What I REALLY Think of the iPhone!

So every year, like clockwork, a new iPhone comes out that's a little better, a little faster, a little stronger than the last one and, as we know, Apple is the master of messaging, that's why they deliver an incredible presentation on stage with unreal video production, they paint the simplest and prettiest picture of how this is the best iPhone they've ever made, the most powerful and fastest iPhone we've ever made, but they also do another very important standard practice, but they give the phone to the reviewers and they don't have to do it. this, but they do it and everyone involved will essentially have a date when they will be allowed to speak for the first time about their experience with this new phone.

Now I've been a reviewer for years. We are professionals. Our job is to take that week and do everything. our tests and take all our findings and find all the things we like and all the things we don't like and all the new features and test all the new claims and summarize them all in one piece and that's a review and If you sync it well you can post that review right when the contract we signed says we can do it, you may have heard of this, it's called an embargo, so that's

what

you see when you see this whole first wave of reviews and impressions videos about dropping a product at the same time, the thing is that each of these reviews is fundamentally a balancing act because there is limited time, there is no possible way to meaningfully test every new thing about every amazing new phone that comes out and Even if you do, how much time do you have left to write all these tests and then analyze the results of these tests and that doesn't even leave time for production, video filming, video editing, color correction, music , all the creativity?

The decisions you want to make are too many. Being a YouTube video reviewer these days is like nine different jobs in one, so how do you decide

what

goes into that review and how much of it has to make it to the cutting room floor for each review to have its own? style, some reviews you'll see are 5 minutes long, super dense, some can be 10 minutes, even my own video reviews over the years have gotten into the 15-20 minute range, but that's in a We strive to provide you with as much information as possible. in the shortest time possible, I'm not trying to waste anyone's time and don't forget that on YouTube we also have viewership and retention metrics so

think

it's a balancing act, so a review is basically the art of compressing and distilling everything what you can. as useful information as possible in one piece, but because it is an art, everyone will cut different things from different places and make different pieces, but not this video in this video there is no time limit.

That's everything you could possibly want to know about my final five. months with the

iphone

12 pro and what I

really

think

is okay, so now that the boundaries are out, I'm definitely going to get into the weeds quite a bit in various parts of this video, you know when it's happening, but I'm still thinking. It will be a lot of fun when we do it now if you are the crazy man or woman who is going to watch this entire video until the end. Well, you can see how long this video is. That's good, buckle up, grab a snack, but if your attention span isn't that long, you can see that there are chapters below for all these different topics, so if you want to go deeper into a certain topic that interests you, you can also do it, feel free.

For the sake of click, this video is also mainly based on the iPhone 12 Pro that I spent most of my last five months with, but every time I reference other pieces of the iPhone line, the 12 mini or the 12 or the 12 pro max, I will do it. Mention that too let's get into it so the iPhone 12 series has a refreshed design this year which is always a big deal in the phone world and the iPhone design just doesn't change as much as before and I think that's a quite important design. It's

really

what most people expect and what seems to identify the iPhone forever.

I mean, think about it most of the time when you see new iPhone leaks, headlines or rumors, it's mostly design stuff, just when you're looking at new or new case designs. dimensions or what the camera bump will look like on the back of this year's rectangle, mainly because we already know that next year's iPhone will be quite similar to this year's iPhone, but we just want to know what the appearance will look like and The feeling in the hand is always the most exciting last unknown. I happen to love the new super-flat, modern design of the iPhone 12 series.

It's still a rectangle with rounded corners in a few different colors, but the sides are flat and straight, with a 90-degree stand. The edges are flat, so flatness has become an identifying characteristic of the phone, just as it was for the iPhone 4, 4s, 5 and 5s, but it's actually even flatter than most other flat phones because, instead of 2.5 D glass, it is flat in most cases. surface and then curves at the edges, this is simply flat straight glass on the front and back and flat stainless steel band around the edges, so this has a couple of effects, first it gave the apple a little more internal volume in the same shape, second it made the edges a little sharper, so I like the flatter edges just because I feel like they give me something to hold when I pick up the phone and grab it, to some People don't like it for the same reason because it can feel a little sharp like it hits the corners of your hand.

I have not felt that with this phone what I like most and what I dislike most about this design are the finishes, which is why all the new iPhone 12 Pro have this type of matte finish. on the back which is nice it's actually a satin which doesn't show many fingerprints under any light which is amazing it doesn't change much as it wears over time but then you have a glossy finish on the Apple logo, camera bump. and the stainless steel band around the outside so the logo is fine I get it but we know they could have made the camera matte because that's what they did on the regular iPhone 12 but they went for a glossy finish only on this piece and then combined with the raised, sharp camera rings, this has a tendency to collect a lot of dust.

