Welcome to the official Linus Tech Tips obligatory iPhone event video. TLDDR,
you can now get a 5G iPhone 12 for the same price that you got an 11 last year,
but it'll be a smaller one. The iPhone 12 Pro can shoot cinematic footage of
galloping horses better than ever. And the HomePod Mini makes yelling
at your kids from anywhere much easier, even if charging your new iPhone isn't.
Confused? Don't worry, we're going to clear everything right up.
Today, Apple diverged even farther from their singular vision for the iPhone by
announcing not three, but four new iPhones. The iPhone 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro,
and 12 Pro Max. Now, the iPhone 11 and
iPhone XR are still for sale with the 2020 iPhone SE replacing the iPhone 8 at
the bottom of the product lineup. And while this isn't actually the most
populous iPhone lineup ever, Apple was selling eight iPhone models back in
2017, it does have the widest price range of any iPhone lineup, all the way
from $400 to $1,100 starting price.
Apple may not have a monopoly on mobile devices, but you can see they're trying.
With that said, Apple has actually bumped up the price of the mainstream
option, the iPhone 12. At $799, it's $50
more than the iPhone XR's original price and $100 more than last year's iPhone
11. But there's also a new option at the
$699 price point, the iPhone 12 mini, which is in terms of specs identical to
the iPhone 12, but with a tiny 5.4 4 in
display. Now, I would make a bit of a fuss about Apple's confusing naming
scheme here. That that would be totally on brand for me. It would. But in this
case, calling it mini actually kind of makes sense since the 6.1 in iPhone 12
doesn't really qualify as a max phone.
So, you know what? Why don't we all just be grateful that we didn't get an iPhone
11R Plus mini max. Now, as I see it, the
reason for the iPhone 12's price bump can be attributed to two main things.
One, the iPhone 11's LCD has been replaced with a higher resolution OLED
display with twice the number of pixels. And two, the addition of 5G, which can
also be found throughout the entire lineup of new products. Like, sure, it's
also thinner and lighter. It's got this super strong ceramic shield on the
glass, and it's got a slightly redesigned wide-angle camera with an
f/1.6 six aperture, but those are all upgrades that I would more or less
expect in the new iPhone. Apple also
brought back MagSafe as a way for these new iPhones to magnetically lock onto a
wireless charger or other accessory, which is cool. Um, was anyone asking for
this though? Last time I checked, what
everyone wanted was MagSafe to come back to MacBooks, but apparently Apple is
really good at compartmentalizing its love for USBC. On MacBooks, it's the
port of the future. On iPhones, oh, hey.
Oh, buddy, you got to slow down. You don't want to rock the ecosystem boat
too much. I can only imagine that the real reason Apple priced the iPhone 12s
like they did was because of the release of some recent Android flagships. I
mean, you can't possibly sell a 6.1 in iPhone 12 for the same price as the 699
Google Pixel 5 or Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan
Edition cuz those are phones for the common folk. And actually, in the case
of the Pixel 5, they are considerably slower, too. The iPhone 12 Pro and Pro
Max, those are not for the commoners.
Because while Apple's iPhone Pro marketing was a bit of a hard sell last
year, I don't think filmmakers dropped their Canons and Sony's on mass to shoot
films on a phone, this year, the Pro moniker might make a bit more sense with
a number of features on the Pros that greatly enhance content creation.
Although, to be clear, I I still think people are going to be shooting on their
Sony's. The 12 Pros can both record 10bit HDR video and are the first phones
to support Dolby Vision HDR video recording at 4K 60fps, meaning that
highlights, shadows, and color should look better than ever, almost as good as
you'll look if you uh shop on ltdstore.com. Then on the photo side,
Apple Pro Raw is the company's new proprietary unprocessed image format
that will let iPhone 12 Pro owners edit color, detail, and dynamic range
natively in the photos app. Both of the Pro models now also have a LAR scanner,
just like this year's iPad Pro, which makes autofocus six times faster than
the iPhone 11 in addition to the benefits of AR content. There are
benefits of AR content. And while the three lens system looks the same as the
iPhone 11 Pro, the wide and telephoto cameras have gotten some subtle
improvements. Interestingly, the 12 Pro Max has a better camera system than the
12 Pro with a 47% larger sensor on the wide camera along with a faster
aperture, which apparently allows for an 87% improvement in low light
performance. Price-wise, this year's Pro models are actually starting at the same
price as last year's, despite the more drastic upgrades.
Wow, such value. Seems like only a matter of time before James Cameron
shoots his next film with the new gold iPhone. It's gold. It's gold. And of
course, the entire lineup of iPhones is powered by the new A14 Bionic, which has
40% more transistors than the vanilla A14 that was found in the recently
unveiled iPad Air, and whose GPU is, according to Apple, 50% more powerful
than any other smartphones, which they showed off by playing League of Legends,
which is good. But hey, how about Crisis
next time? That would be cool. They could probably do it if they dumbed it
down enough. I think they could. Now, none of these iPhones are coming with a
power adapter or earphones in the box, which is
greatish because in theory, everyone already has both of those things. So,
like, yay, protecting the environment except for one small problem. Apple is
including a cable that is a lightning to USB-C charging cord, which is not going
to work with the USB typeA wall wart that Apple went and didn't include
because they figured you already had it. But then they gave you a cable that
doesn't work with it. So, I guess that's why the 12 Pro's price is unchanged
because they know they're going to make an extra 20 bucks from everyone who's buying either a charger or a cable from
the Apple store. Well played, Tim Apple.
Now, we haven't even mentioned the HomePod Mini yet, which is too bad because it's actually kind of cool. It's
got an interesting internal design that puts the Google Nest Mini's single
upward firing driver to absolute shame. And its U1 chip apparently enables some
cool intelligent features like automatically pairing in stereo with
another HomePod mini in the same room. Super cool. And Apple's also adding a
feature called intercom, which lets members of a home group send quick messages not only to other HomePods, but
any Apple device in the group. Nice. The real test of this thing though will be
whether Siri has come far enough to justify getting one of these instead of
a Google Assistant or Alexa enabled speaker. And my guess
is, come on. get real. Like that's not
um anyway, the one bit of bad news from
today is that we didn't get to see the fabled AirPods Pro Studio headphones or
any reference whatsoever to an ARMPowered Mac. And it's still unclear
whether we'll see either of those before the end of the year, which is fine
because honestly 2020 has been a little crazy. And I think we could all just use
a break. Just like you could use a break
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get 10% off today. If you enjoyed this
video, you might also enjoy uh you know, other tech announcement roundups like
ooh our recent AMD one where they announced processors that are uh well,
they put the pro in processor, don't they?