I’ve been using the iPhone 14 Pro Max for a week now, and I’ve been trying to think of how I can explain this year’s iPhone in one sentence, and I think I finally got it down. The 14 Pro Max is the flagship iPhone model that was chosen by Apple to deliver all of the super late features that people have been begging for. Apple nailed it and not only that, they’ve masterfully refined every bit of the iPhone into their masterpiece with all of the aspects of the iPhone like the design the display the performance the software the battery life and of course the cameras, finally being refined into what Apple has been imagining for years. So the question I’m gonna try to answer in this review is whether Apple’s mastering of features and this iPhone is worth upgrading to despite speculation that next year’s iPhone 15 Pro will get USBC among other features. In my answer might surprise you.
DYNAMIC ISLAND NOTCH
Let’s get right down to business and talk about the notch, which people have wanted Apple to get rid of ever since the iPhone 10 and they finally delivered. or have they? Apple’s Dynamic Island took the internet by storm when they surprised everyone with it at their Apple event even convincing some people to upgrade for that feature alone. It seems like the sentiment has shifted a bit once users actually started using it. Some people are complaining that you can see the individual cutouts when it’s in direct sunlight and in my honest opinion I don’t think this matters or negatively impacts the experience at all. Others are complaining that it’s not as useful or active as Apple made it look in their marketing. Well duh, it’s marketing and of course with regular use the dynamic island won’t be used all the time. Even after only one week I’ve already found that it makes using my iPhone more convenient. First off, I love how fluid and smooth the animation are like when face ID authenticates and for the first time ever, I can see timers counting down at all times. The dynamic island also fixed the number one thing that I hated on my iPhone, the low battery notification that used to fill up your entire display, now simply pops up in the island. I’ve actually noticed myself using it for Apple Music which allows me to jump straight into the music app by tapping the island instead of going through my app switcher to find it. Of course you can tap and hold to bring up the pop-up. However, I wish Apple switched the controls to this one tap brings up the pop-up and a second tab opens the app. No more tap and hold please. But what a lot of people are misunderstanding about the island is that it’s a brand new feature and it’s gonna take a few months before we really start seeing it become incredibly useful as more third-party developers add support for things like live activities for sports games in the latest IOS 16 beta or even the cool little Tamagotchi feature for the Reddit app, Apollo. So my point of view is that Apple did an absolute solid work on the island’s hardware itself, finally deleting the Notch and replacing it with something that feels fresh, fluid, actually useful and ready for developers to take on, so just give it some time.
SPEAKERS
What really impressed me was that Apple not only redesigned the speaker Grille to be three times thinner but they’ve greatly improved the speakers all round. Not only are the speakers much louder than before but the quality got better in every aspect including the bass, mids and the highs where they’re now more soft and clear and even better the dynamic range of frequencies is now wider, so you can make out different instruments or Tunes where you couldn’t before so this is a big deal for me.
ALWAYS ON DISPLAY
I’ve got to cover the number one thing that people will notice right away and that’s the always-on display. After so many years of this feature being missing Apple has finally added it but unfortunately a lot of people are complaining about it being too bright, so bright that they keep thinking the display is on when it’s not and to that my reply is that they’re simply just not used to it. Give it a week or two you and it’ll feel like second nature and honestly this is the first always on display I’ve ever seen that still retains your wallpaper in the background instead of being completely black, so it’s totally unique to Apple.
The downside with that is that people are noticing worse battery life with this on and in my personal use I haven’t really noticed a huge drop in battery life. Probably because I don’t like using the auto brightness setting which is the only way to experience the new 2000 nits of brightness Outdoors. In reality Apple should probably just give us the option to dim down the always on display brightness to help save battery life instead of being forced to completely turn it off.
As far as the always-on display itself I absolutely love it since I no longer forget about notifications that popped up for a couple of seconds before the display shuts off like what happened previously, now they are always there so I can’t miss them. The only problem with it right now is that you have to tap on the display once before you can tap into a notification, I really wish Apple would make it so you could tap the notification straight from the always on display and it’ll authenticate with face ID open it up and go straight into that app, so I hope Apple changes that. On the plus side, Apple has made unlocking your iPhone more convenient than ever before by adding swipe to wake so all you have to do is swipe out from the bottom to instantly authenticate with face ID and unlock the phone which is a major game changer for ease of use.
Moving on to the performance, not that much has changed in terms of the raw power of the A16 bionic chip, so nobody should be upgrading for that. There are some major upgrade worthy changes this year like the new Snapdragon X65 modem which is not only quite a bit faster than the previous X60, it also runs cooler which leads to less heat which is the other major change.
For the last couple of years display dimming has been a very annoying issue on the Pro iPhones and this year Apple has finally improved the cooling performance by adding a new thermal tape which helps spread some of the heat away from the chip faster than before and because of that display dimming has been significantly improved this year, now it’s not completely gone like when stress testing the graphics but it’s much better than it was before staying at a consistently higher brightness level when dimmed down, so it’s not instantly noticeable and annoying like before.
GAMING
I was even able to play Call of Duty mobile at 100 brightness with no dimming whatsoever which was honestly shocking since the iPhone 13 Pro Max would dim down in less than a minute in this scenario. This change makes the iPhone experience so much better.
