Apple iPhone 14 Pro review

The iPhone 14 Pro offers the best of Apple's iPhone technology. The wide-angle camera on the back of the iPhone 14 has a larger sensor and faster aperture, and promises 49 percent better low-light performance than the previous model. Apple has slightly expanded the camera software suite to improve low-light performance for all of the phone's cameras.

The iPhone 14 Pro offers the best of Apple’s iPhone technology. This 6.1-inch device is not too big, and its front has been redesigned with the new Dynamic Island and an excellent always-on display. With the faster and more efficient A16 Bionic chip, it continues to be more powerful than its competitors, and the updated camera should satisfy even the most demanding smartphone photographers.

With the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple provided some unexpected surprises: There were plenty of solid rumors that the company would put the front camera and Face ID system in a pill-shaped notch instead of the familiar one, but the new “Dynamic Island” notification system came out of nowhere. And while it became increasingly clear that Apple needed to follow the industry in using larger camera sensors, Apple went even further and rebooted its entire computational photo system as Photonic Engine.

The iPhone 14 Pro, with prices still starting at $999 and going up in the U.S., has a lot of that kind of technology. Apple is late with an always-on display, but it’s much more vibrant than other always-on displays. In the U.S., Apple is fully committed to eSIM, which no one else is doing. There’s a basic satellite connectivity system that’s unlike anything else, but Apple will ship millions of these phones with the service coming online later this year. The new iPhone 14 Pro contains more approaches to big ideas than we’ve seen in an iPhone in a long time.

Design

The most notable design update to the iPhone 14 Pro line is the Dynamic Island, which replaces the notch in previous iPhones and houses the selfie camera and front sensors. It is invisible when navigating through much of the phone’s user interface. Apple has managed to marry hardware and software in such a way that a pill-shaped notch becomes a central part of the operating system’s UX design.

The other notable update to the iPhone 14 Pro over the 13 Pro is the depth of the phone, or more specifically, the depth of the camera. If you have an iPhone 13 Pro case and are hoping it will work with the 14 Pro, you’re out of luck. A slight change in button positioning and a larger camera bump will dash that hope. There are many similarities between the last generation iPhones and the current flagships. The styling is identical at first glance.

The frame is highly polished stainless steel, and the back is frosted glass that repels fingerprints like a champ. The two phones also have the same footprint, so they should take up a similar amount of space in your handbag or pocket. Whether you choose the standard iPhone 14 Pro or the Pro Max, both come in the same colors: deep purple, gold, silver and space black. All new iPhones are IP68 water and dust resistant and feature scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass on the front and back.

Display

Apple has not increased the screen resolution of the iPhone 14 Pro. At 2556 x 1179 pixels, the screen has only slightly more pixels than the iPhone 13 Pro. However, Apple has reinvented an iconic part of the screen, and this Super Retina XDR OLED is designed around a brand new element, the dynamic island. This elongated shape, just a few millimeters from the top of the screen, redefines iPhone iconography.

Forget the static notch. The dynamic island lives up to its name, seemingly changing shape and utility depending on the app being used, notifications displayed, and gestures. It’s as if a physical screen element expands and contracts at will. To be clear, this is not the case. The Dynamic Island is a bit of a misnomer, as it consists of a pill-shaped cutout, a round cutout, a black island around both of them, and some active pixels between the two physical screen cutouts.

Behind these cutouts are a new 12 MP selfie camera with new autofocus capabilities, the IR sensor, and a flood light. These cutouts do not move, do not change shape, and are not covered with pixels, but Apple has managed to combine the physical black of the pixel-free areas, the black color around them, and the active pixels around the dynamic island into a fluid space.

Software

An iPhone is nothing without its platform, and iOS 16, which ships with all iPhone 14 models, is more than just window dressing. It changes some fundamental aspects of the iPhone. Not only do you get new and impressive hardware features, but the iPhone 14 Pro works in new, unexpected and, we think, delightful ways. One of the biggest changes is the new lock screen.

In addition to being able to have multiple customizable lock screens, each of which can be linked to a different focus setting, it features some really cool image segmentation technology. We set up our iPhone 14 Pro with a photo of a person and used image segmentation to have the person’s head partially obscure the clock. When the phone went into “always-on” mode, this feature disappeared and the entire watch was displayed above the person’s head.

Other new features include a search button on the home screen, editable and retrievable text messages, unsubscribe from emails, directions with multiple stops in Maps, live texting of videos, and image segmentation that lets you take the subject out of virtually any photo and put it into apps like Notes and Messages. There are countless changes to discover and use that will undoubtedly make the iPhone 14 Pro even better.

Hardware and Performance

Inside the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple has switched to the A16 Bionic chip, which is not surprising since this happens every year. However, since the iPhone 14 uses the version of the A15 found in the iPhone 13 Pro models, it could be a chip that the iPhone 2023, which is not a Pro model, could also use. The A16 consists of a six-core CPU with two performance and four efficiency cores and a five-core GPU.

