iPhone 12 Pro Max Review — One Month Later! By Rene Ritchie

- In this video, my special guest and I are talking all about our experiences with the brand new iPhone 12 Pro Max. The size, the battery, and you better believe the camera. What we like, what we don't like, and what we want to see from Apple next. And we're doing it right now. Sponsored by Curiosity Stream with Nebula. I've got just a ton more long-term reviews coming your way soon, so make sure you've hit that subscribe button and bell so you don't miss any of them.

Joining me to talk just all things iPhone 12 Pro Max is photographer and design legend, and co-creator of the Halide camera app, at STW, Sebastian Dewitt. So I know I want to dive into the camera. I know everybody watching wants to dive into the camera, but before we do, I just, I wanted to get your thoughts on just the largess of the max phone in general. I was on, I lived on the plus models on the six, six S, seven, eight plus, as long as they were out. But then when the max came out, I dropped back down.

when the 10 came out, actually, I dropped back down to the standard size, and that was enough for me with the edge to edge display. But I did worry that the 12 Pro Max would be too big, like, just physically too big to enjoy as a phone. Especially the same year that the mini came out, but I've adjusted to it. Like, I made the mental switch that it's a tiny tablet with an amazing camera, and a huge viewfinder, and that seems to be all I needed. - Yeah, I really feel you, because when the iPhone 10 came out, I thought this is perfect size.

I don't think it should be any bigger. Actually, I changed the UI of our app to kind of make it so everything was at the bottom, 'cause I couldn't even reach the top on the 10. And then a 10 S came out, and I tried the max, and I was like, oh, this is not comfortable. I think I lasted like at most of you, I was like, oh, I'm back to be 11. Like, a normal size.

And then this year, you know, I'm such a camera guy. So I have to be in the, I have to use this big, giant phone. And actually it's not been too bad. - And I do feel like the mini is like a classic one hander, like if you're talking in sword parlance. It's like a one-handed sword.

Well, this is a hand and a halfer. (laughing) - A hand and a halfer, I like that. Maybe it's just like that it feels a bit easy, like it's more secure in my hand, or the squared edges, but, or maybe I've just come to terms with the fact that it is just a tablet basically. - Yes-- - But it's, I don't find. In day to day use, I don't think it's too bad.

- Or just the same sort of mental leap, because when you think about it as a camera, cameras are not exactly tiny. - Yes, that's true. That's very true. Maybe I'm just, at this point I've just completely surrendered myself to the notion of, oh, I don't have to carry a camera anymore. I have my iPhone.

So the net pocket, you know, impact of my pocket in my bag is just much less. - And the battery life for me, like, I expected good battery life, because the plus phones, and certainly the max phones, all had good battery life. And I realized 2020 is not a normal year. I'm not traveling as much. I'm not roaming as much.

I'm not in airports with no signals. But the battery, it's a day and a half at least. I forget to charge it now, because like an iPad, I'm not doing it regularly anymore. - It's funny that you mention that. I forget charging it, and then for the first time in years my phone is dead.

Like, my girlfriend makes fun of me, because she's like, oh my God, look at you! I've never thought you'd be capable of, like, having your phone die, because I forget after a day. Like, it's not empty at the end of the day. I just don't charge it. And in the middle of the day, the next day, it's like, oh! Oh no, I've lost battery. - The only negative for me so far is the same negative I've been complaining about for the last few years, and that is Apple has been focusing on making the screens more break proof.

And they've been doing their chemical mixing more towards preventing the screens from breaking or shattering. But you know, you can't have it both ways. You can't have them soft enough to not break and then hard enough to resist scratches. So every year without fail, when I do the camera test, at some point I'm juggling a bunch of phones in my hand, and the camera module from one of them scratches the screen of the other one. And this year it's the Pro Max-- - Oh no! - And just took a, yeah.

It's not bad. I can't see it at all when the display is on. But when the display is off, it's just sitting there laughing at me. - Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that, because I think this is a very classic, you know, app developer slash tech reviewer problem. - Yeah, so if you're going to sell it after, like if your plan is every year to buy the new iPhone in part because you sold the previous iPhone, by all means, baby it.

But I just keep them all, so I'm fine. - Same. - Alright, so enough of the tease. Let's get down to the camera. You wrote one of your classic, brilliant Sebastian articles, digging deep into the camera.