Every iPhone 12 pro you see that has been out of a case for more than a few minutes or kept in a pocket will have dust around the camera modules, this doesn't actually change the performance of the camera, so in It's not really a big deal, but the dust will almost always be there because of the rings. The most annoying part of the finish of these phones to me is the fingerprints on the stainless steel. The steel rails are so constant that it's not even worth cleaning them the moment you notice that there are fingerprints like they nailed everything else on this rail.

The power button is a little bigger and still clicks a lot. I love that the mute switch is a staple that still works exactly as you'd expect. I'll talk more about the rest of the button behavior later, but basically my ideal iPhone 12 would actually be a hybrid between the matte back of the Pro and the matte camera bump and aluminum rails of the regular 12, but guess what? which case most people put their phone in, so none of that stuff about finishes and corner grip will really matter to you as much if you cover all this engineering in a plastic case of your choice, the size of the iPhone has always been pretty reasonable, although it has been slowly increasing in size over the years and this is my favorite iPhone size because it feels as big as it can get before you start having to.

I do manual gymnastics to reach the notification shade and things in the top corner of the screen, for some reason Apple just refuses to adjust the software on the gigantic iPhone 12 pro max to really take advantage of that larger screen in a meaningful way, so i found the camera and battery swap for how annoying it is to use it's just not worth it so the

iphone

12 pro is a great size the iphone 12 is an identical size and the 12 mini if ​​you can deal with the battery shortcomings, it is the best compact flagship phone out there right now.

I'll link my full video on that below and a couple more things about the design. Although this is a thousand dollar phone, let's not forget that it costs a thousand dollars, so there are a lot of these premium designs. industrial design features and this would be the perfect video to highlight many of those things that we normally leave out and take for granted, so the entire body is sealed and IP68 certified. I'm not the type to put it under water and test it, but it is able to withstand dust and dirt and is resistant to immersion in liquids up to a maximum depth of six meters underwater for up to 30 minutes, so It's always nice to see premium phones that would survive a quick drop in the pool or a toilet or something. like that and I actually also used to do a lot more testing if you go back far enough in videos where I was literally trying to bend the phone and see if you could hear any flexing or creaking or something like that, phones these days just don't do that anymore and this is not an exception, so overall, just in terms of raw industrial design, the iPhone is exactly what we expected.

It's great, works great, looks great, and still has the largest and most vibrant ecosystem of accessories. Worst part. Technically it's that Lightning port in a USB Type-C world, but for most iPhone users it's just a default and we already know Apple is trying to get rid of that anyway. I'll link a video under the like button or up here in the corner of a full video I made on that topic, the best part, although I still think it's actually the most underrated tactile sensation, so I'm putting this in the section of design because it is a consideration from the beginning when Apple designs the internal parts.

Of the iPhone there is a huge space reserved inside for a very large touch motor, as Apple calls it, and it is really good, so instead of the typical rotational vibration motor that was the typical touch motor before, that touch motor is a linear oscillating vibrator and can deliver incredibly precise and convincing vibrations. They literally feel like touches, almost like you're pressing a real button or your phone is touching you in your pocket and it's better than the haptics of any other phone. I've felt now that this on the iPhone 12 pro is not necessarily better than last year, but it's just one of those things that we skip because we take it for granted, but it's really good, Apple has gotten so good at haptic technology that They are comfortable replacing typical buttons like a touchpad on a MacBook with just a flat piece of glass. and a touch engine underneath, it's that good.

I also think this triple chamber array looks like a stove. Yes, I think Apple knew that when they were making this phone. Yeah, but I think they just moved on. anyway, because memes are inevitable and it's also kind of extra press, yeah, so go ahead and put a cover on it. Oh, the iPhone screen is always an area of ​​big debate just because how much do people really care about the screen? This has always been one. Of the most controversial areas of the iPhone, remember the iPhone 10r? This is a phone that launched at 749 and had a remarkably low resolution, slightly above 720p, LCD screen, and part of the internet went crazy over this, as if Apple of all companies was shipping a paper garbage screen on a 750 phone when almost all other Android phones at that price, even some cheaper ones, had at least 1080p and even I was one of them holding that phone watching a video on youtube that I knew was 4k the max at 720p se It felt almost unacceptable, but it turned out that it was fine, it was fine, people bought the phone and they enjoyed it, there were blind tests that it passed, so I felt that all those articles and headlines about this screen were of no use because Apple knew that. people didn't really care about this kind of stuff as much as we thought they should, but this is the same apple that turns around and ships the iphone 12 pro with an incredible screen on paper with dolby vision, a maximum brightness of 1200 nit slightly superior and world-class color accuracy that I guarantee those same people won't notice, so the question might not be how good the screen on this iPhone 12 pro is but how much people actually care about its most controversial features and For me that's more. funny angle, so on paper the iPhone 12 Pro has a 6.1-inch diagonal flat screen, like I said it's not too big, it has a resolution of 2532 by 1170 which puts you at a whopping 460 pixels per inch , is aOLED screen that reaches a maximum of 1200. brightness that gives it HDR certification and a contrast ratio of 2 million to 1, supports p3 wide color gamut, automatic true tone white balance adjustments and is coated with an oleophobic coating Fingerprint resistant, so this is where it gets interesting, there is a big notch on the top. this gigantic cutout stolen from the top of the screen by the largest notch on any new phone right now, do you care?

