iPhone 12 Review: Just Got Real!

[Music] hey what's up mkbhd here and this is the iphone 12. i feel like we've all seen an iphone before at this point this is a pretty familiar iphone we've seen the rounded corners and the notch and the lightning port but there are a couple key changes this year that are a first in the iphone so i've been using this iphone 12 for a bit since my impressions video and it's my favorite iphone ever mostly because of this design but if you're considering getting one there's some stuff you should know now i'm going to do a separate video on the pro in this sweet blue color i think it's the best color but these two phones are very similar same exact size like a case that works for one works for the other same main cameras almost the same screen same battery same charging but there's a couple things that only apply to the pro and i'll go over those in that video but let's just start with the 12 with this new design shall we i love this super flat design it is so flat it's not the typical almost flat where the screen is flat right up to the edges and then it curves over the very edge and they call it like 2.5 d no this is flat flat like the phone happens to be a little bit thinner and a little bit lighter than last year but i'm not as concerned with that but the square sides are actually the most efficient way to pack in those internals into the phone as efficiently as possible and i happen to think it looks and feels super premium and modern on top of all that now this kind of red but also kind of salmon sometimes product red version after seeing it in person i'd probably not go for this i'd go for either the blue or the black but yeah those aluminum rails are everything they're more grippable maybe a little less comfortable at first but hey the buttons are clicky the power button is a little bit bigger it's still ip68 water resistant you've got your 5g antenna cut out on the right hand side in some regions which trust me i'll get way into that in a second and yeah i just like holding this phone now if you put a case on it i guess a lot of that doesn't matter as much you'll notice it less obviously but still even some cases are flattening out their dimensions for the iphone 12 so that again will make it easier to grip harder to drop and speaking of dropping all these new iphones come with on the front something new called ceramic shield and this is basically this specialty hardened kind of glass with crystal structure inside it and it's on the front of these phones over the screen and it's supposed to offer four times better drop protection so shatter protection basically which is great but i typically care just as much if not more about scratch resistance all the little micro scratches that your phone gathers over time and the thing about scratch resistance is it's typically inversely proportional to shatter resistance so if you think about it the softer something is the less likely it is to shatter but then the easier it is to scratch it and vice versa the harder something is the less likely you are to scratch it but the more brittle it is and the more shatterable it becomes so i see the headline of better drop protection and that's great but i'm not about to drop my phone to find out if it works i'm sure people are already on that i have no idea how they'll land on that 4x number but all right all i know is i already have a little gash in my screen on the left hand side here which is so sad but that's probably out of level six no idea how that happened but i'm feeling like the iphone is not significantly more scratch resistant than before of course zach will probably tell us the truth there so if it shatters a lot less when dropped we'll see that would be nice but i feel like a lot of the drop stuff is happenstance like if i happen to drop my phone a certain way it's definitely gonna crack right and if i happen to drop my phone another way it's probably not going to so i don't know i don't want to worry about too much use the case if you want to use a screen protector if you really want to i'm just going to i'm just going to live my life [Music] so possibly the biggest external hardware feature of the new iphones is magsafe and i think it has bigger implications for the future of the iphone but right now magsafe is the optional new magnetic charging accessory standard on the back like right behind the apple logo so the number one magsafe accessory that apple sells is the puck charger it doesn't come with a brick by the way so if you buy the charger 40 bucks make sure you have a usbc charging brick but uh yeah just kind of slaps onto the back of the phone you line it up with the magnets you kind of get used to where it places right over the apple logo and that's all good this charges at 15 watts while every other wireless charger on the iphone still charges at seven and a half watts and a couple other faqs on this number one yes it is still qi charging so you can still charge the iphone 12 with other wireless chargers and you can charge other phones with the magsafe puck if you're into that number two the durability concern with magsafe leaving marks on the iphone i have noticed that on mine too but i don't think it'll turn out to be a long-term problem it just seems to wipe off every time like you might remember how the homepod was leaving these little white stained rings on certain wood tables which is kind of understandable because not every table is the same but i feel like i guess i hope apple's probably tested this like a hundred thousand times and probably determined that it's not an issue about the way they made this so should be okay and then number three i was getting a lot of questions about this yes you can magsafe charge through most non-magsafe cases as long as they're thin enough and even that magnet will actually still work through some thin cases so i didn't really have any non-magsafe cases here to test but of course channel sponsored dbrand sent over a grip case and i can confirm it's thin enough to work just fine with a magsafe charger kinda like it is a magsafe charger and yes all the other benefits of a case grippiness protection