The new "Dynamic Island" alert system came out of the blue, but there had been a lot of rumors that Apple was going to put the front-facing camera and Face ID system in a pill-shaped cutout. While it was clear that Apple would have to use bigger camera sensors eventually, the company went even further and changed its computational photography system to be called the Photonic Engine.
A lot of that sort of thing can be found in the iPhone 14 Pro, which starts at $999 in the United States. It is late for Apple to have an always-on display, but it is more colorful than other displays. No one else in the United States is doing what Apple is doing. Apple will ship millions of these phones with the service coming online later this year, but it isn't like anything else we've heard about. There are more beginnings of big ideas in the new phone than we have seen before.
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, when you think about the iPhone 14 Pro. That doesn't mean that everything is perfect.
The name "Dynamic Island" has made everyone talk about it, which isn't normal for a status indicator system. I'm here for it if Apple wants to make people think about interface ideas.
The front camera and Face ID system live on the island because they have to take up some space on the front of the display. The notch disappears after a few minutes of use.
You are supposed to notice the difference. If you run your phone in light mode, it has a black pill shape in the middle of a white screen. It is moving all the time and you will see it. I would go so far as to say that this is the first iPhone that feels better in dark mode because of it.
Apple turned the discreet notch into an island. There are a number of different status indicator systems on the iPad. Plugging in a charge or flipping the switch will bring up an additional layer. A call in the background puts a green pill in the corner, an app that uses location is a blue pill. There are pill indicators on the other side of the screen. Another thing to do is connect AirPods. Timers and music in the background aren't useful status indicators
The island is Apple's way of replacing and unifying all those older status systems with a new home for system alert and making it work for things like music. It's not a replacement for notifications, all of them still show up in the notification center.
The easiest way to understand the island is to use a newwidget system built on the live activities platform, which has three views: the main view in the island, an expanded view, and an ultra-minimal icon. If you have more than one thing going, Apple will put the two most important things in the island first.
It is a neat concept, but like all first versions of anything, Apple made some choices that worked and others that didn't, so it is the first version.
A big choice that works is Apple overdoing things in classic Apple fashion: the island is meant to feel more like hardware than software. The edges of the island are up to three times sharper than the rest of the animations in the app. The animations are fun and the cutout on the display is getting bigger and smaller. You can see the camera sensors in sunlight, but the illusion goes away.
The other thing that works is that moving all the status indicators to the island makes them worth watching. Having call information on the screen is nice. Having your timer right there is useful. Making AirDrop and Face ID all show up in the same place makes them easier to understand.
In the keynote and all the ads, the island is shown as something that is worth interacting with, but Apple missed the mark. It isn't like that at all.
The island isn't a primary interface element; it sits over whatever app you're actually using When you tap on the island, it switches you back to the app that controls thewidget. You have to tap and hold to get the expanded version of the ad. I feel like this is backwards to me. I think you should be able to choose between the two behaviors if you tap the button.
It is more noticeable and useful than the notch, but you are not supposed to interact with it. Your music is playing, your personal hotspot is active, and you have a charge in your phone. I got a lot of questions about fingerprints interfering with the camera, and while it doesn't seem to be a problem, it's even less of a problem because you don't touch it very much.
One of the things that needs a year of attention is the Dynamic Island.
You are still looking at the island even though it is more prominent in the animation. It can cover up some content in apps that haven't been updated. The tradeoff between how noticeable the island is and how useful it is is a little unbalanced.
The tradeoff may change when the live activitiesAPI is released later this year. Apple built the hooks to make it available to third-party developers, and some of the concepts we have seen are really exciting. The Dynamic Island is one of those things that needs a year of refining and development before we know how important it is.
The new main camera sensor is the biggest feature of the camera system. In the last few years, Apple has been late to the game, as evidenced by the fact that the S20 Ultra and the Pixel 6 Pro have 50- and 112-megapixel sensors, respectively.
To take better photos, you need to collect as much light as possible, and to do that, you need bigger pixels. At some point, it's difficult to make the pixels physically bigger, so you can use software to group them into virtual ones. The math on Apple's binning is simple: it uses four pixels to create a single virtualpixel, which means the 14 Pro's 48-megapixel sensor generally shoots 12-MP photos.
The Pro's sensor has a 48 megahertz resolution.