Functionally, we all know why the notch is there. It's for facial identification, which hasn't really improved that much over the years. I expected it, but it uses an infrared dot projector, a receiver, and there's an ambient light sensor along with a 7-megapixel selfie camera and a headset speaker and microphone. It seems like this huge notch has faded into our peripheral vision like other added phones. notches around the same time as the iPhone 10 and then over the years they have all shrunk in their notches doing everything they can to minimize the disruption to a smaller notch than to an even smaller notch and then to a punch hole and then even developing technology to place the selfie camera behind the screen so that the iPhone's notch remains exactly the same. huge, this is one of those things that I personally hate every time I look at it, but I've gotten used to it and Apple has clearly done the math, most people have gotten used to it and don't care, and it's just part of the way the iPhone is and rumors are that it will get a little smaller next year, but It's not going away anytime soon, even if we get Touch ID behind the glass on the next iPhone, we'll continue to have Face ID, so my opinion is fine, I get it, but I really wish Face ID would start working better specifically at more angles, e.g. , when my phone is in front of me on a table or desk, I wish you could recognize me from that angle and unlock it. without me moving it or leaning on it because other phones with the fingerprint reader on the front let me do that, then there's the refresh rate, it's 60 hertz, as far as I know this is the most expensive new phone that it doesn't.

I have a high refresh rate screen, but do you care? So my opinion and you may have seen this coming. I love about 120 hertz. It's the best of many of the newer phones coming out. It makes everything feel smoother and more responsive. When you go to 120 hertz, it's really hard to go back to 60. Except for the iPhone, the iPhone is the smoothest 60 hertz phone, so I can feel like the best of the worst or the worst of the best, depending on how you feel about it. Look. A lot of this has to do with the overall performance of the phone, which is great, but I'll get to that later, but most of it has to do with the 120 hertz touch sampling rate, that is, the layer beneath the touch input with your finger and tells the screen to respond updates twice as many times per second as a normal 60Hz screen, so it feels very responsive and very close to the way you touch it.

You move your finger on the screen and this is what iPhone users are used to. That said, the iPhone can still benefit greatly from the 120Hz display and I know this because the iPad Pro has had a 120Hz display since 2017 and it's amazing, so I'm bummed that the iPhone 12 Pro doesn't have a more foiled display high and I would be even more discouraged if next year it didn't either, but something to keep in mind is that the iPad Pro has an LCD screen and one of the main reasons cited by iPhone defenders as to why this phone doesn't have an 120 Hz display is because they wanted to go OLED too and Apple couldn't find a supplier that could make as many high quality 120 Hertz OLEDs as they would need to meet their high quality control requirements and millions and millions of units for the iPhone as well which maybe next year I'm really hoping, but you know what else they made some pretty big claims about for the screen of this iPhone, this new thing called a ceramic shield, so the front of this new iPhone has a layer on The upper part, the so-called Apple ceramic shield, which is not ceramic, but is a kind of shield.

It's actually still glass, but with some sort of crystallized reinforcement and Apple's big claim on stage that this had four times better drop performance, so like I said in my original review video, that's not me who's going to go out and drop the phone and I went back to try to see if it somehow hits that 4x number but what we found out is that it still scratches from level 6 with deeper grooves at level 7 and it will still break when falls. It's not a magic next-level solution. Glass is glass. and you know the rest, thanks zack, but if there is any observable improvement in the iPhone 12's drop performance, it will most likely be due to the new flat design, since these phones are so flat that they are much more likely to be rails suffer some of that impact damage. when you drop it, unless the phone falls completely flat on your face which is unlikely, so with that stainless steel rail it will absorb a lot of the impact or it could just be whatever screen protector or case you have in your phone, not the magic of some ceramic shield, so while I appreciate the effort of trying to make better, stronger glass on the front of the iPhone, it's not magic.