And I think it was super important this year because, especially on the initial reviews, there was a disparity in what people were seeing. Like you had people like Marquez, Brownley, and Peter McKinnon who were saying they noticed no difference at all in the cameras between the Pro and the Pro Max. And then people like Matthew Panzarino and Austin Mann saying, yeah, the Pro Max cameras are way better! And it turned out that Marquez was shooting, you know, technology in his office, and Peter was shooting a Lamborghini at rest, while Panzarino and Austin Mann, while Panzar was shooting his toddler, and Austin Mann was shooting his puppy. So you had some people with a stationary camera, and a stationary subject, and other people trying rapidly to acquire a moving target. And that highlighted the difference in the camera well.

But you sort of broke it down into why that was happening. - When people start seeing super different results, that's when I get really curious. (laughing) So I immediately, when I got the 12 Pro Max, I thought, okay, let's take a look. And I think what surprises people when you look at my posts, and I go into that deep dive, is I start out saying we're going to do a head-to-head with the iPhone 12 Pro, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max. And they think that with one shot I'm going to be able to tell them, see, here's the difference.

And it's not like that. Actually, I start out saying, I took two photos with the 12 Pro Max and the 12 Pro, and I couldn't see the difference. Which makes most people probably go, aha, see, I told you, it's no difference at all. And then I say, well, it's actually more nuanced than that. (laughing) - Well, sometimes when they make a leap forward in camera technology, it really is night and day.

Like, I feel like the iPhone seven, when they went to better optics, you could get photos in low light, even nighttime, that you just couldn't get with previous iPhones. - Yes, definitely true. And there's been, you know, evolutions and revolutions in the iPhone camera. And with the 11 last year, the 10 S introduced smart HDR, and the 11 kind of made that so much better that it almost looked invisible? And so for people there, they really noticed that leap. And this year-- - And the wide angle was all new, all fresh.

- Oh yeah, the ultra wide if of course a huge deal. Yeah, so that felt like a big revolution in that sense. And then this year Apple's investing a bit more in the hardware side of things, where the software stuff was pretty buttoned up. And people are saying, I'm not sure if I can notice it. - And I also worry if the computational photography has gotten to a point where it can correct so much for, I don't want to say optical deficiencies, but optical differences.

Like Google famously is using the same sensor that they were using three or four years ago. And just the quality of their algorithms has gotten so much better. Apple's increasing the optics and also the algorithms. And you explained this really well in your article later, but the smart HDR is pulling so much out that it is overcoming some of the worst, is the worst the right word? Some of the lower end specs of just the Pro sensor. - Yeah, totally.

And that's really interesting, because we process what's coming out of this sensor so much right now, that that is one of the reasons why it was so hard for people to put a finger on, hey, how different is this larger sensor? And if you just look at the straight out of camera shots, for the average person that's not going to be easy to notice because the results are so processed. In reality, you know, once you start getting into places where that size, that extra signal starts to matter more to the average person, like, you know, night mode in motion, a low light shooting, et cetera, that's where you really start seeing it. But it also, a lot of people just didn't see because they just did a very quick test. It really makes a difference on the Pro end of things, which is cool. Like we've had the name Pro in the iPhone since last year, but this year, it really, there really is a Pro iPhone.

- I think that's a big deal because, like some people think the Pro means it's a huge difference, but I think Pro often just means it lets you get away with more. Like I know I shoot in 10 bit, not because it's a Pro feature, but because it allows me to correct for, like, problems in my exposure or problems in my color way more than I would if I just shot an eight bit. - Yeah, yeah exactly. That's a really good example of it. Or if you were to be shooting an iPhone 12 Pro, or an iPhone 12 Pro Max, it might be that as an, you know, if you're just using the camera app and you're taking quick snaps, it might not immediately be evident how much more you can get out of the sensor.

But then if you use an app that takes raw photos, then suddenly you find yourself taking a single frame shot, which, you know, skips some of that computational smartness. And then suddenly you find yourself like, wow, this is what this phone, this Pro Max can do, is on par or better than one of the dedicated cameras I have lying around! Then it starts being really impressive. - And your article really showed that well, because when you removed the smart HDR and the computational effects, the quality that you got off the raw image, the raw data from the sensor, was observably better than it was on the Pro. - Yeah, I would say as far as to say, it was, to me, it was really mind blowing. When it got low light, normally, just to kind of explain to people, if you get a raw file, it's skips a lot of these smart steps, and it's not just, like, HDR brings out detail in your highlights and in your shadows by combining a lot of shots.

