Before the announcement of the iPhone 12’s in October, I had told myself that I was looking for three things in a new phone. If it had two, it’d be a no-brainer upgrade from my iPhone X, and if it only had one, I’d be hard pressed to choose between upgrading my iPhone and my first generation iPad Pro. However, after the event, there was no USB-C charging port, no 120 HZ refresh rate screen, and TouchID did not return in the power button.
But here I am, Pacific Blue iPhone 12 Pro Max in hand. Why? While my three biggest “wants” were nowhere to be seen, there have been many small changes over the last three years that add up to a very nice upgrade. In the world of phones, three years is a long time, and iPhones have gained smart HDR on their cameras, an extra ultra-wide sensor, brighter displays, bigger batteries, and this year, an all new design. I know many of the features I just mentioned and will talk about were introduced in the XR/XS/XS Max or the 11/Pro/Max, but they are new to me and potentially to others upgrading as well. All of these expectations for a new phone was only tempered by the loss of 3D Touch, which to me is a great tragedy.
The reality of using the phone turned out to be more mild mannered. This is still an iPhone, after all, and a big one at that. There is not a fundamentally different experience from using this phone to an iPhone X, but it feels like everything has been turbo-charged. Screen? Bigger and brighter. Cameras? More and sharper (and can almost see in the dark now). Design? Flat sides that are a joy to hold. Rounding all of that together, I would give the iPhone 12 Pro Max a Settlers of Tech rating of 6: my high expectations were mostly met by the cameras, design, and battery life, but I was let down by the software not utilizing the space better as well as the loss of 3D Touch.
Initial Impressions
In February, I picked up an iPhone 11 Pro Max for the first time, and I remember thinking, “Oh man, I’m not sure if I can go back to a smaller phone now.” After reading early reviews that said the iPhone 12 Pro Max was even larger than that phone, I began to worry that I may have jumped the gun, as many people who liked the size last year found this one to be a boat, even with the flat sides making it easier to hold.
I heartily disagree. I love the way iPhone 12 Pro Max feels in the hand, as big as it is. The flat sides provide very solid holding points, and if it weren’t for the price of screen repairs, I would never put a case on this phone. The stainless steel is also very grippy, much more than aluminum, and those two changes make it one of the most confident holds I’ve had on an iPhone, size and all.
The color is difficult to describe, and even more difficult to photograph. Depending on the lighting, it can fluctuate between a blue-green, to the blue seen in the next two images, all the way to a space grey color. If you ever see one in person, hold up the back of the phone to light and move it around to see how the color morphs with the changing light.
The next most striking design choice of this phone is its camera mound. While cameras have had variations of bumps since the iPhone 6, this is the first phone I know of to have the lenses sticking out even away from the metal protective rings, creating an almost tiered structure. It’s difficult to see in the photo below, but John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a good comparison of the iPhone 12 Pro and Max Camera mounds halfway through the article.
Comparison to the iphone X
As stated initially, I am upgrading to the iPhone 12 Pro Max from an iPhone X, and I want to spend a majority of this review focusing on my experience of that three year jump. I’ll first talk about the experience of using the phone before diving into the cameras. From a performance perspective, I can’t say I noticed any form of a speed boost. That’s not to say the new phones aren’t fast; it’s to point out that even a three year iPhone is speedy. Apple is very good at making phones far faster than they need to be so that they last a long time.
By far the biggest upside to the experience is the battery life. My old phone would last me almost 14 hours if I did hardly anything with it. During a real day, I would be down to 20% by about 3 PM, and I would need to charge as soon as I was home from work. The iPhone 12 Pro Max delivers insane battery life. There has only been two or three times that I have dipped below 20%, and those times were because my phone did not properly sit on the wireless charger the night before. Now, that may seem impressive to begin with, but what you also need to know is that I monitor my sleep with an app called Sleep Cycle, which drains between 15 to 20% of the phone’s battery while it’s running in a typical night if it’s not charging. Most nights when I put my phone on the charger, I have between 50-70% battery remaining. I could probably run this phone for two days straight without thinking about a charger.
Now to hop onto my soap box. 3D Touch was good, and I’m going to miss it dearly. An action I do every day is opening new tabs in Safari, and in the video below, you can see the time it takes between me clicking the icon and the options popping up. With 3D Touch, this was instantaneous – pressing the button into the screen brought up those options like any other press on the Home Screen. Now, that slight delay is infuriating. I knew this time was coming for over a year, but it doesn’t make me miss it any less.
The final area of comparison is the cameras, and I have three shots to help represent the improvements that have made me very excited to use the camera more. First, the iPhone 12 Pro Max handles tough lighting situations far better than the iPhone X. This first shot is shot into direct sunlight, and instantly, the improvements of Smart HDR are evident. The iPhone X produces an unusable photo, but the iPhone 12 Pro Max properly exposes the whole photo. The ground, the sky, the building, and the trees can all be seen and are filled with detail.