they all still apply so since i know most people end up looking for a good one i'll leave a link to this case below now at the beginning of this magsafe bit i said something i said it was optional which it is for now but i feel like we can all sort of see where this is going which is apple is slowly moving towards eventually making a portless iphone which i think that's a whole separate video's worth of rant but bottom line is their solution to wirelessly conveniently charging a phone that doesn't have a port is going to be magsafe this thing right here so it's not amazing but i guess it's fine the couple of accessories they've made for it so far not bad there's a regular case of course that you can continue to stack things through there's a kind of weird-looking clear version of the case for some reason there's a wallet that i mentioned that doesn't have very strong magnets but if you think about it it's not so peculiar that the one accessory they chose to make outside of a case is a wallet like let me know if there's any flaw in this this series of logic right so apple wants to get rid of the port on the iphone and go totally wireless charging for everything at a certain point maybe next year whatever right so they already see ahead of time this particular headline which is people who use wallet cases can't wireless charge their iphone so they can't charge the iphone at all so apple needs to invent a way for people who use wallet cases to continue to charge their phone so they invent an accessory which is a removable wallet bit so you can charge the phone and when you don't need to charge it you can put the wallet back on that seems to check out like i said it's a whole thing but today optional battery life on these phones has actually been pretty good but not noticeably better than last year at all matter of fact it's actually a slightly larger higher res display and actually a smaller physical battery so it's pretty impressive that the phone still does okay you can kill it in a day with six hours of screen on time or just a lot of heavy use but this isn't new with this standard size iphone if you want a real battery champ you can go for the bigger phone the actual best new piece of the iphone 12 though is definitely the new display it goes from being that 720p lcd with bigger bezels that was really easy to make fun of to this much better and even slightly bigger 6.1 inch 1080p oled it's like night and day it's basically on par with the pro which is actually pretty surprising to me just a slightly lower peak brightness now it's 60 hertz again and while that's kind of a missing feature at this point on an 800 phone in 2020 i was actually kind of expecting that i was just thinking the pros would get 120 hertz displays this year but obviously none of them did which is a bummer but let's be honest they probably saw that as a battery saving measure since this phone did also just get 5g so let's talk about 5g i kind of love and hate 5g right now so this slogan apple and i guess the carriers 2 really keep pushing that 5g just got real 5g just got real really just now 5g just now got real last time i checked like this year i reviewed like 30 phones with 5g so clearly 5g has already existed but there's a reason they're saying it this way so first of all i did a video all about 5g where i went to a 5g area testing it explaining it showing what's good about it and what its limitations are i'm going to leave it linked right below the like button if you want to watch it catch up on that but the bottom line is it's really promising but it's still being built right now but carriers and i guess apple really like the message that 5g just got real because now that all of the new iphones have 5g built in there's about to be millions and millions and millions more people walking around with 5g capable phones in a few very short months and when that happens that tends to accelerate development that sort of makes it real which i get it but also the carriers would very very much like you to upgrade to their 5g plan please but we got to remember 5g in 2020 has its ups and its downs like this iphone 12 i'm using here has verizon 5g which is surprisingly actually in my area it's not millimeter wave it's not ultra wide band but it can still give me roughly 20 faster download and upload speeds but 5g radios are also pretty power hungry and the more time you spend on 5g the more battery you bleed through now apple's thought a lot about this of course so their solution and you might have caught it on stage during the announcement is called smart data mode and basically it tries to only use 5g when you actually need it to save battery so when you're in a 4g area you're on 4g speeds everything works with lte no problem you're good it'll feel normal when you're in a 5g area and you're doing a lot of bandwidth intensive stuff you're downloading a bunch of videos and music you're face timing and crispy hd you're doing a lot of that high bandwidth stuff that's going to use 5g and that's going to improve that experience a lot but if you are in a 5g area but not really doing anything that benefits from 5g then your phone will actually switch off and stick with 4g and as the verge reported it'll actually still show you the 5g indicator in the corner but you'll get 4g speeds which we'll probably find but that also explains this sort of weird speed test result so look my take is i get it the best technologies are supposed to be invisible like you shouldn't even notice they work you go to download something while walking around you're in a 5g area boom 5g turns on your downloads go super quick and then it turns off to save battery kind of like promotion on the ipad pro it goes up to 120 hertz when you're scrolling and playing games and actually using it but when you're not you're just sitting on the home screen or watching a video it will go down to 24 hertz to save battery so it's sort of not there when you don't need it it's there when it helps you it's just weird that the whole messaging has been in your face 5g 5g 5g 5g 5g so yeah i would say don't buy this phone now because you want to get a 5g phone but if you