But there's also, if you have a tiny sensor, that means there's a lot of noise, because you don't get that much light line. And the less light you have on a camera, the more noise you get. The reason why it blew my mind so much is because it is very tiny, and it can do shots at night without really showing much noise. And that means there's a lot of signal there. Now, if the, if you don't change the way that an iPhone processes an image, and I think Apple may improve this in the future, because right now that's the reason why it's sometimes harder to see the difference between these two things.

You won't get all that detail out of it, but if you would just look at the way the camera sees it, or you take a raw file, you can see that there's tons, and tons, and tons of detail in those frames that you don't get on that iPhone 12 Pro. And that means that at night sometimes you can take a snap without night mode at, you know, a third of a second, and you see amazing detail in it because there's a couple of things coming into play there. That new stabilization, that bigger sensor, that faster lens. And then, yeah, I was very impressed. - Do you think it's a little bit over sharp right now? Do you think that they can or should dial that back a bit? - I think what they can do with the iPhone Pro Max is dial down noise reduction and the image, the amount of frames they merged down a little bit, to get slightly crisper, less processed shots out of it.

- Last year when I was doing comparisons with night mode between the Pixel and the iPhone, what really impressed me was the zero shutter lag on the iPhone. Like I remember taking a picture of my co-host, my podcast co-host, Georgia, at Halloween when it was really dark, but had some neon lights. And I took it with both cameras at the same time. And a second later her brother came in and put his arm around her, and on the iPhone shot you just see Georgia, where on the Pixel shot you see Georgia and her brother because it doesn't do instant shutter. It just stacks the image computationally in sequence.

And Apple feels like, you know, before they would just never allow for any of that. Everything had to be real time, or they would literally not ship it, you know, until they could get it in real time. We're now, with the night mode, but also with some of the computational stuff, it feels like they're willing, they still do instant shutter as far as I can tell all the time, but they're willing to let the image build out a little bit to get that better computational result at the end. - Yeah, totally. And that must be a really tough trade off for them to be working on.

And they still very much emphasize having real-time preview to whatever the camera is doing, which is cool. Because I just got the Pixel five, and it's still, if you take a portrait mode shot, yeah, it's good. But, you know, you take it and you go to look at it, and it takes two seconds, and then you get a portrait effect. Apple's doing this real time and it has been for years! - I like it because I'm used to taking photos with cameras where what you see is what you get. I know you're into like rangefinders and stuff, but I still use, like, the old school cameras.

And what you see is what you get. And I'm used to, like, if the ear looks blurry, I'll move a bit to make sure everything looks clean. And that's how I solve for some of the quirks of portrait mode. - I think that's such a great philosophy and it shows just how much the camera team at Apple has this really strong vision. That's just, you know, the camera should look like what you get.

And that's what we're kind of accustomed to really. That viewfinder should resemble your final result. And then it would be very easy to just say, like, well, night mode has to stack all these images, so you can't redo that. That's impossible. And then somehow they just make it happen anyway.

- What are your thoughts so far on the telephoto? I was initially just enamored with the different size, because we were shooting with the effect of, was it 52 I think? For years now, since the iPhone seven plus. And now suddenly we have an effect of 65 to shoot with, and, yes, the framing is different, but also the compression is different. Like there's less, there's less artificial distance between a nose and ears, for example. I really like that for portraits and product shots. - It's really nice for portrait mode.

The way it renders portraits now is, for faces and people, is much nicer. And to kind of explain how that works, so if you take a portrait of someone, you know, take a photo of me, my nose with the normal wide angle lens, if you get close to me, my nose will be huge and rest of my face will be tiny. So it won't look, I won't look so dashingly handsome as I usually do. (laughing) And then, yeah, if you use a 65 millimeter lens, it compresses all that to a flatter result and you get that nice flattering portrait. In my casual testing so far that has been so, so nice.

