iPhone 14 Pro review: Apple's happy island?

iPhone 14 Pro review

With the new iPhone 14 Pro, Apple proves that it has refined once again, both in everyday use and in the most advanced performance, the formula for the perfect smartphone. The Cupertino manufacturer is aware of the potential of its flagship product, and surprisingly demonstrating it is the limited number of innovations compared to the model of the previous year.






This smartphone brings with it better cameras, brighter displays, a new design element and more powerful hardware, while maintaining the practical and familiar form factor that makes it more manageable than its “big brother” iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Design

With the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple is proposing an iconic design language for the third year in a row. To differentiate it from its predecessor is the even larger camera module, which houses the new sensors that we will discuss in the next paragraphs.| ); } Everything else is now familiar: the smartphone features a body with stainless steel bezels and flat edges. The glass back has a matte finish, while on the front we find the Ceramic Shield coating for maximum protection.



The great novelty of this device, located at the top, cannot be missed of the 6.1-inch display: the Dynamic Island, to which I will devote a separate consideration.

Dynamic Island: Let's talk about it!

The notch is dead, long live the notch: the new iPhone 14 Pro replaces the solution presented for the first time five years ago on the iPhone X with the Dynamic Island, a pill-shaped hole in the display which houses the camera and sensor for recognition via FaceID.

For years now, Android smartphones have reduced as much as possible the space "stolen" from the display with drop or pinhole solutions: the Cupertino house does not is only adequate to the times, but it has brought an unexpected twist to this highly anticipated innovation.



Credits: Jordan Palmer - sportsgaming.win Guide The new Dynamic Island of the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max is indeed a interactive element halfway between hardware and software, one s space that expands and contracts showing icons and animations that indicate notifications and system actions.

The features of the Dynamic Island bring new interfaces for the multimedia player, incoming notifications, unlocking the device and in general many activities that can be performed in the background while doing other things. In the same way, the support of third-party apps will be enriched more and more over the next few months: at launch, applications such as Spotify, Amazon and YouTube Music are already fully compatible with Dynamic Island.



Credits: Jordan Palmer - sportsgaming.win Guide At least until the technologies for under-display cameras are refined, we will have to get used to living with the presence of holes and gaps in the smartphone display. Dynamic Island is not just the swan song of a product design that is now at the end of its life cycle, but a clever way of solving the problem: literally going around it.

Sure, viewing content multimedia may be affected on some occasions, but how much this annoys the user is a purely personal matter.

Display

The new iPhone 14 Pro, with its 6.1-inch panel, it is brighter and more defined than ever. Even in this context, Apple could only perfect an already excellent component, first of all proposing the ProMotion technology that brings the adaptive frequency of the display from 1 to 120Hz (against the 10-120Hz of the iPhone 13 Pro) for greater optimization of energy consumption.





Compared to the iPhone 13 Pro, the display of the new iPhone 14 Pro improves on two fronts. First of all, we find an even brighter color rendering, which reaches a Delta-E value of 0.25 against the previous generation's score of 0.27.

The company instead declares 2000 nits of maximum brightness, a value that we have not been able to get close to even with professional measuring instruments: nevertheless, in the daily experience of use, the iPhone 14 Pro has an almost perfect visibility even in bright sunlight.

The other innovation of the iPhone 14 Pro is the always-on display, a feature well known to Android users that only arrives today for the first time on Apple devices. Thanks to the technology that allows the display to reach 1Hz, the device can show information and notifications on the screen while consuming a minimum amount of energy.

The display of the iPhone 14 Pro satisfies in all respects: Apple has all the cards on the table to continue giving Samsung a hard time, as it will have to get to work to compete with its Galaxy S23 series early next year.

iPhone 14 Pro: photos and video

The new iPhone 14 Pro brings with it some updates to the photographic sector, first of all the new 48MP main sensor which normally uses quad-pixel binning for 12MP images but processed using much more information and light.





Even this technology is not the prerogative of Apple smartphones, but goes hand in hand with a great advance in computational photography. Photonic Engine is an evolution of the Deep Fusion mode that makes the shots of the iPhone 14 range (including selfies) even more brilliant and detailed in any light condition.

