iPhone 13 Pro Max

 

iPhone 13 Pro Max

I promise I’m not going to put this in the title because it's clickbaity and annoying but I have officially taken my personal sum out of this and switched to this the 13 pro max I’ve done it gone to the dark side the thing is I always carried an iPhone 12 pro max around with me and as you can see I’ve taken very good care of it this was actually from accidentally dropping an iPad on it don't ask but I haven't fully switched to an iPhone for a few years but with a 120-hertz screen finally on an iPhone as well as longer battery life and a whole host of camera upgrades this is a proper step up even if it does feel a bit like a 12 s max rather than a 13 but historically the s models have always been the one to get it's where apple refines and perfects the formula so is this actually worth the upgrade are these new features genuinely worth having or just a bit well gimmicky also is now a good time to jump ship from android and if you are tempted to buy an the iPhone 13 is the pro max worth paying top dollar for and actually, I’m not sure if you want to tell but this entire video so far and for the rest of it is being shot on the iPhone 13. this is the new cinematic mode which we'll dive into in a second but hopefully you get an idea of how it looks what do you reckon okay so really there are three big upgrades with the new pro and pro max which by the way are exactly the same this year there are no exclusive features on the pro max it just comes down to which size you prefer 6.1 or 6.7 and if you want a very good or exceptional battery life in fact in a very unhappy like to move these 13s are actually a little bit thicker but they have squeezed in a bigger battery and combined with a more efficient a15 chip and also the dynamic refresh rate we get as a result of the new top panel battery life is ridiculously good I would go as far as to say that this has the best battery on any mainstream phone to give you an idea I’ve been using both the pro and the pro max as similarly as possible this week and on average by the end of a normal day around 10 45 11 pm I still have a good 40 left on the pro max and about 28 on the pro which is still very impressive but this pro max is just in another league we're talking 10 hours of screen on time and so two full days of regular use is easily achievable it's the only phone I’ve ever properly used where i don't have any battery anxiety at all and in a quick side by side test with the 11 pro max and the 12 pro max after three hours of YouTube gaming social media benchmarks we're down to 70 67 and 73 respectively but I would suggest giving my good friend arum’s video a watch as he's posted a great battery rundown test with all the latest iPhone and I will leave a link below so hats off to apple they made a slightly thinner phone and with the a15 The chip they kind of prioritize efficiency over ridiculous games and performance which perhaps we don't need although we'll come to the fact that it is still quite a bit faster and as a result we have two of the longest lasting phones you can buy now if they could just turn their attention to faster charging because while we do have the magnate ecosystem for pretty quick wireless charging in terms of the wired lightning port it's 20 watts and even then you have to buy the charger yourself the privilege of charging it at a fairly slow pace coming from an android phone pretty much any modern android phone it does feel painfully slow to charge let's talk about this screen because it's 200 minutes brighter than before now up to a thousand nits and it is noticeably brighter than the 800 nits we get on last year's iPhone and also on the new 13 and 13 mini the notch is 20 smaller but only horizontally and they don't even utilize that extra space right now there's still no battery indicators so that's not really a big upgrade but the big one is promotion we finally get an adaptive 120 hertz refresh rate on an iPhone and from the moment you turn it on for the first time you definitely notice how much smoother everything is i must admit it is partly why i didn't end up switching to the 12 pro max back of this thing it's so sad um because coming from an android phone with a high refresh screen on an iphone that's 60 hertz with these pretty long animation times it did feel a bit sluggish to me so while this may not be a huge deal for the average joe buying an iphone if you are a bit more of a techie then you would definitely appreciate this 120 hertz but if you're not a fan for whatever reason in the accessibility settings you can turn it off and limit it to 60 hertz but crucially it is still dynamic so you're getting 10 to 60 rather than 10 to 120 hertz the only downside is there aren't really any games that properly support 120hz right now on iphone because while the ipad pro has a few dozen tactical for example it's still 60 hertz on the iphone but hopefully in a few months as developers update their games we'll have a few more to play with now powering everything we have the new a15 bionic chip along with six gigs of ram and in all models of the 13 it is a six core cpu but only in the