iPhone 12 Mini - I'm switching! By Austin Evans

- This is the iPhone 12 Mini and it is the iPhone of my dreams. Now is it for you? Honestly, probably not. But I think that there are a significant amount of people out there who've been waiting for this phone for a very long time, myself included. So I will give Apple props. This is the most comprehensive line of iPhones they have ever created. There's the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, if you're a normal person you want a roughly normal sized phone.

You can go up to the Pro Max if you want a big, big chungus. (clears throat) And then you have this guy, the iPhone 12 Mini. Now, if I put this alongside something like an iPhone 5S or even a current SE you'll see the size difference is real. I mean, I just hold this for five seconds, right? I've just pulled it out of the box and I can already tell just how nice it is to use. The thing is smartphones these days have gotten enormous.

That's a big reason why I use something like this Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. Fits nicely in my pocket, of course it's got the folding thing which is admittedly a gimmick I really like. But the thing about the Mini is that it doesn't need a folding gimmick or anything like that. This is a full flagship and a smaller form factor and that's just simply, simply something that we haven't seen in a long time. I'm stumbling over my own words because I'm so excited for the new Mini phone in my life.

Something else I appreciate about the iPhone 12 Mini is the lack of compromises. So this has been something that is rumored for almost the entire year now but the main thing that kept me from making a decision earlier were the specs and specifically the trade-offs, right? So generally speaking for a Mini phone, you have to lose features right? So whether you lose 5G or high refresh rate or whatever the case is, generally speaking, this smaller device lacks some of the high end features that you expect. Thankfully, that's not really the case with the iPhone 12 Mini. So yes, it does lack a higher refresh rate display but that is shared with the entire iPhone 12 lineup. They all run at 60 Hertz and while yes I would have loved to see something higher.

It's not only trade-off you have to make with the smaller phone, same thing with 5G. Now I will absolutely say that 5G is not a reason for you to upgrade to a new phone right? And actually I do think that the 5G hype behind these new iPhones is a little bit overstated especially because it's not really that much better for the vast majority of people at the moment. That being said, I will certainly take 5G over not having 5G, and the fact is that the iPhone 12 Mini at least here in the United States, does support not only Sub-6 5G but also millimeter wave. Now am I going to use those crazy fast speeds all the time? Probably not but I would certainly rather have those and the fact that it's says such a small phone is nice. Same thing goes with the screen unlike the iPhone XR and the iPhone 11, the iPhone 12 Mini has a much higher resolution 1080p OLED display.

Now yes that does mean that the notch looks a little bit large, so it's pretty much exactly the same on the other phones, you therefore lose a little bit more screen real estate on the top of the device. But that is a trade-off I am happy to make to have a high quality screen. Same thing goes for the cameras. We'll play around with those a little bit more later but you've got the exact same cameras from the iPhone 12 and therefore very similar cameras to the iPhone 12 Pro and not too far off of that 12 Pro Max. Again, you're getting the smaller phone without the sacrifice.

Now there are some sacrifices you do need to make. Screen real estate is absolutely one of them. This is a much smaller display and because of that while it certainly gives you more screen real estate than something like an iPhone SE for example, it's still not going to be as nice for watching video or something as the Pro Max. But that being said, I don't care, that's the whole end of my point. I don't care.

You might care but for me, I'm totally happy watching(chuckles) on a smaller screen. So one of the main concerns I have going into my experience with the iPhone 12 Mini, is battery life. This just simply has a smaller battery and all those great benefits of being a flagship with the high-end A14 processor and camera and all that kind of stuff is great, but you also have a smaller battery to power it at all. So, we'll see how that goes that would be one of my main concerns and yes, it supports MagSafe charging at slightly slower speeds, but I don't care. You won't notice.