The only thing is that you would really want to use it with night mode portrait mode as well. But you can't. - Well, in general, like, we gave up some of the speed to get this lens. Like it went from F 2.0 to F 2.2, I think? And I do miss that! I do miss that extra little bit of speed, because I love shooting with telephoto as much as I possibly can. - Yeah, I totally agree.

I miss the speed a little bit, and in the end that's too bad, because, you know, your iPhone, when it detects that you don't have enough light on that telephoto lens, it will just swap in the wide angle, and then it becomes a bit more noticeable on the Pro Max sometimes. - So from the sort of developers side, like when you're working with Ben and with Rebecca on the app, is there anything that's particularly interesting to you about working with the iPhone 12 Pro Max, as opposed to the other camera's in the iPhone 12 lineup? - Yeah, totally. I think that what's the most surprising thing in my posts is there is an incredible amount of power in the detail of the sensor that is combined with the stabilization technology, so now we can allow users to take photos of half a second, which is just impossible. Imagine trying to hold a camera perfectly steady for half a second, or like a second. The iPhone Pro Max can do that.

That's pretty amazing. And they can do that because of this new in-body image stabilization, which you'll also see in some really high-end cameras. Other than that, we're on the cusp now. We're testing, and we have the Virgin in-testing with pro raw. And pro raw is awesome.

It's Apple finally acknowledging that this is a real camera. It's not just a camera phone. It's becoming a camera with its own raw format, with the ability to pack some of these smarts, like I mentioned earlier. Raw files right now do not have all these smart things like HDR, and diffusion, and even night mode. We'll start getting access from Apple to take raw photos with some of those things included.

Which is very cool. - On the Ibis side, I think as Apple calls it sensor shift, it's interesting because I think people are just used to a certain amount of stabilization, but when the sensor is actually like that in-body image stabilization, you may not notice it at first, but things like, you, night mode doesn't come on as quickly as it might, because it can keep the sensor open for just low-light photographs. Or maybe it doesn't have to keep, like, maybe it'll do a one second or two second, instead of a two or three seconds on night mode. So it doesn't have to stack as much. Have you found much of a difference with between the Ibis and the traditional OIS, the optical image stabilization? - Yeah, for me, just shooting raw, which I love to use.

It's just really nice to be able to get a steady shot when I'm moving the camera, or just quickly picking it up and taking a photo when the sun is in the process of setting or past sunset, and then just getting a lot less noise out of it. And we're actually optimizing our exposure logic, our smart, raw exposure logic, to favor a little bit of a longer exposure time on the Pro Max now, because it can just handle it. And that's not something that you would have anticipated. - I'm still really cranky that zoom hasn't gotten much better since the iPhone seven. It is like a 2.5 size now. That's not really a zoom.

That's more of a step in, just because you're changing the effect of lens, but other cameras are doing, like, five X optical, or some of them have those really wild Periscope zooms, that do 10 to 20, to 30 zoom. And I'm not saying I need anything like that, but it just, having more zoom, it feels like that's the big piece of the traditional camera part that Apple still isn't addressing. They did get way better this year, because they started doing, I think somewhat of what Google did last year, and that is apply their smart HDR algorithms to the zoom. Everything from HDR three to deep fusion, so that the 10, this one is times 12, sorry, the times 12 digital zoom is way better than it was on the previous models, on the 11's. But I would still like to see them optically do a little bit more on the zoom side of it.

- Yeah, and I'm guessing the thing that's preventing them from doing that is that they want to have, like, a really constant quality zoom range through the whole thing, and then just seamlessly hand off through that. So I wouldn't be surprised if next year we see a bigger jump made across all of the lineup that goes to one new zoom level. Yeah, that'd be interesting to see. - The only other pain point I have right now is there's no HDR, like no Dolby vision button in the camera UI. And I would love that so much because it doesn't even indicate that it's in Dolby vision mode when it is.

So I always have to go to settings and look to make sure, because sometimes I really do want to shoot in 10 bit Dolby vision. And other times I know that it's just going to cause production problems, because a lot of apps haven't updated for it yet, and I just want to toggle it off and get a few quick shots. And it's, you know, live photo got that button, the original HDR for just photographs had that button. There's a bunch of stuff you can turn, you can toggle the flash on and off, and I just, please let me toggle H, Dolby vision on and off right in the UI. - As a designer of a camera app, I am actually very non envious of the people who have to design the Apple camera app, because it has to do everything, and yet be simple and for everyone? You know, it has to be competing with Snapchat, but also with Filmic.