Oh, and speaking of screen protectors, this is officially, unofficially, but officially, the easiest new phone to apply a screen protector to because of how perfectly flat it is in case you like that fun fact, so the iPhone screen is amazing on paper, great color accuracy, flat, pretty bright and sharp, but it also has a huge notch at the top that is still stuck at 60 hertz and still scratches as easily as ever which is the norm For the court, there's a lot that goes into testing a set of new smartphone cameras and it usually ends up being the longest section of the review just because so many phones have gotten so good that it feels like the camera.

It's one of the last things that really sets them apart, but here we are with the iPhone 12 Pro and its triple camera system, so these are all top-of-the-line cameras, but you probably already knew that and honestly, it could probably end there. like you. I know you're getting consistently good photos, high-quality videos, and a good microphone, but that's not what you came here for, so there's a lot more to say about these cameras, so first of all, iPhone cameras have It really hasn't changed much since they started getting really good a few years ago. If it's not broken, they definitely don't fix it here, which is funny because the headphone jacks weren't broken either, but I guess not.

I feel the same about it, but the point is that there won't be a huge difference year over year with the iPhone cameras because they don't have much to change, the sensor size will stay more or less the same, it's 12 megapixels. Optically stabilized sensor, this one has an aperture of f 1.6 that lets in a lot of light and is flanked by a 120-degree, 12-megapixel ultra-wide angle lens at f 2.4 and a 2.5x optical telephoto lens at f 2.0, a lidar scanner, a microphone and a flash to top it off. The thing about the iPhone camera that we sometimes forget when we get too deep into the technical aspects is that it is designed to be as simple as possible and easy to use and, at the same time, achieve results that are very difficult to obtain elsewhere. way, so when steve jobs introduced the original iphone in 2007, stay with me, this was one of the slides he showed on stage, it's a graph of ease of use versus how smart something is and of course, it destroys completely to all the competition talking about how they are not. very smart or not very user friendly and the iPhone will be in the corner, just a classic extremely scientific Apple chart on stage, while the rest of the competition is definitely stuck on those axes when you just look. on the camera, just the camera, the iPhone still gets more into that corner than any other phone out there right now, this camera app is very simple and has been forever, everyone knows how to point and shoot, tap to focus if you really need it and If you need additional controls, they're usually hidden, maybe just a swipe and tap, and when you point and shoot, the software does a lot of the heavy lifting thanks to smart HDR, multiple exposures, computational photography, and An excellent Image Signal Processor that makes everything happen very quickly.

It would be very difficult to get the results that the iPhone does with any other camera system by simply pointing and shooting, and that's what the iPhone is so good at, so I give it all the credit in the world for point and shoot, but does it? What about the few times when you really want to customize a little more? What about the times when you want a little more manual control, that's when the apple style can bite you? Because there isn't much of that in the standard iPhone camera app, there isn't actually a Pro mode in the iPhone 12's Pro Camera.

Now, luckily, they've gone ahead and added Pro Raw, which can give you a lot more flexibility. in the editing process and there are some apps in the app store that can help you in the filming process, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of really good smartphone cameras and I think if you did some kind of blind smartphone camera test with a bunch of different phones, all in manual mode to score exactly the perfect photo. You might be surprised which one comes out first. They would all be really good, but where the iPhone separates itself it offers consistently great results with a minimum. effort, so every year I describe iPhone photos in the review and every year it's pretty similar: they have this crunchy processed look but not too sharp or overly processed, a lot of dynamic range and detail for such a small file and the iPhone is known for flatten images with faces by making sure to always light faces that may be in the shadows or not exposed too well, you will always sacrifice the rest of the image if necessary in favor of the subject or face, which most would say is the most smart that can be done in fully automatic mode, but when you spend over a thousand dollars on a smartphone, there will be a lot of people who will want to do more than just point and shoot, and that's where there are some extreme cases where the iPhone camera it does.

Being surpassed by the competition the zoom is great, the iPhone 12 pro reaches a maximum of 12 times the digital zoom. There are some phones right now with 10x optical zoom lenses that max out in the triple digits for digital zoom, so you know there are other winners with even wider ultra-wide lenses or winners with laser autofocus, but again When it comes to point and shoot, which is what most people want from most of their photos most of the time, the iPhone nails the videos, this is where the iPhone is for me. stands out as the best overall camera system on a smartphone because there is another layer which is app support, so you've probably already seen some of the memes about how a video from an Android phone will look like a blurry pixelated mess.

