iPhone 12 Mini - Don't Waste Your Money By Austin Evans

- The iPhone 12 is here and you should save your money. Here we have our best look at the entire 2020 lineup of iPhones starting with the iPhone 12, the iPhone 12 Pro as well as the little brother, the iPhone 12 mini and the big chunky itself the iPhone 12 Pro Max. So let's get some of the negatives out of the way straight off the bat, while yes we do have 5G across the lineup of iPhones this year, there is no ProMotion display, there's no 120Hz, everything is running at 60, just like it has been with every iPhone since the beginning. Look, I'll agree 90, 120 FPS is really the move, right? Is this a deal breaker? I would say no, but when you look at phones that are significantly cheaper that have it, it does mean not quite as straightforward as you might think. However, if you wanna look on the flip side, all the iPhones now have very similar screens. So unlike previously, where the iPhone XR, and the iPhone 11 used a much lower resolution and honestly not as good IPS display as opposed to the old led on the higher end iPhones, now it is pretty much uniform across the board, you're getting there, super retina XDR display with high resolution and importantly that old LED color and contrast, no matter which iPhone 12, you pick up, and especially considering that the iPhone 12 mini starts at $699, that starts to look a little impressive, so no matter which iPhone you pick up from the lowly iPhone 12 mini all the way up to the Pro Max, you will have 5G standard, now I say 5G standard, there are some differences, but it's more based on region, and then the actual phone you're using.

So here in United States, you'll be able to get the iPhones with the millimeter wave 5G built in, and the Verizon CEO was on stage and it certain points it felt like a Verizon ad with the amount of times I heard Verizon 5G, Verizon 5G, Verizon 5G. Then no matter where you are though, that 5G should be enabled at least on the iPhone, so as carriers light it up more and more often around the world, it will support it. Now I will say just from personal experience 5G if you're looking for upgrade or reason to upgrade, isn't really enough in my opinion right now. Generally speaking for me on the T-Mobile 5G network, I've seen speeds that are like 20, 30% faster than 4G, which is fine, and of course these iPhones will support an LTE network and they even have some things built into the software and the firmware to actually give you like the speeds when you need it, so it can detect when you're trying to download a game or something that's very intensive. It will jump onto the 5G network, but as soon as you're just, you know, refreshing Twitter or whatever, it will go down to the 4G network in the background so you can save some battery.

I do think that's one of the big considerations for the iPhone this year. - But you could charge it. - You can charge it better with MagSafe, so yes my friends, the wonderful technology that kept Ken Bollito from crashing his laptop into the floor is returned. - It happened. - It definitely happened, it did happen we have video footage, has returned on the iPhone.

Now it's not at least standard safe from the old Mac books, so instead on the back the phone, there's a little magnet ring around where you are wirelessly charge, but instead of just purely using it for chargers, and of course you can buy wireless chargers that will work, but you can also use it with a wide range of accessories. So you can snap a case on the back of your iPhone, you can use things like a little wallet and you can even do a little cover display, but if you wanna upgrade to some of their MagSafe chargers, you can do things like, I don't know, air power your way out of the dark past. You can use the Apple watch and the iPhone together on a charger. - It is Portable though. - It is portable, but they were very clear not mention air power in any way whatsoever.

Now beyond the speeds and feeds, there are some major new features with these iPhones as this is the first time in years that we've gotten an all new design. Look at this brand new design, completely revolutionary, never been used before, suddenly not from the iPhone 5. Now all jokes aside actually do really like the more squared off look of the iPhone 12, and that comes across to the iPhone 12 Pro as well, so the materials are different, the standard iPhone 12 and the mini have aluminum, whereas the 12 Pro and the Pro Max have a stainless steel, same as what we've seen in the past, or regardless, you're going to get that much flatter design that also enables them to stretch the screens out without enabling too much of a bigger overall footprint. Now beyond just a pure looks, there are a ton of new colors. So on the iPhone 12, you get black, white, red, green and blue, and on the 12 Pro you get silver, graphite, gold and what my personal favorite is the Pacific blue.

Which one are you doing? - Blue. - Blue is the move, right? I mean, the green was cool last year, the blue. One thing I do think is worth pointing out is the ceramic shield, AKA the Jerry Rig everything, please test our phone feature. So they've partnered with Corning, and in fact, I believe Apple is actually an investor in Corning who made gorilla glass that are on pretty much all smartphones right now, and this is supposedly the most strongest, most powerful glass on an iPhone ever, or any smartphone ever, they've called out specifically it is four times better with drop performance, which okay. - Are we gonna test it? - No Zach's gonna give it a deeper groove in level nine hopefully.

- Can we drop it? - No, of course everyone knows that when you upgrade to the Pro phone you get Pro features like USB-C or a USB-C charger, okay, so here's the deal, right? The iPhone is this year are still on lightning, however they now come with a USB-C to lightning charger in the box and by charger I mean cable, there's no charger in the box or no headphones, but don't expect the iPhones to be cheaper this year as I'll get two here in just a little bit. This is, I think, more of a play for the environmental side of things and near probably gonna wanna buy one of those new maxi chargers anyway, right? That's surprising no one, the Apple A14 chip inside these new iPhones is the most powerful and a smartphone yet, which I would normally make fun of this hyperbole, but I mean the A13 is still the most powerful chip in a smartphone and now there's a new version. So it's built on the five nanometer process, I believe actually the very first chip that's on sale, that has been using that in that process, I don't actually expect a huge amount of extra performance, so it has 40% more transistors, but it is still a six core CPU with a four core GPU, and they've talked a lot about like the neural engine and stuff, what they didn't do is talk a lot about the performance improvements. I, based on what we've heard on the iPad there, don't have huge expectations. I think this is gonna be a fairly small bump in performance, but I mean it was already fast, so It'll just be a little bit faster.