We’ve got to talk about the cameras now on the surface it seems like not that much has changed with the main camera, even though it’s the biggest jump in megapixels and sensor size we’ve ever had in an iPhone and that’s because for some reason the new 48 megapixel camera still defaults to shooting 12 megapixel photos by combining or bidding 4 pixels into one and because of that you can’t really see a big difference between the 14 Pro and 13 Pro’s main cameras at least in the daytime. In the night time you can clearly see that the 14 Pro is better because the larger sensor helps it gather more light and you can easily say the same thing for all of the other cameras the ultra wide, the telephoto, the selfie camera, all of them have been improved in terms of low light and night mode photos which by itself could convince some people to upgrade and by the way each of those other cameras have no noticeable improvements in the daytime as well especially the ultra wide and selfie cameras which now look very sharp. Because of those changes the 14 Pro has now leapfrogged over the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and Z Fold 4 in terms of camera quality. The reason why the 14 pro is now so good is of course the new 48 megapixel Pro Rock camera mode which not only shoots at full 48 megapixel resolution but also with 16 bit colors and Apple’s Auto processing which is great. While some people have shown absolutely mind-blowing 48 megapixel Pro raw edits online we kept things simple by comparing a couple of photos which clearly shows the iPhone’s 48 megapixel sensor beating out Samsung’s 50 and 108 megapixel sensors on their more expensive Flagship phones and comparing it to the 13 Pro Max there was a massive difference with the new level of detail being easily noticeable even on a smartphone display. Some people got creative online showing off some absolutely stunning photos. However there are a couple of problems first of all apple is forcing you to shoot in Pro raw in order to take 48 megapixel photos and those photos take a lot of storage, on average between 50 and 75 megabytes. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow you to shoot 48 megapixel photos using more compressed formats like HEIC or JPEG you can’t even convert them on your iPhone itself, so it’s really unfortunate that Apple did this.
Making things worse the 14 Pro still has the same lightning Port as before which means that it still only supports USB 2.0 transfer speeds. Since I prefer using airdrop for transferring photos I decided to test out how long it’ll take to airdrop 20 Pro Raw photos to my Mac and with airdrop it took 36 seconds from start to finish which honestly isn’t that bad and wouldn’t ruin my day even if it was a hundred of these Pro Raw photos taking three minutes to transfer. I’d rather do that than grab a cable anyway. The bigger problem is when you want to back up your entire iPhone to a Mac and it takes hours and hours on end that’s where lightning 2.0 is terrible and USBC would have solved this instantly. Hopefully Apple gives that to us next year or maybe even Thunderbolt. As far as the 48 megapixel sensor it’s really unfortunate that we’re forced to use Pro Res, even worse, there’s no 8K video recording which would be totally doable on this sensor. Apple sadly chose to leave it out this year for whatever reason. Either way Apple still easily defeats every other smartphone brand in terms of video recording like the new action mode that’s not only more smooth and sharper than Samsung’s steady cam, it also crops in way less making it far superior as well as Apple’s cinematic mode that now supports 4K resolution making it absolutely destroy the other two Samsung flag ships. Personally I finally think that I’m going to start using cinematic mode for regular use whenever I have a subject to record. For the cameras I’m pleasantly surprised with all aspects except for Apple’s portrait cutouts that still have some issues and the dynamic range not being as great as some of the competitors, especially for the ultra wide camera.
With all that said I’ve got to add in some of the downsides Apple forced our hand in terms of removing this SIM card slot just so they could move the industry forward which is cool and all but it makes it more difficult for US buyers to travel. On top of that we still don’t have Wi-Fi 6E on the 14 Pro which is kind of ridiculous in 2022 and to think that I was about to splurge on a Wi-Fi 6E router at home because of the leaks and rumors and I’m also a bit disappointed that the display bezels didn’t really get that much thinner and of course it really ticks me off that Apple didn’t add 8K video recording when the 48 megapixel sensor easily supports it.
Other than that I think the iPhone camera system is the most refined it’s ever been as well as their display quality which has seemingly hit Peak refinement along with the Best in Class always on display mode the fastest chip available in any smartphone with minimal dimming this time. The most refined Notch that’s actually useful and speaker equality that is so good I’m shocked that it’s coming from a smartphone so that makes this the most refined iPhone ever the only question is should you actually/ upgrade to it or wait just one more year for the 15 Pro which will likely get USBC and a five times zoom camera. Well to be completely honest if you’re upgrading from an iPhone 11 Pro or older you’re gonna experience a massive difference from the display quality and the cameras to the top tier Max save charging system and cellular performance. Even if you’re upgrading from the 12 Pro I’d argue that there are still some big improvements you’ll notice particularly in terms of fixing the display dimming issues, the cameras and the battery life and yes I know that USBC is going to be a nice upgrade but I’ve realized that I almost exclusively charge using Mac Safe and my MacBook Pro at home now uses Mac Safe as well so I wouldn’t be able to use one USBC cable to charge both of them anyway so in my case USBC won’t really change that much. Yes I’m excited for the five times telephoto camera, which is currently in the rumor cycle, but I rarely take far range telephoto Zoom photos anyway, so I could live without it, and if you can agree with me on that and you have an older iPhone then I’d say that this year is finally the perfect year to upgrade because the new Dynamic Island and the always on display are fresh differences you’ll experience daily as well as the fact that I’m a little bit biased towards the new space black color which I’ve been asking for for years now.
