iPhone 14 Pro: early adopter island

apple kind of surprised everyone with the iphone 14 pro right i mean there had been tons of rumors about the notch turning into a cutout or two cutouts but no one was expecting the dynamic island and while it was getting clearer that apple would have to follow the rest of the industry and using bigger camera sensors eventually i certainly wasn’t expecting the company to reboot the entire iphone computational photography system as the photonic engine there’s a lot of that sort of thing in the iphone 14 pro apple’s late to having an always on display but

this one’s way more on than other phones in the united states apple’s going all in on esim which no one else is really doing there’s a basic satellite connectivity system which isn’t quite like anything else we’ve heard about but apple’s going to ship millions of these phones the service coming later this year all in all there are more beginnings of big ideas in the new iphone 14 pro than we’ve seen in an iphone for a long time that’s the easiest way to think about the iphone 14 pro it feels like the first step towards a

lot of new things for apple and the iphone and maybe the first glimpse of an entirely new kind of iphone but that doesn’t mean all these things are perfect yet let’s take a

look we have to start with a dynamic island right the name is ridiculous but it’s fun everyone’s talking about it which is not normal for a smartphone status indicator system that’s a win that’s where i live every day but let’s just agree that we’re going to call it the island and move on so the island replaces apple’s notch it’s where the front camera

and the face id system live since they’ve got to take up some place in the front of the display here’s the thing about the notch though in almost every review going back to the iphone 10 i’ve said hey after a couple minutes you know notice the notch the island is different you are supposed to notice it it’s located lower on the screen than the notch and if you run your phone in light mode like i do it’s actually a high contrast interface element it’s a black pill shape in the middle of white screen it’s right

there you’re going to see it especially since it’s animating and moving all the time now it’s better in dark mode in fact i would go so far as to say this is the first iphone you should definitely run in dark mode because of it so why did apple go from the notches there but you can all but ignore it to the dynamic island is here and you are going to pay attention to it well it turns out that over the years there have been like three or four different status indicator systems added on to ios

plugging in a charger or flipping the mute switch brings up an overlay having a call in the background puts a green pill in the corner the maps app is a blue pill connecting airpods is another overlay some things like timers and music playing in the background haven’t really had status indicators at all the island is apple’s way of replacing and unifying all those older status systems with a new home for system alerts and making it work for things like music and the new live activities api that’s coming to ios 16 later this year which will

allow apps to share even more background info for things like your flight status or a sports score the simplest way of understanding the island is it’s basically a new widget system built on top of that live activities api and the widgets can have three views the main view this expanded view and this ultra minimal icon when you’ve got two things going at once here’s a list apple sent over of all the things that will support the island at launch before live activities arrives and third parties can use it too so that’s the concept the execution

is obviously where the action is and like all first versions of anything apple’s made some choices that really work and some others that so here’s a big choice that really works and it’s just like purely apple one of the reasons that it’s called the island is that it’s meant to float over the rest of the system it’s a layer on top of ios supposed to feel more like hardware than software almost like a secondary display that can get bigger or smaller to get this to feel right apple’s actually using a new dynamic subpixel anti-aliasing system

that makes the edges of the island up to three times crisper than all the other animations in ios here’s a macro shot of the individual rgb sub-pixels of the display being anti-aliased to create a sharp edge for the island in normal room lighting this really works it feels like the cutout on the display is getting bigger and smaller and the animations like this drop effect for when the island splits in two are super fun in sunlight or brighter light yeah you can see the camera sensors the illusion kind of goes away but it’s still cool

other big thing that works is that moving all these disparate status indicators to the island and making them worth paying attention to is actually pretty great it’s nice having call info right on the screen it’s genuinely useful having your timers right there making things like airdrop and face id all show up in consistent ways in the same place make those things easier to understand which is great the thing that kills me is that in the keynote and all the ads apple shows the island is a thing that’s worth interacting with it’s always moving and going

back and forth between the main view and the expanded view in reality it is not like that at all the island isn’t a primary interface element it sits over whatever app you’re actually using and apps are still very much the main point of the iphone in fact tapping on the island doesn’t open that expanded view it just switches you back to whatever app that controls the widget to get the expanded view you have to tap and hold this feels exactly backwards to me now apple knows i feel this way the idea apparently is that things