pro and pro max do we get a slightly beefier five core gnu versus four cores on the 13 and 13 mini which does seem to make a difference in benchmarks actually and will no doubt come in handy when games do start supporting 120 and are more demanding but if we then bring in the 11 and 12 pro max you can see a pretty significant uptick in graphics performance even over just the last couple of years what's interesting though is that a lot of people will then think well what's the point of the a15 do i really need that extra performance when you know these still play everything flawlessly well that's kind of the point the longevity of it because you know that getting the latest iphone in this case with the a15 will comfortably last you three four five years from now which is not something you can say about the android competition you've got that future proofing built in so not only is this the longest lasting phone you can buy in terms of battery life it is also the most powerful but does it have the best camera well while it is very subjective and you don't have as many options as some android rifles as a whole photos selfies videos the up i would say yeah this is the best i can't wait to see what Google does with the pixel 6 and 6 pro definitely make sure you've subscribed because I’ll be doing a big comparison uh between this the s59 ultra and the pixel but while i don't necessarily agree with apple that this is the biggest leap ever for the cameras on an iphone it's certainly a step up with bigger sensors and wider apertures across the board and also a couple of very interesting new features and these photography styles are a definite highlight and you get five different style options now these aren't filters that just holistically apply over the whole image apple's semantic rendering as they call it make specific adjustments so you still have natural skin tones but it does give you a lot more flexibility to make your iphone photos look more like something you get from maybe a Samsung or Google phone with rich contrast and cool options and then you can go further adjusting each style's tone and warmth which gives it a new name i did ask apple if this would be coming to the 12 series but they wouldn't say it is very cool though and it works with both front and back cameras and all three lenses speaking of lenses the telephoto is now a three times optical zoom up from 2.5 from the 12 pro max and it's fantastic for portraits but for longer zooms well it can't compete with the periscope lens on the s21 ultra which has genuinely usable shots up to 30 times although somehow apple is the only one who can make the transition between lenses this smooth the s21 and frankly all android phones always feel leggy when switching between them the ultra-wide lens now has a f 1.8 aperture versus 2.4 last year and also now has auto focus pixels so it doubles as a macro lens which means you can get up to two centimeters from your subject for some fascinating or creepy or just bizarre looking shots and then of course we have the lidar sensor although apple didn't mention this once during their launch event so nothing really new here but it does continue to come in handy although pretty much just for the more accurate measuring the biggest surprise though aside from that incredible battery life is that this cinematic mode actually works really well i didn't think it would so on a basic level you get a nice bokeh effect so your subject stands out but then you can also adjust the aperture as well to make it more or less intense which i would tinker with because by default i find it a bit too strong and artificial looking so i would tone it down a bit but crucially you can change the intensity and also the focal point of the video before during and after you shoot it and also if you think afterwards i don't really like that you can fully turn off cinematic mode on a video you've already shot and as for automatically racking focus between subjects based on face detection and the scene it actually works not flawlessly but much better than I expected and it uses the depth disparity between the multiple lenses and also a bit of machine learning to figure out when to change focus but then when it comes to editing you can only change the focus and aperture in iMovie plus it seems to record in her hybrid log gamma specifically which makes it a little bit trickier to edit with although in final cut pro you can convert it from rec 2020 to rec 709 which then you can export and use normally however there are a couple of compromises because right now it is limited to 1080p 30 although that's not really a problem if you're just using it for tick tock or something and also you can't switch lenses once you start filming to be fair you may actually never want to use cinematic mode if not well the 13 pro max still shoots the best video on a phone in terms of overall quality and stabilization particularly with that sensor shift ois that now all iphone 13s get but we do also have pro res video to look forward to it's not available right now it's coming soon but one thing to bear in mind is only the pro models will get that and