It has to be like how light, but it also has to be, you know, the simplest camera anyone's ever used. You have to be able to pick it up and use it. So that's going to be tough. - So a few weeks later now, after shooting with this for a while, what's your overall take on the iPhone 12 Pro Max camera? - Hm, that's a really good question. I really, really like it.

I probably had the same exact take as you in the sense that I love the sixty-five. I wish it was a little bit longer. The sensor is fantastic. The size I'm kind of getting used to. I'm still actually kind of scratching the surface as to what is possible with this camera.

And that is just a testament to how much they've hacked into this one. I'm still weeks later trying to see, and still being surprised by it. Just thinking, wow, this is really good quality I can get out of it. I'm just really excited to be building for this camera. As a developer, as a photographer, this is something where I'm just excited to spend a year with it and get everything out of what is packed in this thing.

But for the entire lineup, it's a really good year for cameras. They have now had the computational stuff in a place where it's almost imperceptibly good, which a lot of the, I know that we're firmly in iPhone land, but in Android land, it's not completely a done deal yet. You just have to look at Marquez Brownley's current camera bracket contest that's happening to see just how completely different smart, quote unquote, smart processing on cameras, smartphone cameras is right now. Apple's is really nice. It gets out of the way.

You almost don't notice that it's there. That's when you know it's really impressive. And that's, yeah, I'm very impressed with it. And we have to do a lot to get the most out of it. So it's gonna be a fun year.

- Yeah, I have much the same opinion. It's just, it's remarkable how far we've come. What I like about Apple so much is that there are some camera phones that have really good optics, but the computational side is not good at all. And others that have really good computational but the optical side is just not there. And Apple is doing a really nice hybrid of both.

Every year they're improving the algorithms, and every year they're improving the glass, and yes, it's not big sensor, and it's not big glass, but it's big compute applied to quality glass. And I think this year, it's really hard to see. Like, a pro can appreciate it, but I think their ultimate goal of just everyday photography, like you should be able to pull your phone from your pocket, take a shot and accurately record, not like purely, coldly, scientifically, but emotionally what you saw. And all the sort of pro advantages that we get on a granular level, they don't have to know or care about. It just gives more room across a wider range.

You'll get it in a little bit lower light than you got it last year, or a little bit closer up than you got it last year. And you won't notice it. You'll just know that, wow, even more of my pictures are as good as I remember them being. - Yeah, totally. And then the cool thing is it's almost the same, like I mentioned this in my post, it's almost the same as packing in that really powerful a series chip.

And people say like, well, you know, what is the point of all this power? The same thing is happening with these cameras. Like you mentioned, they're mostly dedicated to just being the perfect way to capture reality as you perceive it for the average consumer, but because there's so many power getting packed in there, from the computational pipeline, to the actual sensors that they're improving now, that means that that extra space is there for the pros and for the developers to fill in. And for future use cases to be invented that we don't really think of right now. That LIDAR sensor that's in there? There's a lot of applications for that that we probably haven't even seen yet, but it's there. - Yeah, yeah.

No, and you know, a lot of times people will dismiss a processor, and say it's overkill, or you don't need it, or it's good enough to have a lower end processor, but the iPhone seven portrait mode pegged it. And portrait mode doesn't peg this at all. And then the true depth camera pegged the iPhone 10, and this is fine with that. And then the computational algorithms pegged the iPhone 10 S, and just increasingly, while they are addressing the previous issues, getting more overhead, they're using that extra overhead to pack in even more features and more computational. So like you literally cannot do everything that you do on these phones with even the previous generation phone.

And I know that annoys people with the previous one, but I think it just keeps pushing everybody forward. - It's great. - As always, you can find the full, extended, uncut version of this chat up on Nebula. That's the streaming platform I'm building along with my educationy creator friends like Legal Eagle, Sarah Z, Allie Abdel, Thomas Frank, Brain Craft, Polly Matter, and so many more. It's a place where we can put up those extended, uncut bonus tracks, without having to worry about demonetization, or the tyranny of the click-through rate, watch time, or algorithms, or even ads.

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Source : Rene Ritchie