Should You Upgrade To The iPhone 13 Pro? Here's What The Reviews Say
For the third straight year, Apple has released a duo of Pro phones. They look more or less the same as the last models, but come packed with fine-tuned and often invisible upgrades, like faster processor chips and new camera lenses. It's easy to dismiss these changes as minute or insignificant, but the iPhone 13 Pro reviews suggest otherwise. The Pro will start at $999 and the Pro Max at $1099.
Across the board, reviewers agree that the iPhone 13 Pro is significantly faster, with a faster display refresh rate and a better-performing battery than previous models. Plus, the incremental camera upgrades are the cherry on top. And guess what? The notch got smaller, too.
Better Cameras
Apple has put their largest phone camera sensor to date in the iPhone. It's better at gathering light and has a longer telephoto capacity with 3x zoom.
Using the Pro iPhones did result in brighter photos, but the improvement wasn't always obvious. I also noticed that photos had fast shutter speeds, which resulted in freezing action better, like when I took a shot of people riding bikes.
Patrick Holland, CNET
Holland also enjoyed the new macro mode, which turns on intuitively if you're within a certain distance from your subject, and had fun experimenting with the new cinematic mode.
Are Cinematic videos perfect? No, but it's a blast to use and experiment with. Cinematic mode needs a good amount of light to work best. If conditions are too dark, you'll get a pop-up prompting you to turn your flash on.
Patrick Holland, CNET
[Via CNET]
Improved Battery Life
Apple has explained in great detail how they managed to upgrade battery life, but The Verge's Dieter Bohn thinks it's pretty straightforward: "I'm just as sure that the biggest contributor is simply that the batteries are bigger than last year," he writes. The Pro has an 11 percent larger battery; the Pro Max's is 18.5 percent bigger.
I've only had the phones for a little less than a week, so I focused most of my use on the smaller iPhone 13 Pro as a kind of worst-case test. And my results are in line with Apple's claims. On a day when we really pushed the phone with lots of 4K video and max brightness on the screen, it still lasted from early morning to 11PM with 20 percent remaining — with somewhere north of four hours of very heavy use in the screen time tracking app. A day with less intense usage clocked me at seven hours of screen-on time before the low battery warning kicked in.
Dieter Bohn, The Verge
Bohn adds that you can safely venture out without a battery pack for these devices.
[Via The Verge]
Design
The camera notch at the back is bigger to accommodate three new cameras and Tech Crunch's Matthew Panzarino estimates it to be 40 percent larger, rendering your old phone cases obsolete. The front notch is slightly slimmer, too.
The front notch has been pared down slightly due to improvements in camera packaging, which leaves a tiny bit more screen real-estate for things like videos, but we'll have to wait to see if developers find clever ways to use the extra pixels.
Matthew Panzarino, Tech Crunch
[Via Tech Crunch]
Faster Display
WIRED's Julian Chokkattu says the new ProMotion refresh rate — 120Hz; tech that started with the 2017 iPad Pro — is "silky smooth." It's essentially giving you twice the number of image frames per second, making animations much smoother.
Both Pro models are nearly identical — they're just separated by size and battery life. I've found myself gravitating to the 6.1-inch Pro's more compact size this time around. It's just so easy to reach all parts of the screen with one hand, and it's not too heavy. Better yet, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by choosing the smaller Pro.
Julian Chokkattu, WIRED
[Via WIRED]
Bottom Line
Tech Crunch's Matthew Panzarino says that the overall technical improvements Apple has made under the hood really do positively affect a user's everyday life.
The iPhone 13s are an impressive field this year, providing a solid moat of image quality, battery life and now, thankfully, screen improvements that should serve Apple well over the next 12 months.
Matthew Panzarino, Tech Crunch
[Via Tech Crunch]
