Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPhone 13 Pro Max: Does Pro Matter?”.
Thanks to inker for sponsoring a portion of this video, the photos are really good. Oh man, that screen is really smooth too. Okay, that that’s pretty cool wait is the iphone pro actually pro now so apple throws the word pro around so much it’s kind of become meaningless. At this point, uh in the past pro’s been another word they’ve used for like more expensive, but now with the iphone 13 pro and pro max has apple. Finally, and clearly, given us something meant for like professionals and not just video creators, but a phone that can be used by anyone for their work and i’m going to focus on the pro models here. But if you want a full rundown on the iphone 13s uh check out robert rosenfeld’s video on the apple circle, we’ll link to it in all the places. So some things are certain in the world: um death taxes and apple’s gon na apple uh.
You know they are going to take their sweet time, adopting new tech that have been found on competitors phones for years, just how they roll uh when they do finally bring those features, they generally have done a really good job with implementation, and this year’s phones on The surface look like a crazy iterative update the notch got a little bit smaller horizontally, but apple hasn’t done anything with that extra real estate. It’S just smaller. No battery percentage in the right hand corner like i think a lot of us would have wanted. Uh. The phones are slightly chunkier and the camera humps are not a humpier and the colors are mostly new, but that aside, at least aesthetically you’d be really hard-pressed to tell an iphone 13 pro apart from a 12 pro. So if there’s a single tech hill that i’ve climbed up on and planted my john flag on, it’s been that apple’s 60 hertz screens, while some of the best 60hz screens was inexcusable.
They needed 120 hertz for years and it was kind of an insult. In my mind, to call it pro without it it’s here only on the pro phones – and i just i just wan na i wan na smile for the fact that it’s here so for the iphone users who have never used anything but iphones. This is what that means. Uh things are going to look insanely smooth.
You probably heard that. But if you look at you know your older iphone and you scroll with text, the text becomes blurry when you scroll on 120 hertz when you scroll. That text becomes very clear and apple can scale that down to 10 hertz, depending on the app and what you are doing. It is awesome that it’s here it makes a giant difference to my eye.
It is as drastic a change when you first saw a high definition versus standard definition. You may disagree, but to my eyes a high refresh screen is something that apple needed, and i am so very happy that it’s finally here so this update alone made the decision to go pro a no-brainer. For for me, i care that much about screens and if you’ve never used like, i said, you’ve never used it on android. It’S an improvement that i think you didn’t know that you needed alright.
So that’s the screen. Everything else on the screen looks really good and the things you’d expect colors are bright and vibrant apple does an absolutely amazing job with their color science, making sure that the blacks are true black. Of course it’s oled just giving you one of the best screen experiences going and it’s nice to have to knock points for the refresh thing here. I would have liked to have had an always on display here but, like i said, apple’s gon na apple. So you know it’s always next year, all right, so cameras uh again on the surface. Aside from some extra chunk, they don’t seem like a huge upgrade after all the same lenses same 12 megapixel wide, the ultra wide, the telephoto, but like the screen, it’s not the whole story, so i don’t usually do this, but let’s start with video iphones are always Awesome at video, but it is absolutely just bonkers this time around how good video is, assuming that you are shooting on the standard wide angle – and it looks incredible here – even low light looks stunning in every setting.
It always looked good in regular light with a lot of sun coming. It always looked great when you’re in a studio like this with lights all around, but it started to look not great when you got to like dusk or you’re trying to shoot at night. It just became a mess noisy and the hdr got all wacky.
It just didn’t. Look as good as everything else. The low light to my eye now looks as good as me, shooting outside at noon, with a lot of sun, not so true, if you’re shooting with the zoom or the ultra wide, especially trying to shoot in the low light, but doesn’t matter i mean just look At the video it looks that good, so cinematic mode is being built as sort of the feature on the iphone 13 and 13 pro um. That are a big reason for people to upgrade and consider upgrading and the best way to explain it is think of it. Like portrait mode for for video, so in theory it should rack focus, and that means sort of change. The focus from one thing to the next and use ai to determine what should be in focus and what should be blurred and like the og portrait mode. It’S got a ways to go. I do like that. I completely change the focus points after the fact, all that data is saved on the video and that’s awesome, but like a middle child uh, it’s trying too hard. So you know the weird blur you get on the edge of people’s kind of heads when you take a portrait mode shot. It’S sometimes there um that’s here now in video two and it’s more glaring and more apparent in in video.
Don’T even think about using this. In low light either you can see what it looks like here: it’s not quite ready in normal light or highlight when it works, though it is very cool. It’S neat, like i said it’s a few years away from being something truly useful and wonderful, but i do think eventually we will get there plus the fact that it’s locked to 1080 at 30fps, it’s clearly not made for filmmakers, like apple, was trying to lead you To believe in their keynote, also we’re supposed to get pro res video um on these phones, which would be awesome. Assuming you have the higher storage size, not here at launch, which is uh a big bummer and that’s definitely a pro feature that will let people that are creators use their phones to film in a format that we’re already using at least we are here so hopefully That comes at a later date.
We don’t know when that will be so we’re gon na get back to all of the 13 pro things in a second uh. But you know what your iphone 13 pro is not going to have a charger in the box enter this guy. This tiny, almost little nothing thing is a 20 watt charger from the folks at anchor, and it’s called the nano pro so this little guy, the anchor nano pro can charge your iphone 13 or iphone 13 pro to about 50 in just 25 minutes. That is three times faster than apple’s original 5 watt charger. It’S also 45 smaller than apple’s stock charger. But don’t let that tiny size fool you.
