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Review: Apple iPhone 12

Don’t buy it just for 5G.
iphone 12
Photograph: Apple

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Rating:

7/10

WIRED
Apple’s base-model iPhone now has an OLED display, unlike last year’s LCD on the iPhone 11. It has an incredibly fast chip. And it supports 5G, for whenever 5G is widely available in the US. Phone ships with a USB-C to Lightning cable, which is great if you’re the owner of a newer MacBook laptop.
TIRED
In a vacuum, the camera is great; compared to last year’s iPhones, the camera isn’t jaw-droppingly better. Phone’s display has the same refresh rate as the display on iPhone 11. Battery life wasn’t noticeably better. No more earbuds in the box. No more power bricks either, although that might be a good thing.

You’re probably stressed out as you’re reading this. Most people I know right now are stressed out. Maybe the last thing you’re thinking about is the new iPhone. Or maybe you are thinking about it because you want or need a new iPhone, but you don’t want to spend any more time than you need to deciding which iPhone to buy.

This is a review of the new iPhone 12. I’m going to make this as straightforward as possible, so you can get back to the other things you need to do, whether that’s working, relaxing, sleeping, eating, homeschooling, watching, walking, Zooming, distantly socializing, or voting. This should be the least stressful part of your day. It’s an iPhone.

If you have last year’s iPhone 11, as I do, or the iPhone 11 Pro, then you probably don’t need to upgrade to the iPhone 12. If your current iPhone is a few years old, you really want a better camera, and you have the disposable income for a new phone, then the iPhone 12 is a good choice. If you are considering upgrading to the iPhone 12 because you think having a 5G phone is going to change your life, you should absolutely not upgrade to the iPhone 12.

Playing the Field

The iPhone 12 starts at $799 if you choose a wireless carrier at the time of purchase. It’s $829 if you buy the phone unlocked from Apple.com. So we’re back to this bullshit. That’s for 64 gigabytes of internal storage. The price of the iPhone 12 goes up to $979 if you configure it with 256 GB of internal storage.

Apple is also selling two different iPhone 12 Pro models. These vary in size, have better cameras than the iPhone 12, and are more expensive—up to $1,399 for a fully loaded iPhone 12 Pro Max. My WIRED colleague Julian Chokkattu is reviewing the iPhone 12 Pro. Julian is awesome and so is his review, so you should read that if you think you want the most advanced, most expensive iPhone.

While reviewing the iPhone 12, I compared it mostly to last year’s iPhone 11, which now starts at $599. I also have a new $699 Pixel 5, made by Google, and I’ve used that for camera comparisons, since Pixel’s cameras are usually top notch. This spring I also reviewed the iPhone SE, and I have used or reviewed virtually every iPhone since the iPhone 4S.

A lot of you are probably curious about the iPhone 12 Mini, the new $699 iPhone with a 5.4-inch display. Unfortunately that phone is not shipping until later this year, and Apple hasn’t handed out review units, so I can’t advise you on that yet. I will say that if you already know you want a smaller phone, you should hold out for reviews of the Mini.

Also, Samsung makes stellar phone hardware, so I usually try to compare at least one new Samsung Galaxy phone to new iPhones, mostly for the cameras. (The operating systems are a whole separate thing, and most people who ask me for phone advice are already committed to either Android or iOS.) But I didn’t have a Samsung loaner on hand for direct comparison at the time of this review. Julian has reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S20 here.

Bright Eyes
Photograph: Apple

The iPhone 12 looks and feels more refined than the iPhone 11. They appear to be roughly the same size, with a 6.1-inch display, but the iPhone 12 has less volume, feels lighter, and has flat, polished aluminum edges. I love the flat edges. The phone ships in a couple of new colors. I have the blue iPhone 12, a pretty but unexciting blue undoubtedly inspired by the color of the year, which was supposed to inspire calm (lol). The new phone also has a brighter OLED display, a nice upgrade from the less brilliant LCD on last year’s iPhone 11.

The display on the iPhone 12 is hardened with something called Ceramic Shield, a new kind of composite made by Apple and glass-maker Corning. The bits of ceramic infused into the glass are supposed to make the phone more durable. And the flat edge design offers a little more protection for the phone overall. I hope this is the case, because I’ve dropped almost every iPhone since the iPhone 8 directly on concrete, and they’ve all cracked. I have not yet dropped the iPhone 12. (And now I’m using a case.)

The iPhone 12’s new chipset is its most significant internal upgrade. It’s the same chip that powers the new iPads. It’s an impressive piece of silicon, with the same number of CPU and GPU cores as the chip in the iPhone 11, but faster. There are double the number of cores in the chip’s Neural Engine, which powers things like Face ID, Animoji, and augmented reality apps.

The new iPhone 12 is a speedy phone. Launching apps, searching for apps, and downloading new apps, like Tetris, was noticeably faster on the iPhone 12. Same with augmented reality apps, like the delightful Big Bang AR app made by CERN and Google. But I could run the app just fine on both my iPhone 11 and iPhone 12. You can do pretty much everything on the iPhone 11 that you can do on the iPhone 12. The 12 just has a little more zip to it.

A more efficient chip also improves photo and video capture, and tees the phone up for more advanced software features that might be rolled out in the future. That’s always the case when you buy any kind of flagship smartphone—you can expect the cameras to be better, and you can expect there to be some features that you won’t really utilize every day but they might matter at some point down the road.

So we should probably talk about 5G.

Radio Waves

All four of Apple’s new iPhone 12 models support 5G. This is not the primary reason to get a new iPhone 12. There are at least 17 Samsung mobile devices out there that support 5G. LG has released 5G phones. So has Sony. Even Google, which has a small hardware business compared to Apple and Samsung, released 5G phones before Apple did.

