 it'll support 4k resolution it'll use the lidar sensors for better edge detection and they'll have spent millions of man-hours using machine learning to make the blur as realistic as possible and bam all of a sudden for every single casual creative on the planet who's going to want to carry around one of these it is exciting but yeah not what i'd call a selling point in its current state now i do have nitpicks the pro and pro max are incredibly dense and fairly uncomfortable to hold i don't understand why even with the smaller notch we still have no option to see our battery percentage in the top the lens flares you get when pointing the camera at bright objects are distracting it would have been nice to see a fingerprint scanner for when we wear masks and can't use face id how the notch on the smaller 13 pro is just a tiny bit too deep and cuts into videos even when you don't full screen them also just a couple of little bugs like what on earth is happening with instagram right now but in the grand scheme of things.

These are not big complaints the things that Apple has focused its efforts on this time battery power display cameras they are pretty much the four key pillars of a phone and so the fact that they're not just pretty good but abnormally good here with potentially the exception of the camera whose improvement will feel anywhere from game-changing to negligible depending on how much you obsess over the details makes these phones really tough to argue against as long as you're okay with the traditional apple being apple things like how their phones use lightning connectors how they're more limited with customization how they don't come with chargers I've got no hesitation in recommending the iPhone 13 pro and 13 pro max.

I got them the wrong way around but you get the point iPhone 13 pro max now I realize that was pretty painful to read but the reason I'm confident doing that is something called shock spread its material that rhino shield uses on its cases and what they're saying is that this one material combined with the honeycomb lattice on the inside has all the protection of a dual-layered case without needing two layers.

It actually means that the minimum safe drop distance using one of these cases is 11 feet that were probably more than 11 feet actually, all good, and 11 feet, unless you ate a lot of spinach as a child is more than the height you're going to be dropping it from which I'm pretty sure, is why they give you a lifetime replacement warranty but the thing that's really important to me is that it's coated in such a way that you pretty much can't stain it like it's covered in the mud right now because I might throw it onto muddy grass but give it a good rub and assaulted oh yeah and you can also choose your buttons your rim colors your backplate there are literally a million different ways you can make it look everything from NASA to naruto.