On Instagram. while the one on the iPhone looks great and there is a grain of truth behind it and there is a reason for that, the truth is a video recorded with a high-end Android phone and the iPhone 12 Pro would be very similar, comparable, anyone could win, but a video recorded within the Instagram app on a high-end Android phone versus the iPhone 12 pro will have a big difference and that's because for years many of the most popular apps with camera functions simply took screenshots of Viewfinder screen on Android phones instead of actually connecting directly to the camera like they do with iPhones.

There was an Android Police article the other day about how the Galaxy S21 is the only Android phone that doesn't suck at Snapchat because it actually connects directly to the camera on this phone and that may seem like a step forward for Android and maybe be a new future direction, but fundamentally it still comes down to development if I'm a new app building something camera related and I can develop a version of my app for as many users as possible. You might be going to make an iPhone version because that's one version of the app for many millions of people and trying to make a bunch of different new optimized versions for a bunch of different Android phones is just going to be a process of diminishing returns, so what is It's cool to see a version every now and then like the s21 ultra or when the pixel had the visual core that would be cool every now and thenwhen, but it seems that the iPhone will always have this development advantage at least in the near future. which is actually the main reason I carry an iPhone, that being said, if you want all the detailed information about the new cameras plus the differences I found between the 12 pro and the 12 pro max with the larger sensor, better stabilization and better zoom, yes I made a video about all those things, but the bottom line is that it doesn't make much difference in most shots until you get to the extreme cases, which is where those things can produce less noisy photos at the most, remember?

Dolby Vision, but how has this big fuss been made over the fact that the iPhone 12 series is the first set of Dolby Vision certified cameras and suddenly it was about to become a big deal and everyone would start recording in HDR all the time? Well that's it. It hasn't really played yet, don't get me wrong, the video files look great. Dolby Vision HDR video from an iPhone looks amazing on an iPhone and if you send it to other iPhones it will look great on those screens, but as soon as you have it. to export it and ship it somewhere else, that's where the experience starts to fall apart. iPhone Dolby Vision video uses hlg which stands for hybrid log gamma and without going into details about file formats and nits, it's just not supported everywhere, so if I shoot Adobe Vision HDR video on my iPhone and want to share it on somewhere like Twitter, Instagram, or even an Apple TV where it's not supported, the video is then converted and mapped to an SDR image that adjusts all that HDR information to a standard dynamic range. screen and for me that sdr image doesn't look very good so the dolby vision hdr video looks super good when it works and I've seen some amazing examples even on youtube of iphone 12 pro hdr videos and if you have the right monitor or the right phone then these videos look amazing but I'm still waiting for the best most reliable HDR channel to record a video here that reaches your eyes beautifully and compliant at all times but in short overall the cameras on the iPhones are pretty good 24/7.

I think it would be foolish to overlook Magsafe Magsafe is one of the most interesting new features of the iPhone 12 series, not for nothing physically surprising, I mean, it's just a wireless charging puck with some magnets that line up with the part rear of the iPhone, simple but with an additional layer. Additionally, there are rumors that Apple will eventually get rid of the charging port early this year, which means we could be looking at the future of charging on all iPhones and then the fun part is that it also brings the potential for a whole magnetic iphone ecosystem accessories enabled through magsafe so first of all from the name i understand why they called it magsafe it is a beloved brand but it doesn't have the same utility as the original magsafe so if you trust this magsafe drive to charge your phone and accidentally hit the cable, the phone comes with it, it's no safer than a normal cable, but that being said, it works by slapping it on the back like that, it charges at 15 watts and that's fine, There are a number of pretty decent safe charger accessories out there. something like that they are just cases that are magsafe compatible meaning if you slap the charger on the back it will also magnetize and run through it.

This is one of Nomad's leather cases for the iPhone 12 pro max here, but other than that I was hoping there would also be a separate ecosystem of magnetic accessories that sit on the back of the iPhone, so I bought this car mount from Belkin that has a somewhat sticky rubber on top of the metal that is supposed to hold the iPhone. place without clamps, which would be great just with the Magsafe magnet inside and this for me was going to open up this whole new world of things that stick to the back of the iPhone with magnets and it's not good, sometimes it can depend on your car . suspension at this point, but for me it sinks slowly as I drive until it finally falls off the magnets, so it looks like this magnetic charging puck is the best Magsafe accessory out there still five months later, although there are a few things in the works For now which I hope to get my hands on looks great, they make big claims about also having a proprietary magnet array that is a bit stronger.