This thing pulls up to 20 watts. It also includes anker’s, pretty awesome patented active shield technology. It’S going to combine dynamic temperature sensors and actively monitor the temperatures and a power tuner chip which are going to adjust the current for the fastest and, most importantly, safest, charge comes in four awesome: colors, glacier blue cool lavender, arctic white and black ice, obviously with anker’s Patented power iq 3.0 tech, it’s gon na work flawlessly with your brand new iphone uh, but it’ll also work flawlessly with pretty much any smart tech.
You have thanks to that handy, usb type c port. If you wan na pick up one of the anchor nano pros for yourself link to them down below all right so camera time, like still camera time, let’s start the way. I always do because i love this a blind test with the regular wide angle, with a 12 pro and a 13 pro take a look at these suckers.
How do the color reproduction look? How do highlights look? How do colors look on the walls? Can you tell which one was which i knew which phone took both and to my eye they looked nearly uh identical, but now look at these shots with low light. Look at things like shadow reproduction. Look at things like noise. That narrowly would not be so good in low light.
You could see a ginormous difference here again way: less noise way better with shadows and they’re, not over brightening. The dark, like you, got with the 12 pro, if there’s one area that has gotten just immensely better across the board, with the 13 pro uh, it is low light. It is shocking how good this has gotten, so all that stuff had to do with the wide angle, the main shooter, but all the cameras are better so back to that wide angle, it’s better because pixel sizes are bigger. Now it’s actually 1.9 microns. It also has an f 1.5 aperture, meaning you can take in a ton of light, which obviously you saw with those examples, but the best thing about it was that it did not have to switch into night mode, nearly as often which is great.
I did not like night mode all that much because i couldn’t keep my hand that stable and always have a tripod, which is cool when it does go into night mode. To my test it seemed like 30 faster. It seemed way way faster than before, which is awesome so another new thing and don’t laugh because i laughed before i started testing this photo profiles and to me that struck me as filters apple added filters, things that we’ve had for a long long time.
The more i played with this, the more i checked it out, the more i read about it, the more research i did, the more videos i watched on people talking about uh photo profiles. It seems that it is not filters. This has become kind of like a chameleon style phone.
It used to be, if you will like the oversaturated look of pictures like brighter colors. Samsung was the way to go. If you liked flatter images, iphone was an awesome way to go.
If you like sort of true to life colors, then the pixel was an amazing way to go with other phones kind of filtering in with photo profiles. You can mimic any of those, and it’s not just like putting a uniform thing across a photo like a filter. Does actually is using ai and machine learning to do different things depending on what’s in the shot, so for skin tones for trees for sky and clouds, it does sort of different things dynamically, and if you dial in a profile that you like you can set that As your default um, so you can get that high contrasty pictures that you can get with a samsung phone. I tend to really like that, but i know that that’s not for everybody, but you’ve got a lot of choice now what you can do with these cameras? Uh and it’s absolutely awesome – you may never play with these but know at least that they are there, so the pro models still have zoom uh, it’s three time.
Zoom. Now it’s nice to have they’re not getting into like the space zoom 50 100 times zoom. That samsung is getting into it’s a nice implementation of three times zoom it’s here. When you do digital zoom to like ten ish times, it’s very clear and apparent it works. It’S not great for night mode um, but night mode is supported.
Also, here you can shoot macro shots. You can get really really close to things. I think it’s that feature in this phone that i’m going to try once while i’m testing and then not really ever use again. But if you like to get like pictures of the veins on leaves you’re going to be very excited. I’M not gon na make any other jokes on on why you would use a macro lens, but it’s here if you want it, battery’s something i’m still testing um.
Obviously, phones just came out. Judging by the extra chunk in the phone and processor improvements uh with the a15, i would expect it to be better but to be determined. I rocked 12 pro max for the whole year and i had no problem with battery life. So, even slightly better will be nice.
I probably talked about processor here, it’s the a15. It’S got an extra graphics core this time around uh versus what you get with the regular 13.. I can’t tell any difference: they’re always fast. Processing power has never been an issue for apple, but, as i use it more, i can talk a little bit more about the a15.
I don’t really care how it benchmarks what i care about as an actual use case and like all of these new phones that come out, you don’t really see their power until developers have had generally a good six to eight months, start updating their apps. Take advantage of all of these new things and by that point already rumors of the iphone 14 uh coming out. But processor is not a problem here. So the question that i always had for professionals: is this really a professional phone for me? I think this actually is a pro phone um, i’m very curious to see what prores is going to look like now that performance is going to be when it comes, but being able to sort of use this as a camera.
For me, as a became or an accountant when i’m out and about, is a giant difference and again, these updates are not just about the looks it’s not a design refresh like we got with the iphone 12 line, it’s more subtle. I know a lot of people me included, would love to see a huge design change every year, but that’s just not how apple do how apple do is small incremental changes that ultimately add up to better and better products? I think what we have right now is a culmination of years of sitting on the sidelines with camera technology and getting to a point where cameras have gotten so good, and i am just blown away by how amazing the video fidelity is. This very easily could be used in place of the camera we’re using right now, it’s a relatively expensive black magic ursa. It is a production camera and the iphone does a very adorable job at mimicking. What it can do, it’s powerful, definitely not cheap. I love the storage. Size comes in a terabyte now for a ton of storage. If you are going to shoot in progress when that comes out, i love the 13 pro max.
That’S going to be my phone of choice for a while and if you are a professional, i think it’s gon na be a really good choice for you as well. .