iPhone 14 Pro Review 6 Months Later: Some Harsh Criticism
What’s going on guys, my name is Wade with TechDaily. So I’ve had my iPhone 14 Pro for more than 6 months now. It’s my daily driver – it’s the phone I use most often, when I’m not testing other devices. I’m personally an iPhone user anyway, I have been for forever, but even I can admit that the iPhone has lost some of its luster. The iPhone 14 pro is a great device – it’s the premium, well spec’d Apple device you’d expect to get for nearly $1000 – awesome display, top notch performance. But the past 6 months
of use with this phone has not been without issue. And I think my thoughts are echoed by others who similarly feel that not only is the iPhone itself a bit tired in design and features, but that iOS itself has lost some of its “it just works” distinction and is plagued by bugs and glitches that have almost evolved into a meme. In this video, I’m going to give my brutally honest thoughts about the iPhone 14 pro after 6 months of nonstop use, it’s not all bad news, but I’m going to be harsh, and I also want
you guys to let me know if you have an iPhone 14 or 14 pro or any other iPhone really – what you’re experience has been like, I’d love
like, and it’s functional too. Around back, there’s a magnetic ring that flips out which serves multiple purposes. You can use it as sort of a finger holder to get a better grip on your phone, you can also use it – like the name suggests – as a stand to prop up your phone in either landscape or portrait orientation, and this is great if you want to watch a video or just keep your device upright while you work or even set up a FaceTime call hands free. And the magnetic ring also gives you an even strong
MagSafe connection for apples own accessories or any third party ones you might have. They also come in a bunch of different colors – my favorite is this deep purple that really matches the phone quite well. If you’re interested, I’ll leave a link to CASEKOO’s magic stand cases down below in the video description, I use the case, I highly recommend it, and thanks so much to CASEKOO for sponsoring this video. Now even though there’s no catastrophic cracks, the polished stainless steel frame of the iPhone 14 Pro tends to get “worn out” in a way – little
love marks, scratches, spots, stuff like that. It’s more prevalent around the major touch points like the volume buttons and the lightning port. You can kind of see those small spots and scratches there. No big deal really but if you like to keep your phone pristine, its a bit tough with this polished finish. Physically, I’ve actually really grown to appreciate the size of the regular iPhone 14 Pro. It fits nicely in my pocket, it’s easy to use with one hand, at this point, I can’t imagine using anything larger and I don’t even really want to. I’ve
had my fair share of Max iPhone’s over the years but I’m sticking with the 6.1 inch Pro for the foreseeable future. My only real gripe is the fact that that big ol’ camera bulge really makes this phone top heavy. It’s less obvious with a case on but without it, the top of the iPhone definitely pulls down a little bit – it’s hard to explain, but it’s sort of like a teeter totter that’s uneven on one side. I’m sure Apple just wants to prominently feature the cameras on this iphone, but I wouldn’t mind if the camera
bulge was gone and everything was flush with the back of the phone, even if the whole body has to be thicker. Fill that space with more battery, that’d be cool, but having these huge camera lenses and stuff stick out the back isn’t really a necessary design element in my opinion. The other design element that I’ve realized is sort of unnecessary – at least in my own experience – is the new Dynamic Island. I don’t know if it’s just the apps that I personally use or what, but very few actually utilize the dynamic island, and the
ones that do don’t really present me with a better way to quickly do something. 99% of the time, I’m just switching back into whatever app is playing or running rather than trying to tap into the tiny dynamic island area and mess with it. And like I said, so few apps have a dynamic island state that I’m not really being trained to utilize it. I’ll see things in the dynamic island pop up, I think it’s sometimes a more dynamic notification pop up, if anything, but I don’t think its the best way to actually interact with something.