I'll believe it when I see it, but long story short, I call it an accessory now, but it may be a necessity in the very near future because if the next iPhone really doesn't have any ports, then you will have to charge your phone wirelessly every time, like this which I guess this Magsafe drive would be the best way to do it. That the biggest bummer for me would simply be the charging speed, so wireless charging is already pretty inefficient, but there are a lot of innovations being made with companies pushing super fast wireless charging speeds. 40, 50 and 60 watt wireless charging.

Apple doesn't do that at all. Magsafe is The 15 watt period is actually 12 watts on the iPhone 12 mini and even if you connect it to a faster brick, it will limit that charging to that 15 watts in the long run, it is true that this is better for the health of your battery and if you want your phone. to last several years so that's what you get here but sometimes you just want to charge it fast you know I guess that's why they call it magsafe because for your battery it's safe the iphone 12 pro has a 3687 milliamp hour battery On paper, which is actually quite small, we are very used to flagship smartphones today having between four thousand and five thousand milliamp hours, sometimes less rarely, but thanks to the efficiency of the iPhone, its vertical integration, its optimization, all the classic things we have.

There's been talk for years that that number doesn't actually mean as much as actual day-to-day performance, which is great on the iPhone 12 Pro. I can consistently get six to seven hours of screen time, which is really good for a phone. this size on heavier days, although with a lot more browsing or just more demanding usage, maybe I'm getting a lot of data or gaming or using the camera a lot, so it will drop faster. The a14 bionic chip inside is very powerful, so it can move through the battery fast enough to kill you at the end of the day with less than five hours of screen time, but for me that's a problem anyway.

Pretty rare day, so the only thing you really start to think about more and more after the phone comes out is long-term battery health, and to be honest, five months later is still a pretty short amount of time. in the relative grand scheme of things when it comes to batteries, but you want this to last three, four, maybe even five years or more, and iPhones have a good history here and this iPhone 12 Pro that I've been using it still shows 100 battery status and that's all for the battery. Apple is a bit boring in the battery department.

I was talking about it in the Magsafe section, but Apple has never done it. They led the industry in charging speed, they've never led the industry in battery size, and there are Android phones left and right with split battery cells in foldable form factors, even with split battery cells for faster parallel charging. , there are phones that make 50 60 even 100 or 120 watts, which is absolutely unrealistic and can take you from dead to full sometimes in half an hour. The iPhone has never done any of that. It's just a simple cell of modest size that lasts a reasonable amount of time.

The iPhone is not just a piece. of the hardware it's the software that runs on it and it's the ecosystem around it now there's really not a lot of additional things to say about ios on the iphone 12 pro specifically that's new here in fact that's one of the things What people like most is that it's incredibly consistent, they don't change too much year over year, they never have and the older iPhones will literally have the exact same software experience as the new iPhone as soon as the new iPhones come out, so really What I have to say about iOS this time is what were supposed to be new widgets, so widgets finally came to iOS after having them on Android for the last 12 years or so, when Apple is late to the party for a reason, usually there is some reason.

They'll either do it Apple's way or they'll do it better although they weren't the first and now that I've had them for about five months on the iPhone 12 Pro, they're actually a little better. and worse at the same time, so ios 14 widgets are really good. In fact, I think its implementation on iOS, while a little less custom, feels a little more polished and controlled as you'd expect from iOS, but when I first went through iOS 14 in that video, we saw some widgets built in by Apple. which showed huge potential, there are smart stacks of widgets and some really informative widgets to give you live update information, they were all pretty clean and consistent visually, still can't express it exactly. wherever you want on every home screen, but this felt like it was on iOS, so now it was up to all our favorite apps and developers to update their apps to create fantastic widgets like they did on Android, so where they ended up worst is actually No. so many and still not as customizable as they are on Android, maybe it's a little unfair to expect all my favorite apps to have been updated with widget support like they have been for a decade on Android, but only in apps.

I use it five months later. There is a Waze widget on Android, but not on iOS. There is a SoundCloud widget on Android. Really useful playback controls. Not on iOS. There is an Asana widget on Android, but not on iOS. Therefore, there are fewer widgets and generally less customization within widgets. themselves, but overall the quality of the widgets feels a little better, so it sounds right for Apple, that being said, I was really curious how many people actually use widgets, so I did a poll on Twitter asking them, do you know how many of you use? widgets on your home screen, how many don't and it turns out that about 75 percent of you do, whether you're on Android or iOS, which I found very interesting, so we have the new app library completely at your disposal. the right.

Now this isn't exactly the app drawer that many of us love on Android, but it's getting there and it's definitely useful for finding everything in one place and not needing to have every app on a home screen or in a few folders to That the iPhone home screen situation will continue to develop over time and, speaking of developing over time, so will the ecosystem. You can't talk about the iPhone without at least touching on the ecosystem around it, which is why Apple's ecosystem becomes a little more complete around the iPhone every year. the year they added the homepod mini, they added airpods max and the long rumored air tags are probably coming soon and in the walled garden analogy, that may be the inside of that garden becoming even more lush and beautiful or they may be the walls of the garden. going up a bit more either way, I think both are true.