It's totally fine. Some of the big differences between the Mini and it's much bigger brother the Pro Max is on the camera side. So while they both share the exact same ultra wide they have very different main sensors and of course the Pro Max does have that 2.5 times telephoto. Now, in theory you should see much better results on this Pro Max right? Not only do you have a larger sensor but you also have that nice wide aperture there and generally speaking that means that you get better low light performance, and you also get a little bit more of that natural depth of field. Well let's see if that's actually the case.

So if I just pick some random piece of tech up here and maybe we'll just take a couple of photos. So with this particular example of a very close up subject, you can see a difference. So specifically if you look at the lights behind the PS5, they're a little bit more bokeh'd out, and that looks a little more like a real portrait mode but of course this is the standard photo. Now while the Pro Max does at least on paper have better stabilization with the sensor-shift. It actually isn't a big difference.

In fact it's actually designed to be essentially the same level of stabilization as what you get on the Mini phone. Now the telephoto is a pretty big difference. So if I take a normal shot on the Pro Max and I take a telephoto, very large difference and look, I'm all for having some kind of telephoto on a phone it makes a difference, but ultimately does it make enough of a difference for me to go with a much larger phone and to give up the much cheaper price tag of the Mini. No, it doesn't. - It does for me Austin.

- Well look, you can use the Pro Max. It's a free country and it's a free world. - Is the phone free? - No. - Oh. - So the iPhone 12 Mini has the same Apple A14 Bionic chip as its bigger brothers, the 12, the 12 Pro, the 12 Pro Max, but there's more to it than just pure specs.

First of all, this does actually have more memory six gigs of ram versus four, but importantly I wanna see how the performance lines up. So let's start out by running a quick little Geekbench and just get a little bit of a baseline on what both of these phones are capable of. Interesting so the Pro Max actually has a slight lead in Geekbench. Now mind you this is just a single run but at least on the multi-core side we see a little bit more performance on the Pro Max. So this is the 3DMark Wild Life test.

Now this is simulating a very high-end graphically demanding game running on both the Mini as well as the Max. What do we got? What do we got? 41 versus 39. Yeah see, there we go. The Pro Max pulls out a slight lead as well. Oh wow.

In one minute, the Mini lost 2% of its battery. (laughing) Oh boy. Alright. I think we gotta run the 20-minute test and see how these phones hold up. So look at the thermal image while we're running this 20 minute long stress test.

It's pretty clear that the iPhone Mini is much warmer. So even though the Pro Max has a hotspot on the top the entire back of the Mini is I would say pretty toasty but the real test is going to be what the performance of the phones look like. Alright, the benchmark is, 45 versus 91. Whaaaat? Huh? Huh? The max scores of both phones pretty much identical but the difference is what 18 or 17 minutes in the Mini lost half its performance but then it came back up. I don't think I would put too much thought into that, that seems like a really weird edge case.

- I feel like you'd almost have to run it one more time to figure it out. - Absolutely would yeah. I'll say the Mini definitely ran warmer but if you take that weird anomaly out, I actually think that the Pro Max and the Mini performed very similarly. I mean, you look at the general loops, I mean, they were very similar. Both phones start to throttle after a couple of runs but they don't throttle that much.

I'm actually gonna say that this is a win for the Mini, not in so much that it actually outperforms the Pro Max but it gives you essentially the same performance in a chassis which is much smaller, that actually I will say is pretty impressive. So who should buy the iPhone 12 Mini? I think at this point, I pretty well established. This is the phone for me right? Am I gonna toss the Z Flip in the garbage? Absolutely not. But as far as an iPhone and all the benefits of using an iPhone, the 12 Mini checks all the boxes for me with the only exception being battery life. But that's something I can deal with especially because I'm in a very fortunate position where I do go back and forth between the two devices.

But if you want a compact flagship there is simply nothing that touches the iPhone 12 Mini. Thank you very much for watching. Please subscribe to the channel for more content because believe me when I say, we have some big, big videos coming up that I will watch on my small, small iPhone. (upbeat music).

Source : Austin Evans