In practice, thanks to the quad-pixel technology iPhone 14 Pro can shoot images with 12MP final resolution, but with a higher level of detail thanks to the information processed by the new sensor. Apple claims it can take 2x zoom photography without loss of quality, however it is a cutout on the 48MP main sensor that certainly cannot lead to the same results that can be achieved with the full sensor and binning.

Credits: Jordan Palmer - sportsgaming.win Guide

The 12MP ultrawide sensor also improves, which doubles in size compared to the iPhone 13 Pro, while the telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom does not change. On the latter front, the main Android competitor, the Google Pixel 6 Pro, which reaches 4X optical zoom, earns points.

Credits: Jordan Palmer - sportsgaming.win Guide

In the road test "The shots of the iPhone 14 Pro proved to be more than satisfactory in all circumstances, both in terms of the range of colors and the level of detail achieved, even in poor lighting conditions.

The photographs taken tend , thanks to the help of the Photonic Engine, to accentuate the lighting of the scenes, making them slightly brighter than reality, without ever being completely overexposed.

The Night mode remains on board, which returns excellent results especially in outdoor shots with lower times than in the past, as well as the Portrait mode.

Credits: Jordan Palmer - sportsgaming.win Guide

It also improves the front sensor, which preserves the True Depth technology and earns standard autofocus as well as access to Photonic Engine.

Even on the video front, Apple reconfirms its domain: iPhone 14 Pro retains the Cinematic mode of the previous generation, now with the possibility of recording up to at 4K 60fps or 4K 30fps in ProRes on models from 256GB and above.

The real novelty, however, is the Action mode, an advanced video stabilization technology to better capture moving subjects. Beyond the most professional uses, Action mode is at its best in recording while on the move.

iPhone 14 Pro and A16 Bionic: performance

For the first time this year Apple has reserved the new chipset for its Pro line-up: unlike the iPhone 14 and 14 Max, both remaining on the A15 Bionic chipset of 2021, the iPhone 14 Pro is equipped with the new A16 Bionic chipset with a new 4 nm production process , 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine.

The improvements that this SoC brings with it are many, such as the display engine dedicated to the always-on function, without forgetting the focus on greater energy efficiency.

iPhone 14 Pro iPhone 13 Pro CPU A16 Bionic A15 Bionic Geekbench 5 (single-core / multicore) 1891/5469 1733/4718 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited (FPS) 74 70 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited (FPS) 19 17 On paper the results of the first Geekbench benchmarks show a real generational leap of the A16 Bionic compared to its predecessor, as well as to its main competitor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

In everyday use it is difficult to find a single flaw in the performance of the iPhone 14 Pro: the new A16 Bionic shines smoothly and lag even in the most demanding processes, from gaming to video editing.





Sure, the average user will not take advantage of this chipset to its fullest potential, but the sense of satisfaction and security that comes with this kind of high-end user experience is bound to win over a very large audience base.

Battery and charging

For iPhone 14 Pro Apple has kept 20W wired charging, plus 15W MagSafe and 7.5W Qi charging. I subjected the new iPhone to a custom battery life test, in which I forced it to endlessly reload a webpage under the mobile network with the display brightness set to 150 nits.





Contrary to what is reported in the rest of this review, on the autonomy front iPhone 14 Pro has unfortunately given far from brilliant results, lagging behind not only (predictably) compared to the Max variant, but also compared to the iPhone 13 Pro under the same conditions. The company declares 10 hours of use with the screen on, with a small improvement compared to the iPhone 13 Pro.

The result of the customized battery test could therefore be attributable to iOS 16: there is the possibility that with next releases the operating system will stabilize to the point of returning the declared values ​​to the device.

Conclusions

With its incredible cameras, splendid display and powerful performance, iPhone 14 Pro is the dream of every demanding Apple user, but the exclusive innovations that differentiate it from the "basic" variant make it attractive to a much wider audience than professionals.

The new cameras, the A16 Bionic processor and the Dynamic Island, associated with premium materials and a form factor that is still familiar and easy to handle, make it a true champion.

Apple's innovations in the new iPhone 14 Pro have a high price, at least on the Italian market. Compared to the iPhone 13 Pro we will have to pay well 150 euros more for the basic 128GB variant, with an official list price of 1339.00 euros which further increases for the 256GB, 512GB and 1TB variants which respectively touch 1469.00 euros. , € 1729.00 and € 1989.00.