One of the biggest changes to the camera system is that Apple is running its Deep Fusion processing for mid- and low-light photos earlier in the process on uncompressed image data, which is supposed to improve low-light performance by two to three times depending on the camera you are shooting with. Apple is still doing SmartHDR and all of its other familiar processing, but now there is a fancy name for it.
The effects of Deep Fusion have always been very subtle, even though Apple likes to show it off with photos of people wearing sweaters. The same is true on the Apple device. It seems like sweater mode is still in effect.
The 14 Pro and 13 Pro take the same pictures. The 14 Pro captures a little more detail in dim lighting, but you have to look for it. The main camera and the ultrawide have a bigger sensor this year and benefit from Photonic Engine. In dim light, the ultrawide looks a bit better than the 13 Pro, but you have to pay close attention.
If you zoom in to 100 percent, you can see that the iPhone 14 Pro is getting more detail and has a nicer background blur. It is nice, but it is not noticeable at the size of the social media network. The Pixel 6 Pro has a larger range of colors and a 50-megapixel sensor.
This is about the same as the previous two phones. Both phones grab a lot of detail and have great low-light performance, but the iPhone 14 Pro is more willing to let highlights blow out and even more willing to let some vignetting creeps in. I can't say which is better. Both of these photos are great, but which one you prefer is up to you.
The 14 Pro has the most aggressive sharpening and noise reduction yet, and Apple has been ramping up the amount of noise reduction and sharpening it has done over the years. The skyline shot is overprocessed and looks bad.
The left and right side of the phone are marked.
The Apple device is less predictable than the S22 Ultra. The S22 Ultra is not as heavy-handed with noise reduction and sharpening as it would be if it were. In bright light, the differences between the 14 Pro and the S22 Ultra are not as obvious as they could be. You get a lot of punchier and warmer colors compared to the more natural look of the iPhone, but that is not always the case. The S22 Ultra is more consistent in its detail.
Apple claims a 2x zoom is possible because of the large sensor it has, as well as the way it crops it to make it look better. If you cut out the center of the image, you will get the same photo as if you took the middle 12MIPs from the 48MIPs sensor. Since you don't get the benefit of pixel binning, it gets into a little trouble in lower-light situations. It is nice to have a middle ground between the standard wide and 3x.
Portrait mode on the 14 Pro is not as good as the S22 Ultra.
The 2x crop is the default for portrait mode. The regular S22 takes better portrait photos than the S22 Ultra. The subject is cut out of the background to individual strands of hair and the 14 Pro isn't there yet. Part of Mariya's head was chopped off.
There is a lot of detail in the photos I took, and a lot of room to modify them. The iPhone 14 Pro will be fun to play with if you are excited about ProRAW. I don't think it's a good idea for people to take pictures on their phones.
The difference between the 13 Pro and Apple's selfie camera is so small that it's hard to tell.
There are two selfies: one for the iPhone 13 Pro and another for the iPhone 14 Pro.
I asked Becca Farsace to play with the video features on the iPhone 14 Pro, and she found that they are as good as ever, but there is not a huge leap over the already excellent iPhone 13 Pro. The highlights are in the video above.
The 13 Pro had a bit of a mess last year, but Apple continues to put more work into it and it does a better job of distinguishing faces from the background. It's now possible to use it with 4K video resolution. It works best with faces but struggles with other subjects, according to the senior video producer.
4K resolution is now supported by cinematic mode.
Action mode is a stabilization system that lets you leave things like a Gimbal at home and still get smooth and steady footage. You need a ton of light for it to work, and there is a massive crop to the footage that is captured. It feels like it is a year away from being useful, but it is enjoyable to play with.
In good light, it's hard to tell the difference between the 14 Pro's footage and the 13 Pro's, but in low light, the 14 Pro gives a noticeably sharper image with less noise.
The 14 Pro has been the top contender for a long time, and the iPhone has been the top contender for a long time. Writing about the video features is similar to dancing about architecture.
It's been a long time since Apple added an always-on display mode to a phone. It's alright! The display refresh rate is very low and the brightness is very low. Apple has done a good job of keeping wallpaper colors accurate in the always-on mode, but I would rather have a black and white clock that looks like my phone is awake all the time. I would like to see some options in the future.
