Apple iPhone 12 Lineup Reactions! By Marques Brownlee

All right, what's up MHD here in the new crispy shirt and well today, was apple's new October fall event, the new iPhone event, whatever you want to call it. But of course, since it's 2020 it was a virtual event. Nobody actually went down to Apple headquarters to see the new iPhones. Instead, we got the pre-recorded apple announcement video, so that means instead of the event ending and then everybody goes over to the hands-on area to check out and play with the new stuff. That's obviously not happening right now, but I still have a lot of thoughts and reactions to what they just showed, what they just unveiled. So this video is sort of everything you need to know and my honest take on it.

So it's really two new things: HomePod mini and the new iPhones, but let's hit, let's do HomePod mini first, so you may or may not remember when I reviewed the original HomePod apple's smart speaker back when it came out in 2018. I called it the dumbest smart speaker, mainly because it's just Siri powering this thing and there's no screen, and it was pretty rough HomePod mini, which is new, is 99 bucks, and it's basically a much smaller version of the HomePod again, so meaning no display just the glowing set of volume, controls and the touchpad up at the top, and it will still focus very heavily on audio quality and just being a good speaker. So there's a s5 chip inside specifically for computational audio. So it's listening to where it is in your environment and sounding as good as it can. It still has forced cancelling woofers, still has a bunch of tweeters and all that stuff.

It's just way smaller now, but you know, sound quality is one of those things where I got to hear it. I could actually hear it to believe it. So the HomePod was a pretty good sounding speaker. I just I have to get the actual HomePod mini in the studio to test that for myself, but other than that yeah, it's an it's a smart speaker still powered by Siri, there's also an ultra-wideband chip in there. For better direct control from an iPhone and there's also this kind of cool intercom feature.

So if you have a family of people using connected Apple devices, they can all hear your intercom message on the HomePod and also there's a note in there about Siri knows like 20 times more facts. I think that's what they said which great I guess, but you know it's. I've been using Siri, it's its still Siri, but anyway, yeah HomePod mini 99 bucks, which kind of sits in there. It's cheaper, of course, than the regular HomePod, but in this world of all the other smart speakers where you got google home smart speakers, you got the Alexei smart speakers and all shapes and sizes. Some of them have screened some of them have clocks.

It's like you, gotta really want Siri or that ecosystem plug-in to pick the HomePod over those. So, okay, then we got to the new iPhones, so iPhone, 12 mini iPhone, 12, iPhone, 12 pro and iPhone 12 Pro max. So four new iPhones and there's a lot of really cool stuff in here I have to be honest. I like a lot of what they showed. In fact, I think a lot of iPhone 12 is so good that it makes the 12 pro a little less like a convincing buy for me.

Maybe let me know if you feel the same way, but really, first, the big overarching headliner feature for all these new iPhones is 5g. They all have it. They spent what felt like a million years talking about it. Furthermore, they went over the faster data speeds, the higher capacity, how it's the future. You know they had Verizon come up on stage to say all this great stuff about it.

So here's what I'll say about 5g all right. It's a two-sided thing: uh right now, not really ready. Yet, like most people, don't have 5g coverage, whether it's the device they're on or the network they're on, it's just not out there. Yet I did a whole video on 5g explained about why it's not out there first link below the like button. If you want to check it out, but the bottom line is you probably don't have 5g, yet the coverage isn't really there.

The infrastructure just isn't really built yet, so you're not really buying a phone right now because it has 5g, but people keep iPhones for probably the longest amount of time of any new phone. So people are going to have this new iPhone in three four five years and in five years, there's a better chance that 5g will be more built out, and maybe you'd regret not having 5g in five years. So it's a good thing that all the new iPhones have 5g. So you don't have to pick the one that does or doesn't have it. They all have 5g.

So, okay, first up iPhone 12. And the new design to me is pretty sweet. It's the new flat sided shape that I was waiting for like iPad Pro. It's got the aluminum frame, all the way around flat screen and, of course, some new antenna action positioning it well for 5g, there's ip68 water resistance and there's a new ceramic shield specialized glass on the front ceramic shield. Furthermore, it's an interesting branding of a new glass features.

Apple, didn't even really want to call it glass, it's a new composite material with crystallization, and they didn't actually call it glass at any point on stage. But what you should know is it's offering four times better drop protection. That's the main headlining feature now, of course, there's going to be people going out and testing this it's hard to quantify. What is four times better. Do you drop it, and it breaks a quarter of the time that it usually would? I don't really know I'm just hoping it translates to better scratch protection, but I think they're talking about shadow resistance, either way, there's going to be drop tests on YouTube in a couple of weeks.

Hopefully it's stronger glass, so the three big new things they talked about on the iPhone 12 phone itself are the screen charging and the cameras. So the screen is now much better. It goes from that 720p LCD screen. We all kind of like talking about on iPhone 11 to now it's a 6.1 inch, 1080p OLED display with thinner bezels, it's a significantly better screen than on iPhone 11 and, of course, I'm happy to see this better brightness. Much more contrast in an OLED, better pixel density, the whole thing the notch doesn't go away, as you can tell obviously, but that might be the only downside.

