iPhone 14 Plus & The Problem with Benchmarks!
you would think that the most expensive best iPhone is the one with the best battery life right nope this here is the new iPhone 14 plus it’s basically just the iPhone 14 but bigger so the mini sized iPhone is dead after two years and they’ve replaced it with this plus size version which means a bigger screen and a bigger battery I will say it is a bit lighter than you’d probably expect that aluminum makes this big phone actually lighter than the smaller Pro with its stainless steel but there’s really not that much else interesting here
except that when Apple announced it on stage they said that it would be the best battery life ever in an iPhone and then they just moved on I guess that does make sense though right it’s the same size as the iPhone 14 pro Max same battery size roughly but with a dimmer 60 hertz display so I guess yeah it should last longer but is it actually substantially longer see when you get to Apple’s website the iPhone 14 pro Max is the one listed at 29 hours of video playback Which is higher than this 14 plus
which is listed at 26 hours but then again just for audio playback the plus will do a hundred hours for the first time which is more than the pro Max which
day when they used to be really important like years ago new phones would come out and they would have huge year-over-year performance gains which was exciting but mostly because they would actually like unlock new things that you could do with your phone things like shooting 4K video for the first time or playing HD games or taking HDR photos with a bunch of different exposures so that big jump in raw performance year over year meant before the jump you couldn’t do a thing and then after the jump you crushed a threshold and now you could which
was sweet but smartphones are so evolved and so complete nowadays that basically every smartphone can do all the fundamental things very well it’s more around the edges that they’re starting to optimize for certain tasks certain things so yes the overall power and the geekbench score still does go up a little bit year over year every year but that doesn’t really mean nearly as much as it used to it doesn’t really mean anything significant other than maybe a few more frames per second in a game or launching an app slightly faster Plus in this one’s case
it’s the same chip as last year so it means almost nothing but what’s really happening now is companies are developing their own silicon with special sections of their system on a chip designed to accelerate certain functions that they think will be a priority for their users so if Apple you know the a series chips and the iPhones means big performance cores small efficiency cores but then a bunch of other stuff things like a prores accelerator for faster video encoding there is a neural engine for optimizing machine learning tasks and there’s a special image signal processor
for fusing to together different exposures into a photo very quickly and a display engine that helps smoothly run those animations for the Pro phone on the dynamic island with Google you’ve got the new tensor chip in their pixel phones again big cores small cores but then dedicated pieces for machine learning for their Crazy Fast speech to text there’s an image signal processor for HDR plus and then more and more some apple flagships even though they haven’t gotten to designing their own silicon entirely are still adding things like a specialized ISP to the find X5 Pro
for processing photos the way they want to much faster and now it’s even starting to apply to all types of other devices we already know about Apple silicon Max you know the M1 chip having a prores accelerator because that’s important to a lot of people using Pro Max also the steam deck has a custom Apu that lets it hit certain frame rates in lower power States basically the point is these companies are now adding focused pieces of compute Hardware when they design products based on what they think is a priority to their users and accelerate
those those things dramatically and those pieces make a bigger difference than any Benchmark will show like here here’s this is a good analogy I like a good comparison so let’s say you need a vehicle for the fastest time around a track and you get to choose between vehicle a and vehicle B all you get to choose from is benchmarks so the benchmarks for vehicle a is it did a 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds it got on a Dyno and measured 502 horsepower and 339 pound-feet of torque then vehicle B did the 0 to 60
in three seconds flat it measured 835 horsepower and 908 pound-feet of torque so okay just based on those numbers a sensible person would probably lean towards picking vehicle B that would mean you just picked the rivion r1t a very fast pickup truck but you just picked that over the 2018 Porsche 911 GT3 one of the best track cars ever made that’s how I feel about relying on basic General benchmarks these days like the benchmarks tell one story about the general overall capability but you still should be picking based on the specific features and things you
want to do like you want to carry around lots of huge things get the one with the huge trunk do you want to make quick turns at high speeds get the one with the arrow pieces do you want to take lots of pictures and videos of yourself and your friends get the one with the best cameras do you want the one with the longest possible battery life get the big one but speaking of battery life I do actually want to mention that I have noticed I’ve gotten better battery life on the iPhone 14 Pros after
disabling the always on display this is something we were wondering from the review I’ve had a couple days or weeks now to do it and yeah it does make a difference but that actually leads to the second part of the video when I wanted to go over a little bit more which is the state of the iPhone 14s about a month later so it’s been an interesting couple of weeks testing these phones and seeing what’s happening to other people with their phones my reviews went out using the phone’s Apple loans for reviews but then since
then I’ve gotten my own that I’ve bought and started using full-time I haven’t really had any major issues but it does seem like this has been one of the notably buggier launches of a new iOS and iPhone in the past couple years and even though it’s not happening to my phones it’s hard to ignore so there was a pretty famous camera jittering bug with the pro iPhones but for a quick iOS 16.0.2 update I ironed that out the only issue I’ve personally noticed on mine is my iPhone 14 pro often takes forever to connect to
wireless car play and often just fails and doesn’t connect but then again I can’t tell if that’s just the new iOS or the Cadillac lyric that’s causing this exact problem but I asked on Twitter hey how is everyone’s iPhone 14 experience is going so far the first few weeks and of course this is going to be a pretty focused sample but thousands and thousands of you chimed in and I’ve spent quite a while reading through a lot of this stuff and it’s almost a little bit surprising how many bugs I’ve been getting tweeted about here
are the three most frequent things that I’m seeing from you guys in my Twitter Dimension so the first one is lock screen stuff specifically uh it seems like there’s like an auto rotate bug when customizing your lock screen tons of people send me screenshots of it videos of it it hasn’t happened to mine but it’s been annoying because then you kind of have to reset your phone restart it and start it again but that’s like the number one thing I saw most frequently then number two was Dynamic Island stuff so a lot of people with
the pro phones have noticed weird bugs with Dynamic Island the software bubble like moving to the wrong place or animating weirdly getting stuck in animations quirky stuff like that I kind of expected that to happen a little bit at the beginning but that obviously kind of breaks the illusion of it just being this little seamless little pill box of software that’s annoying but then number three is battery drain and this is the one I am most concerned about a sort of alarming number of people just when I asked about it it’s been floating around there
already but people just chiming in with like yep the battery doesn’t last as long as I expected it doesn’t last as long as a previous phone I had it’s been draining and telling me that it’s been draining and I’ll like wake up in the middle of the night and have like a warm phone with a nearly dead battery weird stuff uh so that’s the one that I’m gonna keep my eye on that I think Apple’s probably also going to be paying the most attention to it’s the hardest one to fix also shout out to channel
sponsor dbrand they just dropped this new sick digital camo design they call it glitch camo they’ve also got a navy and Arctic colorway available great way to make your iPhone stand out from the rest you can check these out at the link below but there you have it that’s the iPhone 14 plus and the iPhones one month later thanks for watching you guys in the next one peace