But 5G networks aren’t yet widespread enough in the US for you to experience the benefit of these faster wireless speeds. And there are different flavors of 5G being rolled out around the world. Verizon, one of Apple’s launch partners for this phone in the US, has been touting its expansion of ultra-wideband 5G, which has fast speeds but limited range. This will someday be useful in places like crowded train stations, stadiums, and parks, and experts say 5G could revolutionize entire industries, like healthcare and transportation. But again, it’s not especially useful right now, despite analysts frothing at the mouth over 5G.

Only once during my six-day test of the iPhone 12 did the phone briefly connect to Verizon 5G, on the beach in Half Moon Bay, California. I got so excited I took a screenshot of "5G" popping up in the upper right corner of my phone's screen. But it wasn’t really a good opportunity to test 5G, or compare, say, Netflix streams on a 4G phone versus a 5G phone. The sun was setting, and I was more interested in testing the new phone’s camera. (Julian tested the iPhone 12 Pro’s 5G capability in New York City; read about his experiences too.)

Snap Tight

The iPhone 12 has the same camera design as the iPhone 11. The rear camera module has a wide camera and an ultrawide camera, while the selfie camera is a single wide lens. They’re all 12-megapixel cameras—same as last year’s iPhone 11.

However, taking photos in low light and at night is supposed to be better on the iPhone 12, because the wide-angle camera lens on the back has a wider aperture. And Apple is wielding some of its machine learning tricks to make all photos, including selfies, look brighter and more crisp. In recent years, the iPhone display itself would cast artificial light when you were taking selfies in a dark bar. Now the camera is good enough that you don’t necessarily need that artificial light (also, RIP dark bars). Some people have suggested that these phones have larger sensors too, but that’s only in iPhone 12 Max Pro. The advancements are largely due to improvements in software.

I’ve taken more than 100 photos on the iPhone 12, iPhone 11, and Pixel 5 over the past several days. My takeaway is that if the iPhone 12 existed in a vacuum, its camera would be spectacular. Compared to the iPhone 11 camera, it’s not a huge leap forward.

Color accuracy is improved; a lot of my iPhone 11 photos now look warm in comparison. The iPhone 12 handles complex edges a little bit better in Portrait mode, like my editor Mike’s curly hair or my cat’s ears. One Portrait photo I snapped had the bizarre effect of applying dark studio lighting to the lower half of the photo, even though the phone was set to standard Portrait mode. This appeared to be an anomaly.

The iPhone 12’s video capture is more advanced too. Both the iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 capture 4K video at up to 60 frames per second. But the new iPhone 12 supports a professional-grade Dolby Vision video format at 30 frames per second, which gives video clips a rich and filmic look.

The areas where the iPhone 12’s cameras seemed most improved were in low light or at night. And since many of the iPhone’s camera advancements this year are computational improvements, that means Apple will continue to release software that will make the cameras better. Still, several of the photos I shot using Google’s Pixel 5 were the clear standouts when I compared them to photos captured on the iPhone. The Pixel 5 tends to smooth out selfies too much, but its low-light photos are remarkably good.

Power Play

Apple is big on magnets this year. It has revived MagSafe, which was a proprietary name for Apple’s laptop connectors, and introduced the name as the magnetic wireless charging system for the iPhone 12. My review kit came with a $39 MagSafe iPhone charger, a flat puck that I could plop the iPhone onto to charge it. You can still use other Qi-enabled wireless chargers, too, like the 2018 Mophie charger I have on my kitchen counter, but you’ll have to move the phone around to find the right spot to initiate the charge. With MagSafe, the iPhone 12 and the charger snap into alignment.

This is satisfying to use, and it will open up a whole world of third-party MagSafe accessories. But as with all “small” things Apple rolls out, there may be big implications for accessories makers. The wattage is higher on MagSafe than it will be with Qi accessories. This gives Apple a distinct advantage in owning the charging standard, making its own charging accessories, and forcing smaller companies to now adopt this charging standard. (Plus, every time Apple introduces a small change, it promises that the new path will be an easier one to walk, but that’s not always the case. I say this as someone who still has to find the right dongle every time I want to pop an SD card or an Ethernet cable into my MacBook “Pro.”)

Back to batteries: I noticed no real improvement in battery life between the iPhone 11 and iPhone 12. The new iPhone got me through the day, but if I forgot to charge it overnight, I’d have to charge it immediately in the morning, per usual.

Of course, my phone habits have changed a lot the past several months. I’m mostly home, connected to Wi-Fi. I’m using GPS a lot less frequently. And when I stream movies or TV shows or exercise classes, I’m doing it on a TV or tablet at home rather than on my phone while on a train or plane. However, I message and talk and video chat on the phone a lot more. All I know is that the battery life on the iPhone 12 didn’t seem better than the iPhone 11, which I had been using regularly up until last week.

It’s also hard to predict what’s going to happen when people do start accessing 5G networks more frequently—and what happens if that’s a year or two from now, when your iPhone 12’s battery has aged? One attribute of 5G is high data throughput, which can cause battery drainage. Apple has said it’s working with wireless carriers to make sure networks settings on the iPhone are optimized for 5G, and it has a software solution that toggles between 4G and 5G in a way that’s supposed to preserve battery life. But there are still unknowns there.

Get the iPhone 12 if you’re long overdue for a fast phone with a great camera and you prefer iOS and living in Apple’s ecosystem. But don’t get the iPhone 12 solely for 5G. A smartphone, more than ever, should be something that fits into your life and delivers the experiences and connections you need it to. It shouldn’t be an overpriced vehicle for technology you can’t fully take advantage of yet. And it shouldn’t be the cause of more stress. There’s enough of that already.