After unveiling the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus, Apple moved to showcasing its refreshed Pro range of smartphones today. The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max come with new cameras, a new notch design, and a new chipset. You can also contact emergency services via satellite if you find yourself 'off the grid' but under "light foliage" or in direct view of a satellite. This service will debut in the US and Canada only in November, and will be free for the first two years.
The main visual change you'll notice is
the pill-shaped cutout at the top of the screen. It's smaller than the older
notch, and this was enabled by the fact that the cameras inside are now 30%
smaller. The proximity sensor has also moved under-display to help. Apple of
course couldn't help name the cutout: Dynamic Island is how it's called. Apple
is playing with black pixels around the actual cutout to create some dynamic
effects.
The space around the cutout changes to
allow easier access to controls for ongoing background activities like Maps or
Music or a timer. Third party apps can take advantage of this area too - for
example, you could get sports scores on there.
The display itself, 6.1" on the Pro
and 6.7" on the Pro Max, is now brighter, up to 2,000 nits peak for HDR
content, and has a new controller that supports refresh rates as low as 1Hz.
This means Always-On Display is finally available on an Apple product,
exclusive to these Pro phones. The time, widgets, and Live Activities will be
visible at a glance on this Always-On Display.
The main camera on the back has a
"quad-pixel" sensor, which is a first for Apple but rather old in the
Android world right now. The sensor has 48MP resolution, and by default the
phone will shoot in 12MP. The camera has an f/1.78 aperture, and 1.22μm pixel
size before binning - 2.44μm with binning. You also get second-gen sensor shift
stabilization, as well as full focus pixels.
The high-res main sensor enables a new
intermediary zooming step of 2x in the camera app, by cropping from the middle,
perfect for Portrait Mode shots. There's a new 12MP ultrawide camera in tow,
with large 1.4μm pixels, delivering sharper images with more detail and
improving on macro shots too. Finally, the 3x telephoto camera is still there
and has optical image stabilization.
The A16 Bionic chip is at the heart of the
two devices, and it comes with a six-core CPU, with two performance cores and
four efficiency cores. The CPU overall is billed to be 40% faster than the
competition, while its two high performing cores require 20% less power than
the ones in the A15. The 16-core Neural Engine included in the A16 is capable
of 17 trillion operations per second, while the 5-core GPU comes with 50%
higher memory bandwidth.
The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max
will be offered in space black, silver, gold, and deep purple with
128/256/512GB and 1TB of storage. Pre-orders begin Friday, September 9, with
availability following on September 16. The price in the US has stayed the same
as last year - the iPhone 14 Pro starts at US$ 999, while the iPhone 14 Pro Max
starts at US$ 1,099. Like the cheaper non-Pro iPhone 14 models, these too remove
the SIM tray for the US market, relying on eSIM only.