So one of the things that I think is actually the biggest upgrade on, well, any phone every year, but specifically on the iPhones this year are the cameras. So let's get the basics out of the way first. The iPhone 12 and 12 Mini have two cameras just like before, you have an ultra wide and a wide angle camera, on the Pro and the Pro Max, you have three cameras, a telephoto, a standard wide and an ultra wide, right? So the general layout is the same you don't get any extra cameras this year, but those cameras, those lenses and those sensors are going to be different. So starting out with the iPhone 12, this has a ultra wide which if not the same as very similar to what we got last year, which is a little bit disappointing because let's be real, the ultra wide on the iPhone is kind of fine, but it is not as good as even something like the Z flip, which is a much older design. What we do get this year is an upgraded lens for the main camera, so it is now at 1.6 aperture. So it lets more light in, and it also has a seven element lens, which should theoretically give you more sharpness, so specifically they called out now 27% improvement in low-light, and the fact that night mode now works on the ultra wide and the front facing and everything, but they were also talking a lot about the actual video quality.

So on the 12 Pro it has slightly better video and we'll get to that in a second, but it apparently allows you to have better low-light across the board through the better lens, as well as the better processing. Now let's move on to the iPhone 12 Pro. Same ultra-wide camera, no difference, same main camera, no difference, so you have those improvements but it's the same, and you do get a telephoto camera, which as far as I can tell is very similar if not identical to the telephoto on last generation. The ultra-wide camera on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, that is such a mouthful, does look to be the same, however, the main wide angle sensor is now much larger, so they specifically say that it is 47% larger, which is not as surprise because a lot of other phones these days have started incorporating much larger sensors, when you look at something like the galaxy S20 Ultra, I mean, that was a massive, massive sensor that was almost the same size as a lot of compact cameras. Now it's interesting because they've done this only on the 12 Pro Max, So if you want the better image quality, the better low-light performance, the better video, the better everything really is going to be on the 12 Pro Max and not the 12 Pro, which is strange because typically the difference between the sizes was just the size of the screens, there was actually no spec difference or anything like that.

But this time around, if you want the best camera or an iPhone, you go all the way up to the big chunky himself. The telephoto is also different on the 12 Pro Max. So instead of a 2x lens, it's a 2.5x zoom. Basically the telephoto should be slightly more zoomed in, which is great, just fine I think it's a decent compromise. But the main difference is going to be in that main sensor.

There is something that is only exclusive to the Pro and the Pro Max and is not included on the peasant iPhones, is the higher quality video modes. So still 4k 60 across the board, it's still going to look good no matter what. But the Pro models have 10 bit recording, which is really nice actually, that's something that you typically wanna see on fairly high end cameras, and you also have Dolby Vision built in. Now, if you talk to Wes, he will give you a very long dissertation on why Dolby vision is not as standard, but really merely a lot or a fire finishing, whatever it, all it matters is that you have Dolby vision which will allow you to get more dynamic range and it will be able to be edited directly inside the photos app, does that matter to you? Probably not, I think 10 bit is nice and the ability to have more dynamic range and a better image out of the iPhone is good, but I mean, unless you're gonna be car grading, your iPhone footage is probably not going to be a huge difference. New bunch of other things included on the iPhone 12 Pro line, so there's Lidar which is nice for things like AR, but specifically for things like auto-focus, that's really cool, you do have sensor shifts, but specifically only on the Pro Max, so again, taking from the higher end cameras of the world, like these Sony A7S III, the actual sensor will be able to move to stabilize your image.

There's also Apple ProRAW. Now this is a little bit more of a pro feature, which can fair these phones there food Pros. But essentially what this allows you to do is instead of saving a raw file and doing all of your own edits yourself, it will bake in some of the stuff that they're doing with all of the computational photography, but a way that you can still completely adjust it. So it's going to only be able to be edited inside the photos app, and apparently some third-party photo editing applications, I assume Photoshop at some point, but if you wanna get the absolute best image quality out of the iPhone, you really wanna get in there and sort of tweak everything. The ProRAW format is nice, right? Because essentially the raw image straight off the sensor is fine, but so much of what makes the image look great is all the processing that they do, and you know, obviously that's being done pretty much in an instant, but the fact that they can give you all that processing, but you also still have the full flexibility to tune the image however you want is nice, but again, that is a Pro and Pro Max feature.

So say you want to get your hands on some of these brand new iPhone. So they're going on sale at two different dates. So they're, pre-orders is this Friday for the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro, and they will be going on sale next Friday, the 23rd of October. However, if you want to get the iPhone 12 mini, which is what I'm gonna do, or the iPhone big chunky edition, that will be going on sale next month. So they will be on sale on November 13th with pre-orders on the sixth, AKA, some of that iPhones are coming out right around PS5 and X-Box, which means I'm not going to sleep that week.

Pricing is pretty straight forward, $699 for the iPhone 12 mini, $799 for the iPhone 12, $999 for the iPhone 12 Pro and $1099 for the iPhone 12 Pro Max, obviously more if you wanna upgrade the storage, so I'm very curious, do you think the iPhone is worth it this year? And if so, which of the iPhones is actually best? I will say for me, it really comes down to the iPhone big chunky (chuckles) and the iPhone 12 Mini. The little chunk is some might say, I think I'm ready (chuckles). I'm gonna stick with it, I'm gonna stick with it. I think the iPhone 12 mini is the phone that I'm going to switch to. I like a smaller device and the compromises really aren't that heavy.

The Pro Max is a great looking phone, if you wanna carry around the big chunk is in your pocket, I'm good.

Source : Austin Evans