It's a hdr10 certified it's flat right up to the edges. The whole thing is nice. The new cameras are also pretty nice. It's a new dual 12 megapixel camera system, so they didn't change the numbers here, but it is a new ultra-wide and a new standard camera with an f 1.6 aperture and that should make for better low light and portrait shot performance. But you know most of the smartphone camera improvements that you get in 2020 nowadays are with software and so you're going to see stuff like that with their new smart HDR 3 with night mode coming to the front-facing camera, that's pretty sweet.

So all the stuff combined should make a better camera system in iPhone 12. But I'm definitely going to have to be testing that for the full review as well. So then, when I say new charging, I don't mean USB-C, which would have been nice, but what I do mean is the new magnets built into the back of the phone, because MagSafe is back this to me. This is the coolest new thing in the iPhone. To be totally honest, I guess I'm so used to.

So you know how there's a Apple Watch charger where you just connect it with magnets. It lines it up slap it on charges. The watch well, now, there's going to be a MagSafe big wireless charger that slaps on the back of the phone, helps you align it perfectly every time and charges the phone. It's not wireless, there's still a wire, but like now you, maybe you can kind of still use the phone while it's charging that way. This is the part where it would be nice to have a hands-on, because then I could see like how strong the magnets really are and if they really firmly connect to the back of the phone and all that stuff.

But I don't know I think, MagSafe being back is sweet. I checked the Apple Store, it's already up, actually 39 bucks for the iPhone 12 MagSafe charger, not insane, but not cheap, obviously, but it's at least it's not a hundred bucks or something stupid, it'll charge at 15 watts, so a normal 2020 wireless charging speed nothing too crazy, so I'm into that, but not just for the charging part, but also for the entire ecosystem of mag, safe accessories that are born from this magnet and a lot of these are also already up in the Apple Store. You know, there's now this little wallet that magnetizes to the back of the phone now there's some mag safe cases and MagSafe is stackable, so it'll charge through the case too, a lot of cool stuff, just snapping onto the back of the phone, and I imagine there will be way more third-party mag, safe accessories that come out as soon as this phone drops, which could be cool for other chargers and other cases and things like that, other accessories for the iPhone uh yeah, there's going to be a lot of stuff snapping on the back of the iPhone. Also, it's probably going to get a lot of people really used to snapping things on the back of the iPhone and not wanting to plug in any more hot. Take next iPhone won't have a plug, because everyone's going to be so used to snapping it on the back.

It's not a good. Take it's just a hot take. Also speaking of charging. There is officially now no charging brick in any of the iPhone boxes, starting with iPhone 12, which again sounds crazy, but we also called it there's a whole video again that I did I'll link below just about this and I kind of called it pretty much exactly the way they did it. In this event, they talked about it in the environmental section of the keynote.

You know all the environmental e-waste savings and all that stuff. They showed us a new, smaller iPhone box, which saves space and shipping. Now that volume is smaller, that's more efficient. You can watch that whole video below. If you want to see it more in-depth analysis or ranting on what that means for the iPhone's box and the rest of the industry, but yeah iPhone now will just come with the phone itself and a single USB to lightning cable and the paperwork.

And that's it there's of course, all the new usual year-over-year iPhone improvements here with the iPhone 12, there are new colors, blue red black white and green, I'm personally, feeling that blue and the red, since phones are still pretty shiny here from what I can tell and there's a new chip as well a14 bionic, which is the first five nanometer chips in any phone: six core CPU, four core GPU, better machine learning, performance and image, processing, etc. , etc. This is no surprise. Apple's been perfect at chips not to take anything for granted, but yeah. This is gonna, be a pretty fast phone for a long time.

So that's iPhone 12 right. That phone is going to be 7.99 and then real quick. They also dramatically unveiled a smaller iPhone, 12 mini, and it comes out like a month later in the year, but basically the iPhone 12 mini is just a smaller version of everything. We just saw that's new in the iPhone 12 mag, safe, new colors, all that stuff, but just smaller and a 5.4 inch display and that phone iPhone, 12 mini is going to be 6.99. So the price of the standard iPhone did just go up technically, but they brought in, so they made a new mini version to fill in that price gap, and they still have the SE, so they still have a whole lineup of phones ranging from a bunch of different prices, but I'm very curious about this mini and getting my hands on it and just how small it'll feel on the hand and if there's any reason to get it over the regular 12.

But of course that leads us to the big dogs. You see here iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro max now, there's actually not that much. In my opinion, different about the pros this year versus the 12. So the prices are still the same.999 and 1099, both starting at 128 gigs, but the main more subtle differences here are the size, the colors and the cameras, so not a drastic stuff. But that's what's new.