do get this phone now then maybe it'll be a nice bonus if you're in a 5g area or in the future when you end up in a 5g area you'll be able to use that too cool [Music] all right new iphone equals new best camera ever in an iphone right well sure iphone 12's got a slightly updated dual camera system with a standard and an ultra wide the standard has a slightly wider aperture at f 1.6 instead of f 1.8 and to be honest it's not really much of a difference in the camera like it's just not same as the pixel they're not really doing anything too drastic if it ain't broke don't fix it really the hardware improvements are almost impossible to notice in regular photos but they will get you an improvement in like the edge cases the most difficult photo and video taking scenarios so like handheld in low light that'll be better night mode will be better auto focus on fast moving subjects super high dynamic range shots like shooting straight into the sun thanks to smart hdr3 stuff like that other than that it still looks like iphone photos which is to say some of the absolute best and most consistent crisp photos on any smartphone so that's not a letdown but iphone video though firmly in a league of its own it firmly like every time i test a new iphone camera it's just the video camera is so much better and people care a lot about video they take a lot of videos so you'd want to know yeah the iphone takes great video and that's despite not shooting 8k and not having a huge new sensor or anything crazy like that it's just so fine-tuned and so reliable but i want to save my full analysis of that for the video about the pros because i think pros care even more about video stuff and there's potentially well there's even new hardware of the sensors in the 12 pro max so that could be interesting to see my one knock is it does seem like there's more flaring in low light video like just a ton of little orbs for every little point light source but it's still very usable though now you might have heard about dolby vision hdr these new iphones are the first cameras the only cameras in the world to shoot bit high dynamic range dolby vision 4k video and that's awesome hdr video is awesome higher brighter brights deeper shadows overall better images even better perceived quality i love hdr but here's the thing dolby vision is just one hdr standard or format by dolby and there are other hdr standards that have been out you might heard of hdr10 is one of them and that some other smartphones have actually started enabling you to shoot you might have a smartphone in your pocket right now that is already capable of shooting hdr10 video but the issue with new formats is always compatibility so some tvs are hdr10 certified some aren't some displays are adobe vision certified some aren't so you can look at the display the video you take on the iphone and it's dolby vision certified and it looks amazing and if you send this video to another iphone 12 it'll look amazing on that iphone but as soon as you upload it to twitter or instagram or tick tock or kinda anything at this point even youtube it doesn't show up as that hdr on most people's screens it's back to sdr but the big deal here again is kind of like 5g because there's about to be so many iphone 12s in the world there's about to be millions of new devices and new people out there shooting tons of hdr video and looking to share it and so now there's more incentive for places and and apps like twitter and instagram and tick tock to support hdr so maybe the tagline should have been hdr just got real anyway the rest of the iphone is pretty familiar and that's a good thing for most people ios 14 we've all seen it by now it's familiar even though there's a couple bugs and apps that will probably get updated pretty soon face id it's completely unchanged even performance is familiar since there's nothing super new like high refresh rate there is the new a14 bionic inside which is one of the very first five nanometer chips in any device which is a more powerful cpu and gpu and is paired with 4 gigs of ram and everything's great but that's mainly for speed that you're going to notice later down the road when the phone is 2 3 4 years old and hopefully still feeling really fast but fundamentally there isn't really that much of a difference in these iphones and the performance you get this year versus what last year didn't already do just a little bit faster but yeah even at a somewhat premium 830 bucks that's the actual price apple's website shows carrier pricing at first so it's a little misleading but even at that price yeah this phone with best in class cameras best in class performance much better screen is pretty damn good it's this is the one to get for most people here's a too long didn't watch version for those of you lazy people that i know just went down to the chapters and skipped to this it's a great phone the best new parts of it are definitely the display which was a huge knock up from last year knock up why'd i say it like that the display is better battery life's about the same cameras are a little bit better build quality and design are also an awesome improvement and magsafe it's optional for now but might as well start getting used to it and the worst part is the price is a little higher because also 5g is built into the phone even for people who are never going to use it but that being said there you have it great work apple and definitely stay tuned for the review on the pro i want to dive into what makes it a pro you know as a as a youtuber i think a lot about this as a content creator am i a pro iphone user i don't know there's a lot to talk about there but that's been the iphone 12. thanks for watching much coming up very soon because you know tech toby guys it's over catch you guys in the next one [Music] back peace and on and on

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 13,447,232

Keywords: iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 review, iPhone 12 Pro review, iPhone 12 vs, ceramic shield, drop test, magsafe, MagSafe, MKBHD, iPhone 12 magsafe

Id: X1b3C2081-Q

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020