We tested the iPhone 14 Pro Max and Allison Johnson has the Pro version. All three of us felt that the battery was running a little bit faster than before. We test a lot of phones like that, and we were running around taking lots of photos and videos, but we were also running around taking lots of selfies. We all got through a full day with the 14 Pro Max, so maybe that always-on display was taking its toll, but Apple claims the 14 Pro and Pro Max will get better battery life than the 13 Pros. We will be watching it over time.
The display can go up to 2,000 nits in bright sunlight, up from 1,200 nits, and it can hit a peak brightness of 1,600 nits, up from 1,200 nits. The ProMotion feature from the 13 Pro is retained. I think Apple's displays are the best in the industry.
It's time for everyone to get used to eSIM, which lets you access mobile networks without needing a physical sim card, because Apple made a big move to drop sim trays from the iPhone in the US. The 14 Pro can hold up to eight different eSIMs and two of them can be active at the same time. My AT&T account was transferred over from the physical one in my phone to the one on the web, and I added my account from the web with a few taps.
It is not nearly as easy to move eSIM info from one phone to another, and carriers will play some weird lock-in games here because they are carriers and weird lock-in games are what they do. It will likely cause problems for travelers who are used to buying local sim cards in their home countries. I was hoping that Apple would allow users to sign up from the phone like they can do on the iPad, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
We can all force the carriers to compete a bit more if we can add new networks quickly and easily.
Allison got an early look at Apple's emergency satellite system, and it looked good. If you attempt to make an emergency call on cellular, the software will prompt you to use the satellite option. The system walks you through a series of questions to help first responders understand your situation. As the satellite moves across the sky, the satellite icon on the screen will change position. Messages got out in less than 30 seconds even though there was a little foliage between the phone and satellite.
You can either be into or not into Satellite SOS. It may be appealing if you are an outdoors enthusiast. If you don't leave areas with cell coverage, you won't be interested in a satellite emergency communication system. It will be free for the first two years on the new phone, but at some point it will cost more. The update will be available in November.
Apple won't say how much Satellite SOS costs after two years.
Crash Detection can be used for grim scenarios. The feature uses input from multiple phone sensors to detect when you have been in a car accident, similar to the one used by the Pixel feature. Don't expect the feature to come to older iPhone models because the 14 and 14 Pro have a specialized accelerometer that helps enable it. Crash Detection doesn't need input from the user. It will display a prompt to call emergency services if it finds a crash. It will call for help if you don't reply within 20 seconds. We don't know how to crash a car to see if it works. It is free and requires no setup if it works the way it is supposed to.
Every smart device has a set of terms and conditions that you have to agree to before you can use it. It is not possible for us to read and analyze all of them. Since these are agreements most people don't read and can't negotiate, we're going to start counting how many times you have to agree to use the device.
You have to agree to using any of the models.
You can send theiOS terms and conditions by email.
You can't use the phone if you don't agree to the agreements.
You have to agree to set up Apple Cash and Apple Pay when you set up the phone.
The Apple Cash agreement states that services are provided by Apple Payments, Inc.
You have to agree to it if you add a credit card.
You can't email the terms from your credit card company.
There are two mandatory agreements and six optional agreements for Apple Cash.
Everything you need to know about the 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max can be found here. The 14 Pro is the only model this year with Apple's new A16 Bionic chip, which is more powerful and has a faster graphics card. It is fast but so were the 13 Pro and the 12 Pro before it. The longevity of Apple's performance advantage is expressed by the fact that these phones are so fast.
The Pro is available in four different colors. Everyone seems to like the colors purple and black. Most people put a case on these phones. The Max is almost useless without a case to hold it in place.
The idea that the iPhone 13 Pro was the culmination of a lot of ideas for Apple is what I have been thinking about. It feels like the same culmination of ideas as the 13th iteration of the Apple device, the iPhone 14.
The Dynamic Island, the new camera, and the satellite connection system are just a few of the new ideas that can be found in the iPhone 14 pro. These ideas are not complete because they are new. They are an example of a victory and a sign that Apple isn't holding on to the future of the phone. The Dynamic Island is an example of how Apple is still thinking about the experience of the iPhone.
A lot of new ideas can be found in the 14 Pro.
I am not sure if the new ideas are worth it. If you are the sort of person who is willing to accept some rough edges, you will have a lot of fun with the iPhone 14 Pro. If you are happy with your current phone, you may want to hold out for another year to see how things go.
Additional testing was done by Allison Johnson.
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