The point is that it's making it harder to get out. I don't really have any fundamental problems with the way iOS works. It is mature enough now for any changes to be made at this point. make is a small added feature or a small experiment. You know, widgets were easily the biggest new thing, but they've pretty much locked down things like the swipe up gesture and the timing and responsiveness of animations, even if it's a little jarring coming from a square border instead of a rounded edge and have locked down the fundamentals of the camera UI for so long that almost everyone knows how they work now.

I don't like the power button, for example, because it doesn't just turn off. The phone also activates Siri with a long press. Remember when power buttons simply turn phones on and off, but the most frustrating thing for me on iOS, which I wish would evolve, is not the notifications - although that could use some work too - but simply the settings. The fact that there are so many settings separated from the app and moved to the Settings app has been annoying for a long time, but guess what, the iPhone is still a ridiculously popular phone for a reason because it doesn't change too much year after year.

There's nothing too dramatic happening compared to the last one, people understand it, they're used to it, my parents use an iPhone right now and I'd be very hard pressed to recommend they switch to another phone, even if that phone is technically better than the cost. the change is high and that is on purpose, so the arrival of 5g to the iPhone finally 5g has been a topic that we have promoted and that we have talked about for a long time and they becameLots of big promises when 5g finally came to the iPhone. They opened their whole keynote speech with the CEO of Verizon on stage talking about 5g for a while, so it was very promising, in particular, 5g got really good, now we have the benefit of hindsight, if they were right, 5g became real by adding it. for the 12 series, no, I mainly mean that the launch of 5g in the world is an infrastructure thing, it will be a literal slow build process for that to happen, so it won't happen suddenly and quickly because they say an individual phone.

Yes, there are now many millions more 5G customers in the world because of this new iPhone, but here's a more interesting question: do you want or need 5G in the first place? Because here's what we've seen tons of promises of this incredible, incredible 5g-enabled future with robo-taxis and remote robotic surgeries and blazing fast internet speeds wherever you go, but as you saw in my 5g explainer video, we haven't yet. reached that point. I mean realistically 5g speeds aren't much better than 4g speeds, sometimes they are a little better sometimes they are actually worse, the rare exception to this is when you are within a stone's throw of a millimeter wave tower, in which case you can get incredible speeds until you get away from it, in fact I demonstrated it quite clearly in my video that if you are in sight of that millimeter wave tower you get fantastic speeds, but as soon as there is an obstacle between you and the tower or if you literally stand behind a window or turn your back to the tower, then you're going to lose some of that signal, which is why 5g is great. 5g is very promising for the future but it won't suddenly become real because of a phone or any technology, the only thing that can be said about the iPhone, that's why they are Using these terms, now there are millions of people walking with your first 5g phone.

Some of these people will live in an area with 5g coverage and will benefit immediately. Some of these people will live in an area that does not. I don't have it but it is about to get 5G coverage in the next few years and they will see the benefits soon and some of these people will live in an area without 5G and won't benefit at all. Those people can simply switch to 5G. turn off and use iPhone as last. Also one of the fun facts is that if you haven't upgraded to a 5g phone, the millions of people who just got off 4g with their 5g iPhones can boost their 4g speeds a little.

Better to give Apple credit because they managed to minimize the effect of 5g on battery life quite well on some of the early 5g phones and this happened with 4g. 2 had worse battery life due to how inefficient it is to constantly search for a 5g signal and you may have even seen it. That now-deleted tweet from the Verizon account asked people to turn off 5g to improve battery life, but I actually found that the iPhone does a very good job with power management. It is now well known that you don't actually connect to 5g all the time. actually it just turns it on when you are downloading something or using a lot of data when you really need it, if not it may show you the 5g logo but it won't actually be connected to 5g and it will save you. some battery life and honestly you'll probably never notice it, so the effect on battery life has been minimal and it's been a step forward for internet users around the world to use 5G, but it definitely hasn't improved suddenly, so you know how every year.

As soon as a new iPhone comes out, there is a quick and dramatic search for literally anything that could be wrong with this new phone and if there is something, that becomes a headline and we are all trying to find the latest, most important door. new. The signal strength drops when I hold the phone on a screw grip antenna door. Some iPhones have charging problem on the charging door, maybe the iPhone can be bent in half, that's Bend Gate. I made a whole video called iPhone Gates. I explained that you can see it, but it's been pretty quiet this year.