Now I appreciate the idea – making I guess the equivalent of an Android selfie camera cutout functional is a nice idea – even if this dynamic island area is still basically as big as the original iPhone notch, let’s be honest – I just don’t really know how to make it better. More functional. And honestly, I don’t even think I’d want it to be. The iPhone has such a dated design now from the front and the back. The dynamic island is like a cop out way to keep that area big with the earpiece and speaker and
camera and Face ID sensors. All Apple really did was allow for a tiny bit more of screen to be shown through above the dynamic island area, and then make the dynamic island an even bigger “notch” that’s constantly attempting to be a thing. I don’t think the dynamic island sticks around after 2 or 3 more iPhone releases, and unfortunately end up on a graveyard next to 3D Touch Now one of the few things that was actually upgraded on the iPhone 14 Pro this year was the display, and specifically the brightness. This is the brightest iPhone yet,
and in some sense that’s definitely true. The user controlled brightness is bright – when you’re just using this phone under normal conditions – at home, at work, inside, you get very minimal glare and a lot of nits to work with. I’m almost never at max brightness simply because the phone doesn’t need to be – 60-70% max and you’re good. The auto brightness on the other hand with like outdoor viewing in direct sunlight, that also is supposed to be better – much much brighter, and for longer periods of time, but I honestly haven’t seen much of
a difference. Sure, the phone definitely seems brighter with its auto brightness enabled for maybe a minute or two, but after the phone heats up, the screen gets dimmer and dimmer in big steps down until, eventually, you can barely see the screen at all outside. I don’t know that a phone like this can sustain the full 2000 nits for like an hour, but I also haven’t seen this phone be super bright for more than 5 minutes. I feel like there’s gotta be a happy medium here. Ok so let’s talk performance, and specifically iOS. Now the iPhone
supposed to “just work” – that’s the idea with Apple products and the iOS ecosystem at least, but I and a whole bunch of other people have noticed that iOS lately has been rough. The phone itself is fast, obviously, it’s the most powerful iPhone you can buy at least the pro’s were given an actual performance upgrade this year – unlike the regular non-pro iphones, though to be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an every other year upgrade with the processor on the pro phone sometime soon too. The issues that plague this phone though plague all
iPhone’s – new and old – and that is a consistently glitchy iOS that seems to have gotten more and more unstable with each minor and major update. The glitches and funky things are sporadic and widespread. Right off the bat, In my own experience, the stocks widget has stopped showing me line graphs for whatever reason. No idea why, and deleting and re-installing the widget doesn’t bring it back. Phone calls – whether it’s a regular one or via what’s app – also get dropped as soon as I try to answer them, and sometimes the phone just doesn’t
ring at all. Videos playing in the YouTube app will randomly go black almost every day, I don’t know if that’s an iOS bug or a YouTube app issue, but I feel like everyone has experienced that recently. My AirPods don’t always connect immediately anymore which is a bummer. And the lockscreen and by extension notifications are also just awful. This is a clunky and irritating way to display and hide notifications, it’s awkward to scroll through them and tap to show them, it’s still time consuming the get rid of them even though they’re grouped, sometimes they’ll just stay
in the Notification Center even though I’ve already dismissed them in app, and if you’re playing music and have the album art shown, you can for some reason tap through the notification to the album art but depending on where you tap, it affects things differently. Luke Miani had a great video about even more of the iOS issues plaguing folks recently, there’s a whole Twitter thread devoted to their weird stuff people have had happen on their devices, and it just seems like a lot of the bugs shouldn’t be happening. It’s not very IOS, and I can honestly
say that “just working” isn’t a defining factor of the iPhone right now. It’s objectively false. So as with most smartphones over time, my iPhone 14 Pro isn’t as uhh..virile as it once was? I’m sitting at 95% battery health which after 6 months is a pretty drastic decline honestly, I may very well be below 90% after one year and I’ve been trying to charge my phone using just the MagSafe wireless charger which with its slower speeds is supposed to help sustain the battery longer but I do plug up to the bigger faster Apple wall plugs and
that does degrade the battery. I also use my phone a lot, directly and indirectly with music constantly playing or YouTube videos going on in the background. My screen time and app usage is probably higher than most, but still if I’m losing a percentage of battery capacity every single month, that seems pretty extreme. But let me know what % battery health you guys have if you’ve been using an iPhone 14 or 14 pro since launch in really curious. Now i feel like up to this point this video has just been me bashing the iPhone 14 pro
– fortunately we’re going to end on s high note, the cameras are the best on any device for a vast majority of everyday shooting. Now I want to make that clear – every day shooting. Most people – myself included – whip out this phone, snap a single picture without any thought or any mode or any change to any setting, and that’s it. And that’s what the iPhone does best. Take great regular pictures and videos too, there’s seriously no other device I would rather film a casual outdoor scene or even a full featured fully edited YouTube
video on other than the iPhone. It’s the best video taker there is. I’ve taken thousands of pictires and videos with this phone now and I’ve honestly captured some incredible things. With night mode, with the wide angle, super detailed portrait pics that I use for professional things. But it is not the most capable camera system on a smartphone, and it’s not the most feature rich either. Way more people are way more impressed with Samsung’s super zoom abilities for example, or the google pixel’s magic eraser when that was an exclusive software feature. It’s been a long time
since us iPhone users would whip out our phones and say, “look what this camera can do” – not since night mode or portrait mode. No one is showing off the cinematic filter or Pro Raw – not that 99% of average iPhones users even use or even know what that stuff is. And the more I think about that, the more I realize that the efforts into the camera updates – where Apple spent most of their efforts the last few years – haven’t really yielded much at all. Regardless of my seemingly harsh criticisms, the iPhone 14 pro
remains one of the best smartphones you can buy for the money. It offers a super premium build, great display, unparalleled performance and app support, an accessory lineup with MagSafe that so far reigns without competition. But..it’s still the same old iPhone we’ve had for 3 or 4 years now really. The same look, the same design, and I’d say the same software experience too but that’s not actually the case – it’s a buggy UI with weird instances of glitches and errors that don’t feel very Apple. I’m not sure what I want more – a complete hardware redesign
or maybe a half dozen breakthrough features or maybe an iOS update that’s just a hundred big fixes. Regardless of those wishes, I will still keep using my iPhone as my daily device for the foreseeable future because the good outweighs the bad, but I could see maybe a year or two down the line, that eventually not being the case. But what do you guys think about the iPhone 14 pro and current state of iOS? I being too harsh, too unreasonable? Let me know in the comments down below I’d love to hear your thoughts of course. Hopefully
you guys did enjoy this video though, be sure to follow techdaily on twitter and subscribe to techdaily youtube channel if you haven’t already and I’ll see you guys later.