The next photo compares portrait mode between the two. Again, I chose to take another already problematic photo to compare how the newest sensors and software to the old. I saw some real improvement in what I have heard described as the “Peter Pan window,” where someone or something has created a window to the background, much like Peter Pan standing with his hands on his hips. If you look at the iPhone X portrait mode image, a number of portions of the street are tack sharp when they should be blurred, and a number of branches also suddenly go from being in focus to extremely blurred. The iPhone 12 Pro Max shot definitely corrects for that Peter Pan window, accurately discerning background from foreground thanks to the LIDAR sensor, and for the most part, the branches also are more accurately in focus. Interestingly, the places where portrait mode lets down on the iPhone 12 Pro Max make the image appear softer, with parts of tree branches appearing blurred around the edges and with no clear definition between the subject and background. Granted, this is a tough shot for portrait mode, but I’m glad to report that there has been considerable improvement over the last three years.
Finally, the selfie camera. I am a rare selfie taker, so apologies if the photos are lacking to selfie enthusiasts. I took these photos at the same time, with one phone stacked on top of the other. Swiping between the photos for a side by side comparison, there have only been minor improvements. Yes, the photo is sharper, and the colors look more natural, with the highlights being more balanced. Nothing between the images blows me away from an image perspective.
However, the camera is also wider now, and it isn’t something I even noticed at first. When you first flip to take a selfie, the camera is roughly the same proportions to the iPhone X’s, but if the phone is rotated, it automatically moves to it’s full focal width.
Cameras
My favorite new features of the iPhone 12 Pro Max is, far and away, the Ultra-Wide camera. I know this is the second iteration of the fun fish-eye, but when my wife bought the iPhone 11 earlier this year, I immediately found it more fun and useful than the 2X lens of the iPhone X. Speaking of the 2X lens, I also find the 2.5X lens much more useful (again) than the 2X of the iPhone X. The 2X never gave me the zoom range that I wanted, and I would find it more useful to take a step closer to make up that optical difference of the lens rather than take a photo with the lens. If I needed to zoom in, I often would be closer to 3X or 5X the wide camera. That little bit of extra space is to me another huge benefit to the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and it’s not available on the 12, 12 Mini, or 12 Pro. The photos below show the full optical range of this phone, from 2.5X to 0.5X.
I like this range of lenses. If the telephoto was more zoomed, there would be fewer opportunities to utilize it. In the photo above, I was standing on an opposite street corner, and a 3X or 5X would be too tight around the building to be a pleasant overall shot. If the Ultrawide were any wider, there would be too much distortion in the photos. With this range, each photo gives a different perspective of the scene. It goes from just the single building, to the homes around it, and finally to the entire intersection. Just because I like these so much, here is a second set of images, but this time I’ve also included the 12X digital zoom photo to get a sense of the full range of photos possible.
The second new feature that I’m enjoying is Night Mode, and I have another three images to show case the functionality. For anyone unfamiliar with it, Night Mode is basically Apple’s term for a long exposure shot, and it automatically turns on when the phone senses that there is not enough light. This first photo was the first moment that I saw it turn on while waiting in my car at a Chick Fil A, and it highlights the main benefits of a long exposure shot. It is just a photo of my shoes, and anything that was visible before gets brighter and (depending on how steady the phone is held) also gains some detail, while the aspects hidden in the shadows begin to emerge.
Next up, I have a more simple night shot of a building, with lots of detail in the brick work. While there is some improvement in the sharpness of the image, the real improvements come from the color and brightness of the roof. The roof goes from blending into the night sky to being separated from the night sky and well defined. To me, even the sky looks better, as it goes from being a black backdrop to holding slight variations depending on where light is shining.
When night mode kicks in, you have the ability to make some minor adjustments. It can be turned off, on auto, or set to 10 seconds. Auto will adjust the time between 1 and 3 seconds, depending on how much additional light is in the scene, and the two Night Mode photos above have been set to auto. The final photo I have to show case night mode is just the sky with the exposure set to 10 seconds. I had read last year about night mode being able to capture the stars in the sky, and when I tried this with auto mode, I could make out maybe a single star. Cranking the exposure to 10 seconds, though, truly makes the sky shine. Each star comes through as a pinpoint of light, hardly smeared from my shaky hands. If I were to try this with my Canon 7D, the stars would be blurry streaks of light, let alone the uniform outlines of the clouds. It is thoroughly impressive to be able to capture that with a phone.
Final thoughts
And… that’s about it. Sure, there are more features to discuss, but for some, such as Dolby Vision, I don’t find myself using them very often if at all, and for others, such as the higher peak brightness of the display, I more notice when that particular area lets me down than the improvement itself. And I think that is the best way to review this phone. There was nothing revolutionary about upgrading — no USB-C, 120 Hz display, or folding design — but over the last three years, Apple has been battling back those minor annoyances to make the phone more pleasant all around to use, in any situation. I don’t begin to think about if my phone screen is bright enough, if the battery is big enough, or if my photo will turn out except for the moments where those things fail. I highlighted a lot of the moments that I saw my iPhone X fail, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max handled those situations with ease, forcing me to find new edge cases to correctly set expectations for next year.
Settlers of Tech 