So again, it packs all the good stuff from the 12 that we just talked about: ip68 water resistance, the ceramic shield, the a14 bionic, the MagSafe magnets, and now it's just in a body with slightly larger displays than the last year, 6.1 inch and 6.7 inch, sleds and you're getting flat stainless steel sides now, instead of aluminum, which is incredibly shiny and uh. The new colors here are white, black, blue and gold, and I swear to you that gold looks, I guess I'd say better than anything. The Escobar brand could have cooked up so well done apple, it's a flashy phone and then, basically, if you're, looking for the real reason to buy the pros, look no further than those camera modules. That's where the big new stuff is, so it's still triple cameras, but it's an all new hardware stack, so a new standard and ultra-wide and telephoto camera. Both the pros have deep fusion on all four cameras, including the front-facing camera, and you also now do get that LIDAR sensor back there, which we first saw in the iPad Pro earlier this year, and it should help with not just better and more accurate AR, but also improved autofocus in the dark, which is sweet.

Honestly LIDAR to me seems more useful, more often on an iPhone where you take a lot of photos in low light than an iPad. So it's kind of funny that we got it on the iPad first, but LIDAR is on the iPhone. Now. There's also this new pro raw image format that they talked briefly about, and it looked really cool. But then, when you look up the specs of the iPhone on their site, it says coming soon, which is what they said about deep fusion for months before it actually came out.

So I'm going to hold my judgment on this pro raw image format until it is actually out and then curiously slightly different cameras on the 12 pro and 12 pro max so 2.5 x, telephoto on the 12 pro max and 2x telephoto on the 12 pro slight difference there. It's not like 100x, zoom or anything crazy, but that is different, and then the 12 pro max has a better sensor shift optical image stabilization, while all the others have it built into the lens like it always has been so really, the max has all the highest end features and then probably their biggest flex in the camera. Module of them all was the pros 10 bites Dolby Vision, HDR, 4k, 60, fps, video just insane. It's the only camera in the world, that'll shoot Dolby Vision when it comes out and again having a new standard like this. Where this is the only camera in the world that'll do it doesn't really lend itself to any reputation for that standard.

So if it's a good camera, we'll all think good things about Dolby Vision but yeah, I don't know how good that's going to be. Yet but I'm excited to actually see it, and so that is basically it for what's new with the pros now, you might have noticed, there's a one thing missing. At least one thing I was kind of hoping for which is promotion high, refresh rate 120 hertz. That is not in these new iPhones, it's not in the iPhone 12 Pro or 12 pro max. Now, if you're, if you're defending apple, of course, you're saying oh, whatever it's not a big deal, the average person wasn't really going to notice that which I guess, okay, fine, you're, technically you're right, if you're just going to defend them, no matter what, then, yes, they made the right choice.

No one was going to notice that, but also apple is notorious for doing that extra next level of stuff that the average person probably won't notice like 10 bites, 4k 60fps, Dolby Vision, HDR, video and all kinds of stuff like the calibration in their displays. So I'm also a little bummed that they don't have promotion here, because to me the person with a thousand dollars to spend on a phone, and I want to really be convinced by this phone over. You know another android phone. I could buy uh to that specific customer who's going to appreciate 10 bit 4k HDR uh. I would appreciate high refresh rate too, but whatever the reason is whether it's the yields not being high enough for that display quality or they just couldn't get them in that volume at all.

Whatever the reason it's not here, fingers crossed, maybe for next year, then a couple other small notes. We see those uh notches still on all the new iPhones. They appear to all be the same size and shape as before. They didn't mention face ID once on stage. So I'm just going to go ahead and assume.

There are no improvements to face ID same sensors up there. Uh yeah same face ID then for 5g. They talked about a smart data mode on the iPhone which intelligently only uses the 5g radios when they're needed, which, to me kind of sounds a little like. We only have high refresh rate on the iPad Pro when it's needed, meaning not all the time, but I'm super curious when they turn on 5g and when they won't it be off most of the time to save battery 5g is a big battery hit very interested in testing the iPhone and seeing when that turns on, and then yes, that mysterious little rectangular cutout on the side of the iPhones that we've seen all the way from the models all the way to the renders in the keynote that is the 5g antenna, cutout four millimeter waves. Officially, so that's it! I don't really have any other impressions of like the materials and the new sizes and how big the mini is versus the max and the colors and all that stuff, because we don't have them so that'll be a separate video when we actually do get them here in the studio, and I can check them out and deliver that to you guys so make sure you subscribe to be among the first to see it when it does come out.

But let me know what you think, which one of these four new iPhones speaks to you, the most I'm kind of probably still going to go for the max anyway. Either way, thanks for watching enjoy the rest of October a lot more videos coming up soon see you guys later so big shout out to expression for sponsoring this video. So have you ever gone to search for a show on Netflix and seen this see? Netflix probably has a show. You want. It's just restricted so, depending on where you live.

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Source : Marques Brownlee