also not the base 128 gig storage because apparently shooting in pores on this will use about six gigs of storage per minute so you'll have to get the 256 512 or one terabyte versions of this to eventually get that pores support but what about low light shots well if we bring in the 12 pro max again for comparison i would have thought this is where we'd see the biggest improvement but actually with these first few examples they're pretty indistinguishable however switching to the ultra-wide lens we do start to see more of a difference it's a little bit sharper and less noisy and it's the same again here in fact just look how noisy that sky is on the 12 pro max plus the castle is just a little bit more evenly exposed on the 13. and actually if we punch up the exposure on both you can see just how much cleaner and more detailed the 13 shot is so the ultra-wide is significantly better and there's also a marked improvement with a telephoto as well you do have to look closely but the 13 pro max retains a lot more of that fine detail switching back to the main lens and the 13 is noticeably brighter here and there's also a more natural color tone across the whole photo the 13 is a touch noisier but there's also a lot more detail here low light video does seem to be broadly similar between them the 13 pro max has maybe slightly fewer artifacts and less noise but there's not much in it and annoyingly they both still suffer from that lens flare which darts around when there’s a strong light source so we're not really seeing much improvement to low light video and I think the only other slightly disappointing aspect of the camera is the front selfie is basically the same as before there are no changes aside from perhaps some minor improvements with the new is on the a15 chip it is still very good and again particularly for video but it can look a bit soft and lacking in detail sometimes this is turning out to be a long video hopefully you're still with me but just quickly I’ve got a few thoughts on my transition from I was gone say I’m transitioning but it sounds kind of dodgy am I switching from android and the s20 ultra to the iphone there's a few good things and a few bad things firstly this is surprisingly big and bulky it's wider than the s21 ultra and once you put a case on it really is a bit of a chunky monkey the regular 13 pro is a lot more comfortable and I kind of wish the 13 pro max was just a little bit smaller i do also kind of miss having a fingerprint reader because while the true depth face id we get with this i would say is the best face unlocking on any phone when you're wearing a mask and just sometimes i kind of wish i still had a fingerprint reader like you do on the s21 also as much as I do love ios the lack of a proper split screen mode for multitasking especially on a phone this big seems like a real missed opportunity i mean ipads have it why can't i have it on the pro max as well and i also do miss the customization of android like being able to speed up animations add launchers or really customize my home screen but on the more positive side the speakers are incredible i love the little alert slider which really is only an option on the one plus phones but the biggest selling point of an iphone is of course that ecosystem I cloud airdrop message face time and even other hardware like the apple watch and air pods for most people this is the biggest reason they wouldn't switch to android honestly i don't think one is better than the other i think they both have their strengths and their weaknesses but the hardware of the 13 pro max in terms of offering the best performance the best battery and arguably the best all-round camera and I’ve just realized i'm holding the wrong one this is the 12 pro max goes to show how similar they look the battery the performance and the camera as a package i think makes this 13 pro max the best phone you can buy right now which you'd hope it might be given that it costs 1100 pounds all I need now is a usbc port perhaps a slightly better selfie camera faster charging and maybe cinematic mode in 4k however while this is gonna be my new everyday phone and i think it's fantastic if my friends or family asked which iphone should they buy i wouldn't recommend the 13 pro max to most of them i would say get the 13 pro it's 100 pounds cheaper it's a lot more comfortable to hold you really do appreciate that smaller size and also while the battery life isn't quite to the same level it's still very good and a step up from last year's so for most of you guys i would recommend getting the 13 pro but what do you reckon are you gone upgrade to a 13 and if so which one let me know in the comments below oh and don't forget of course this entire video was shot on the iphone 13 between the video and the cinematic mode so let us know what you think of the quality excuse me pigeon in the comments below and also whether my cameraman James maybe is out of the job because all i need now is a phone thank you so much for watching guys don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you enjoyed the video and I’ll see you next time right here on the tech chat.