should be as simple as possible and going back to the app is the simplest thing i don’t know i think a tap should pop open the widget and i definitely think you should at least be able to choose this is kind of the whole tension of the island it’s much more noticeable and useful than the notch but you’re not really supposed to interact with it it’s background information all those questions about whether you’re gonna get fingerprints over the camera like well as it stands you don’t touch this thing very much at all but because it’s

so much more prominent you’re looking at it all the time i’m using it with a bunch of apps that haven’t been updated so it kind of covers up some content because it sits lower on the display so right at this second the trade-off between how noticeable it is and how useful it is a little out of whack it doesn’t quite do enough to always be in the way now i think all this might change when that live activities api rolls out later this year which is the other big thing apple did right it made this

system available to third-party developers but right now the dynamic island feels like one of those things that needs a year of refinement and developer attention before we really know how important it is the big feature of the iphone 14 pro camera system is the new 48 megapixel main camera sensor apple’s actually a few years late to this trend samsung has used 108 megapixel sensors since 2020 and google added a 50 megapixel sensor to the pixel 6 pro last year the basic idea is the same all around to take better photos you need to collect as

much light as possible and to do that you need bigger pixels but at some point making the pixels physically bigger gets hard so instead you just add a lot more pixels and use software to group them into giant virtual pixels this whole thing is called pixel bidding and the math on apple spinning is straightforward it uses four pixels to create a single virtual pixel which means that 48 megapixel sensor generally shoots 12 megapixel photos apple’s also reworked its entire photo processing pipeline and rebranded it the photonic engine the big change here is that the deep

fusion pixel by pixel analysis that happens in mid and low light now happens earlier in the process on uncompressed data it’s never really been easy to see how much it’s doing and well it’s the same on the iphone 14 pro honestly the 14 pro and 13 pro take really similar photos here’s verge video producer mario abdulkov in a really dim bar the 14 pro is a little cooler and it captures a tiny bit more detail at 100 percent you really have to go looking for it these photos of mario outside look pretty much the same

but if you zoom in you can see the 14 pro is getting a bit more detail and it has a nicer background blur because of the substantially larger sensor this is all really nice but in instagram sizes it is not particularly noticeable here’s that same photo on the pixel 6 pro by the way you can see it captures even more detail with its pixel bend 50 megapixel sensor along with a wider range of colors this is about as different as the pixel and the iphone have been in a few years they both grab a lot

of detail and have great low light performance but the pixel 6 pro makes very different choices about highlights and shadow while the iphone is way more willing to let highlights blow out and even let some natural vignetting creep in both of these photos are terrific and the one you prefer is entirely down to subjective preference where the iphone 14 pro falls down is really in the details of the processing apple’s been ramping up the amount of noise reduction and sharpening over the years and the 14 pro has the most aggressive sharpening and noise reduction yet

sometimes it just looks bad this night skyline shot is kind of an over process mess compared to the pixel compared to the samsung s22 ultra the iphone is a little less predictable the s22 ultra consistently holds on to more color detail and low light it’s not as heavy-handed with that noise reduction and sharpening in bright light the differences between the 14 pro and the s22 ultra are more subtle but samsung still does a better job with detail in true samsung fashion though you get much punchier and warmer colors compared to the more natural look of

the iphone i mean look at these sunset photos samsung’s color ideas are sometimes from an entirely different planet but photo for photo the s22 ultra is more consistent with better fine detail now apple isn’t just pixel binning its sensor it’s also cropping it to generate what it calls an optical quality 2x zoom basically it’s just taking the middle 12 megapixels off that 48 megapixel sensor if you shoot and pro rot the full 48 megapixels and just cut out the center of the image you’ll get the same photo you don’t get the benefit of pixel binning

in 2x mode so it gets into a little trouble in lower light situations but it’s nice to have and it’s a really nice middle ground between the standard and the 3x tele that 2x crop is now the default for portrait mode which doesn’t seem to have improved all that much both the s22 ultra and even the regular s22 take better portrait photos samsung’s really nailed cutting the subject out of the background down to individual strands of hair if 14 pro isn’t quite there yet you can also switch the whole camera to pro raw mode and

shoot in full 48 megapixel glory which generates massive dng files anywhere between 50 and 80 megs each if you’re the sort of person who wants to do this this is incredibly exciting but normal people should probably not shoot 48 megapixel photos on their phone the other big update is to video but you know i called in the expert for that i’m just kind of having a hard time telling the difference the iphone 14 pro of course has great video i mean colors are punchy and bold with just the right amount of sharpness but all of

