Apple iPhone 12 and 12 Pro: What to expect & review

Now even though we're expecting to see the most newest iPhones apple has ever revealed in one shot they should all have a lot in common so let's start there the tagline for the event is high speed which to me seems like a pretty clear reference to two new developments for this year the a14 Bionic chipset and the company's inevitable embrace of 5g now apple already talked about the a14 a bit when it announced the new iPad air like the fact that it packs a 6 core CPU and a powerful new quad-core GPU we also know that the chipset was developed based on the 5-nanometer process which means a few things for one it should be at least a little more energy efficient than the a13 chipset we got last year but more importantly, Apple was able to cram nearly 12 billion transistors into this thing which is more than three billion more than what we got in the a13 now most of the a14's new transistor budget was used to flush out the neural engine in significant ways which should lead to a big performance boost not just for system-level features like Siri but also for apps that rely on machine learning models and augmented reality with all that said it's still not clear just how much faster this iphone chipset is compared to last year when apple laid out the performance improvements compared to the previous ipad air the a14 sounded pretty beastly but what you have to remember is that those promises of vastly improved cpu and gpu performance only apply when you're comparing the a14 to the two-year-old a12 found in the current iPad air and then there's 5g which was a big point of contention for a while, it seems like Apple was only able to move forward with it after patching things up with Qualcomm and presumably gaining access to their 5g modems.

anyway we're expecting all versions of the iPhone 12 to support 5g but with a caveat, sub 65g networks have a much larger footprint in us and most of the world right now actually so it's no surprise that all of the new iPhones should play nice with those networks we've heard though that the support for a much faster but more geographically limited millimeter-wave 5g networks will be very limited it's possible that only the biggest most premium version of the iPhone 12 will be able to tap into those networks but we'll have to see now about the phones themselves we're expecting to see every version of the iPhone 12 sporting a new kind of squared-off design sort of like the iPhone 5 and the more recent iPad pros and as someone who believed iPhone designs peaked with the iPhone 5 I'm pretty stoked to see where apple landed here if all the rumors hold true you can also expect nice looking OLED screens across the board and potentially smaller notches thanks to improvements made to the true depth camera system these things might all even be a little slimmer than the models they replaced which I will certainly never complain about and we don't think any of these will come with earbuds and USB charging bricks. 

we're expecting to see a surprisingly tiny version of the iPhone 12 that might even be called the iPhone 12 mini because of its 5.4-inch retina display size-wise that would make it a little bigger than the original iPhone SE and a little smaller than the iPhone se released earlier this year which in other words makes this the smallest new iPhone Apple has made in a really long time and that's honestly nice to hear just because there aren't that many great small phones out there rumors suggest this thing will be available with either 64 128 or 256 gigs of storage and two 12 megapixel cameras around the back we're guessing it's another combination of a standard wide and ultra-wide camera the next step up from there is the regular iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 max we're not really sure about the name yet it'll pack all the same components as the smaller iPhone 12 just with a bigger 6.1-inch display which means it's more or less the same size as the iPhone 11.

what's really interesting is that the new iPhone 12 pro is supposedly the same size which I guess I can't be too surprised about the apple in the past has been very candid about the fact that 6.1 inches are the sweet spot for iPhone designs the big difference here is that the 12 pro screen supposedly supports 10-bit color for improved color accuracy and might and I really cannot emphasize the word might enough support a 120hz refresh rate for ultra-smooth scrolling and on-screen motion. 

apart from that we're expecting apple to stick with three rear cameras just like last year's iphone 11 pros but there's a solid chance they'll be joined by a lidar emitter like the one built into this year's ipad pro lidar stands for light detection and ranging and if you've ever heard of these things before it's probably because lidar sensors are crucial for spatial awareness and self-driving cars the most obvious use case in a phone though is for augmented reality this lidar array shoots out light and very quickly measures how fast that light gets reflected back which will help it recognize the space and the objects taking up space in it when you couple that with the a14's new neural engine we could be looking at a renaissance of augmented reality apps but that's really up to developers to decide throw in six gigs of ram in either 64 256 or 512 gigs of storage and we've got a pretty potent little package and then there is the iphone 12 pro max which is obviously the biggest iphone 12 of them all but funny thing is since it supposedly packs a 6.7 inch screen the iphone 12 pro max will likely be the biggest iPhone ever period again expect this thing to pack the same guts and improved screen as the regular iphone 12 pro but with one major difference if any iphone is going to play nice with both sub 6 and millimeter wave 5g networks it's this one and that probably will reflect in the price which is a pretty nice segue because there are a few finer points that we don't have a firm grasp on but two in particular really stand out how much will these phones cost and when will they be released. 

it's time to put on the speculation hat some leaks have suggested that the smallest iPhone 12 could cost as low as 650 dollars for the 64 gig model and if that's true it would be highly unlikely to see the iPhone xl for anything less than 750. meanwhile, the general consensus is that the iPhone 12 pro will start at a thousand dollars just like the iPhone 10 and 11 pro before it but depending on how different it is the iPhone 12 pro max could reach as high as 1200 to start it's also a safe bet that you'll be able to at least pre-order an iPhone 12 on the Friday after the event with units hitting doorsteps later this month but things could be different for the iPhone 12 pro we have seen some claims that they won't even go up for pre-order until November now four new versions of the iPhone sounds like plenty to me but this is Apple we're talking about the pioneer of the one more thing maybe Apple will finally reveal those studio-grade over-the-ear AirPods which I think would finally cease to be pods but whatever or a second-generation homepod which is definitively still a pod we may even get our first glimpse in apple's silicon powered max though honestly, that's probably important enough to get another event of its own.