There aren't many controversial things about this iPhone, but I don't know, it doesn't feel like it. Well, I feel like there always has to be something, there has to be something for YouTube channels to feast their eyes on, there has to be some kind of door that we can talk about, what is the door? Oh, maybe it's the screen again, right? There's always some sort of element of controversy with the screen and this screen is nice, but it's a thousand dollar phone with a comically large notch and somehow it's still 60 hertz and Apple gets away with it so it's surely worth the money. pity, maybe there have also been I've seen a couple of forums and YouTube videos talking about the green tint on the iPhone screen, it hasn't been enough for Apple to respond yet, but it's out there or oh, actually, such Maybe it's just the fact that it still uses lightning, not really, it's an iPhone, it uses lightning every year.

I mean, we knew they were never going to go to USBC for the iPhone, that's not really a door, actually, you know what I think. I know what it is, I think a door bar is something that gets a response from Apple, it has to get over that threshold like you have to find something that's so important that Apple's engineers didn't find it and their testers didn't. find, but it's such a big admission that Apple has to go away, then answer you, that would be a door and maybe the only thing that qualifies for that would be that there is no charger in the box of the iPhone 12 series and so it was quite significant, for Of course, it didn't get a reaction from Apple, but it was so big that it needed some kind of pre-reaction that was an explanation from Apple in their keynote about why they were doing it, so we saw them take the environmental angle. you know less loads in the box means less e-waste when people would throw it away less space wasted with packaging and more iPhones shipped by truck, by train, by plane, by pallet, efficiency saving the world now when you actually break this down, yeah , you're saving some electronic waste by not shipping charging bricks that people could throw away if they don't need them, but on the other hand, the cable that ships with the iPhone is a USB to Lightning cable and most people who own iPhones they dont have it. a USBC charger, so they have to buy that USBC charging brick anyway, which means more packaging and more money, and now they're throwing away their old bricks and it doesn't really make any difference, as much as we all hate this and We can By looking through the environmental angle, we can also see how this is already starting to become normal, so since this iPhone was shipped in a small box without a charger, the xiaomi mi 11 was also shipped in a small box without a charger , but they still give you a charger if you ask for it and then the galaxy s21 series did the same but they are not trying to give you a free charger at all when Apple does something the rest of the industry realizes everyone is watching and They often react and, just as we saw with the headphone jack, where it seemed like there was a buffer time of about a year where you could mock what Apple was doing with the headphone jack before removing all of your ads, make fun of them and copy them.

On your next phone I feel like the buffer time is even shorter with this one, but the difference in danger with this trend is all the innovation we've been seeing in recent years in battery technology and charging technology and this is one race to the phone with faster charging makes that just end, I really hope not, so that's what really makes this a door opener for me, at least it's not just that Apple no longer ships a charger with the phone and, oh, look how greedy they seem to be. It's just the ripple effect this inevitably has on the rest of the industry and at the end of the day I think that's what makes the iPhone such a fascinating product to begin with.

Know? It started changing the world in 2007, but every time they update it after that, it has these second and third order effects on the rest of the smartphone world around it. That's what makes the iPhone so crazy. There are companies that make entire phones based on rumors of what Apple might do in a future iPhone. just so they can beat Apple, that's crazy, okay, I think that's it, I think that's all I wanted to say about the iPhone and somehow I haven't done it in some video somewhere. I am happy to have done it. You did this, this is, uh, if you went straight to the end of this video, watch the whole thing.

Well, we've been through a lot together, so I appreciate that. You may also notice that this time it is a different shirt. That's what happens when it's a It takes more than a day to film a long video, but if you skipped straight to the end, this conclusion here, well, you missed the most exciting part, but anyway, yeah, I'm really curious From what you think, it's not just about making a longer video just to make a long video, it's about being able to cover an entire topic instead of just a small portion of it like we're normally forced to do, but hey, yeah you see the video and enjoyed it, we can do more of this. kind of stuff, so let me know in the comments section below, also down below, right under the like button, are all the references and all the links to all the things that I talked about during this video, as promised.

Great, that's all, thanks for watching now. A few words from only the sponsor is brave enough to veer at the end of this gigantic video. expressvpn thanks the sponsor of this video. expressvpn. So quick question: how did you choose which internet provider you use? I'll probably just answer that for you. You probably did. You don't have a choice, or if you did, you are very lucky because in most areas you don't have a choice and therefore these ISPs essentially have a monopoly over the areas they serve if they start doing things with the ones you don't agree with or if it starts tracking every website you visit even when you're in incognito mode, what are you going to do?

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