the same could be said about the iphone 13 pro and outside of a much sharper image in low light from the telephoto i’m not really seeing a large jump in performance between the two but apple has three gimmicks for us this year first there’s now an active mode that is supposed to provide more stable footage the pixel 6 pro had a similar feature but i find that video footage from most flagship phones in 2022 is already pretty stable certainly stable enough for mobile viewing so i never used it there and i probably won’t use it

here second there’s this sort of smooth zoom feature that smooths out the transitions when you’re switching between lenses it’s cool once you notice it but i think that most folks won’t notice it at all and lastly there’s 4k cinematic mode it blurs the background just well enough that i actually found myself always trying that mode first when filming a video of a person’s face with anything else i mean plants signs forget about it it’s just not that smart yet but does it matter that it’s in 4k for me it kind of does but i’m a

person who’s going to take that footage into premiere anyone else i don’t think it matters overall though the 14 pros video is not upgrade worthy if you’re coming from an iphone 13 pro and i think it would have been a little bit more beneficial if apple spent more time attempting to get rid of all of those light reflections at night and you know apple while you’re at it why don’t you add a button to your native camera app that allows you to switch between the front-facing camera and the rear camera when you’re filming a video

i mean samsung has had this feature for as long as i can remember it’s time that iphone gets it too okay back to the review apple’s made some other big changes to the iphone 14 pro the phone now has an always-on display mode which well android phones have had always on displays for a long time now it’s fine the display refresh drops to just one hertz and the brightness goes super low to save battery life apple’s done some really nice work here to keep wallpaper colors accurate in the low power mode but honestly i’ve been

fooled into thinking my phone is awake one too many times and i might prefer a much simpler pixel style black and white clock i hope we see some customization options here in the future other than that the display is slightly brighter than before it can hit a peak brightness of 1600 nits up from 1213 pro and in bright sunlight it can go all the way up to 2000 nits you all know i think apple’s mobile displays are consistently the best in the industry and it’s no different here this is the part of the video where

i’d usually talk about connectivity but can we all just admit that the 5g height balloon basically popped like i turn it off and just use lte because those networks are less congested sorry let me know when the self-driving cars are doing robot surgery or whatever anyway apple’s made a big move to drop sim trays from iphones united states which means it’s time everyone got used to esim which lets you access mobile networks without needing a physical sim card you can sign up for up to eight different networks on the iphone 14s it’s pretty rad my

iphone 14 pro transferred my atm t account over for my 13 right over bluetooth and i added my google fi account with just a handful of taps now it’s not nearly as easy to move e-sim info from iphones to android phones and back again and carriers are certainly going to place some weirdo lock-in games here because their carriers and weirdo lock-in games are kind of why they exist but being able to add new networks quickly and easily to your phone also theoretically means we can all force the carriers to compete a little more that’s definitely

a good thing speaking of connectivity apple’s emergency satellite connectivity system isn’t rolling out until later this year but alison got an early demo on the apple campus and it looks pretty slick the system walks you through a series of questions to help first responders understand your situation then it shows you where to point the phone to access the satellite we’ve got way more on that in her review of the iphone 14. speaking of allison she’s also been testing the iphone 14 pro while becca and i have tested the iphone 14 pro max and all three

of us sort of feel like the battery runs down a little bit faster than the 13 pro now to be fair all three of us were running around taking lots of photos and videos generally testing the hell out of these phones for the past week but you know we test a lot of phones like that apple says the 14 pro and 14 pro max should get slightly better battery life than the 13 pros and yep i still got through a full day with the 14 pro max so maybe it was just the always on display

taking a toll but it’s something i’ll be keeping my eye on in the future so that’s the iphone 14 pro the way i’ve been thinking about it is that the iphone 13 pro was the culmination of a lot of ideas for apple it was confident and complete and kind of hard to criticize the iphone 14 pro on the other hand is the clear beginning of lots of new ideas like the dynamic island the new camera even that satellite connectivity system because these ideas are new they’re inherently incomplete so there’s lots to criticize but they’re worth

criticizing which is its own kind of victory and a sign that apple isn’t holding still with the future of the iphone i’m into that what i don’t know is if all these new features are worth it yet if you’re the sort of person who’s willing to accept some rough edges to be on the bleeding edge you’re gonna have a lot of fun with the iphone 14 pro you’ll be figuring it out right alongside apple but for everyone else might be worth holding off of here look at these clouds oh my god look at that look

at those oh my god this stuff over here come on that is just so special

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