This is the same setup as the A15, but with a faster CPU that uses nearly 16 billion transistors and a GPU that has 50% more memory bandwidth. Add to that the 16-core neural engine, which can now perform 17 trillion operations per second, and an advanced image signal processor for managing photos and videos. And as for speed, you may have seen some benchmarks from the day of the event.

Benchmarks performed on the day of an event are done secretly by the participants of the event and should not be considered reliable under these circumstances. In the Geekbench 5 benchmark, the iPhone 13 Pro scored 1,723 and 4,658 in the single and multi-core tests, respectively. The new iPhone 14 Pro managed 1,880 single-core and 5,317 multi-core scores, slightly outperforming the previous generation chip, while both ran iOS 16.

Camera

The big update to the new iPhone 14 Pro’s camera is the 48 MP primary sensor. Paired with a wider than usual 24 mm viewing angle and a lens with f/1.78 aperture and OIS, it all reads well on paper. The ultra-wide-angle camera has a conventional 12 MP with a 13-mm angle of view and an f/2.2 aperture, while the 12-MP telephoto camera manages about three times the zoom equivalent with a 77-mm angle of view, OIS, and a ƒ/2.8 aperture. Apple also uses the inner 12 MP of the 48 MP sensor to create a 2x digital zoom lens, so you can zoom in well-lit environments without loss.

The new, larger sensor is paired with an f/1.78 aperture lens with a 23mm focal length, second-generation optical image stabilization with sensor shift, a seven-element lens, and pixels with 100% sharpness. Apple has also updated the ultra-wide-angle camera, increasing its sensor to 1/2.55 inches, which boasts a resolution of 12 MP and a focal length of 13 mm. It also benefits from 100% of its pixels being focus pixels and has a six-element lens with autofocus.

Battery Life

Apple has not publicly announced the battery capacity of the iPhone 14 Pro. Instead, it promises battery life that is only slightly higher than the iPhone 13 Pro (Apple claims 23 hours of video playback instead of the 13 Pro’s 22 hours). These improvements are likely due to the efficiency of the 4-nanometer A16 Bionic and the new adaptive refresh rate, rather than a larger battery.

Our experience shows that 24 hours of video streaming is possible, but we were also able to drain the battery faster when using the phone outdoors in bright sunlight, where the screen had to be increased to its maximum brightness of 2,000 nits to compensate. The phone doesn’t come with a power adapter, just a USB-C to Lightning cable, but if you buy the dedicated 20W charger, Apple says you can get to 50% in 30 minutes, and we found that claim to be true. However, this is the same as with the iPhone 13 Pro, we still don’t have ultra-fast charging with the iPhone 14 Pro.

Price and Availability

The iPhone 14 Pro, whose prices in the US still start at $999 and go up, has a lot of that going for it. The iPhone 14 Pro’s price in the U.S. starts at the same $1,000 as last year’s model, but in other markets like the U.K. and Europe, there’s a big price increase. In those countries, the starting price for the iPhone 13 Pro was $1,150, while the iPhone 14 Pro now starts at $1,300.

If you’ve already decided on the iPhone 14 Pro, you can find the best price for Apple’s latest flagship in our overview of the best iPhone 14 deals. Prices for the iPhone 14 Pro start at $999 / £1,099 / AU$1,749 for the base 128GB model, with storage options up to 1TB. Unlike most Android phones, there are no options for additional RAM beyond the base of about 6 GB.

Final Words

We hope you like this article on iPhone 14 Pro Review. The iPhone 14 Pro models use Apple’s new A16 Bionic processor, which not only offers the best performance of any iPhone to date, but also contributes to the quality of photos and videos. Note that only the iPhone 14 Pro models get the A16 Bionic, while the standard iPhone 14 models continue to use the A15 Bionic introduced in the iPhone 13 series. We won’t be able to tell the performance difference between the A16 Bionic and the A15 Bionic until benchmark tests, but it’s very likely that the A16 Bionic will outperform the A15 Bionic.

The cameras of the iPhone 14 Pro get the biggest upgrade. The main camera now resolves at 48 megapixels a huge jump from the iPhone 13 Pro’s 12 megapixels. This higher resolution means you can make larger prints or zoom or crop into an image without sacrificing image quality. It also allows for a new 2x zoom. Apple also says that the sensor has been redesigned to capture more light, resulting in even better image quality.

John Brister
John Brister
Meet John Brister, the prolific content writer renowned for his perceptive comparison articles on Bollyinside. Specializing in topics ranging from TVs to headphones and other accessories, John's knack for breaking down intricate details into reader-friendly insights has garnered him a dedicated following. Beyond his literary pursuits, John is an avid swimmer and equally passionate about tracking, often exploring new trails and routes, feeding his sense of adventure.

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The iPhone 14 Pro models use Apple's new A16 Bionic processor, which not only offers the best performance of all previous iPhones, but also contributes to the quality of photos and videos. The cameras of the iPhone 14 Pro receive the biggest upgrade. The main camera now resolves at 48 megapixels a huge leap from the 12 megapixels of the iPhone 13 Pro.Apple iPhone 14 Pro review