The iPhone 13 has arrived, but do you need it. It is clearly an improvement on iPhone 12 and the four variants offer amazing camera capability. Is it worth the upgrade?
Apple upgrades the iPhone year after year, but its capabilities have surpassed what most users need. For many, there is little need for the annual iPhone upgrade ritual
Certainly, the four new iPhone 13 models are better phones than their iPhone 12 predecessors, and better buys. iPhone 13 costs the same as iPhone 12 did a year ago, but you get new cameras, longer battery life, faster processing, and more storage, with the smallest option now 128GB, not 64GB as last year. Premium models even offer one Terabyte of storage.
As great as the improvements are, they probably aren’t enough to make you upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 13 because the iPhone 12 is already a stellar handset – unless you are serious about the new photographic features.
However, if you have an ailing old iPhone, or are parachuting from Android to Apple, the iPhone 13 is the best bang that Apple offers for your buck.
Lowlight photography with an iPhone 13.
An upgrade would be warranted had the new handsets offered features we’d been hanging out for years to have. For example, if iPhone 13 offered 50x optical zoom camera capability. Phones just don’t do that, with Apple going as far as 3x optical on premium units this year.
An upgrade from iPhone 12 to 13 would have been warranted if iPhone 13 offered the ultrafast millimetre wave (mmWave) 5G capability being developed for stadiums and other crowded public areas, something worthwhile as Australia comes out of lockdown, but Apple again this year won’t offer mmWave in Australia.
In 2021, the iPhone does offer clever features such as cinematic mode and photographic style that are worth having, but you would not have missed them if Apple hadn’t invented them.
Apple is not alone here; many handset makers tempt you with features that are exceptionally clever but weren’t on your original tech feature shopping list.
iPhone 13 Mini and iPhone 13
iPhone 13 & iPhone 13 mini line-up.
The handset line-up in 2021 is virtually the same as last year, two standard models and two premium ones. The standard iPhones – iPhone 13 mini and larger iPhone 13 have 5.4-inch and 6.1-inch brighter OLED super retina displays – Apple’s term for screens with pixels you’ll never see even at close range.
The standard models have new dual camera lenses – a wide camera with a larger f/1.6 aperture for better lower light performance, and optical image stabilisation (OIS) at last. Only the premium iPhone 12 models offered OIS on the wide lens last year.
An ultrawide image shot with an iPhone 13.
The ultrawide lens again offers improved low light performance, lower noise and a 120-degree field of view.
iPhones now have the ability recognise multiple people in a shot and treat the parts of people such as faces, skin and texture clothing differently when composing the final shot.
iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max
iPhone 13 Pro & Pro Max line-up.
The two premium models are the same except for the screen size – 6.1 inches for iPhone 13 Pro and 6.7-inches for Pro Max. The most noticeable differences are the stainless steel band around the side of the handset (which you never see once you slap a case on) and the three significantly larger camera lenses on the back.
You get a wide lens with larger pixels for improved low light photos, an ultra-wide lens with variable focus that snaps macro images and video, and a telephoto lens with 3X optical zoom rather than the standard iPhone 2x.
You can take close-ups a few centimetres away, but not the even closer close-ups offered by the Oppo Reno 2. You are also hampered by lower light when the camera gets really close.
A macro image taken with a premium Apple iPhone 13 handset.
Apple says it will fix the automatic switching between lenses that can occur at macro range.
The display on these premium models has a neat trick. It changes its refresh rate depending on the activity. For fast action gaming it throttles up to 120 Hertz or 120 frames per second but for more passive action it can drop to 10 Hz and save battery. Further, it can detect the frame rate of content and display it at the recorded frame rate or, in the case of streaming services, the delivered frame rate once streaming apps support it.
For cinematographers, Apple will bring the ProRes 422 HQ video codec to the premium iPhones via a software update later this year. They will no longer need to transcode and edit content separately before sharing, it is managed seamlessly.
Cinematic mode
Editing to change the focus in cinematic mode.
This video option is the star attraction of the iPhone 13 range and is available on all four models. Apple promotes it as immersive storytelling, where you have multiple people and maybe some pets in a video sequence. Actually, you can apply it to any video you shoot.
The phone uses machine learning to focus on an active person in the foreground, and blurs the rest. If that person turns towards another person, or that second person appears to be the centre of action, the focus automatically shifts to that second person. If someone else moves into shot, the focus switches to them.
Importantly, if you don’t like the automatic choices that cinematic mode makes, you can change the focus at any point after you shoot with the editor, in iMovie, and later, when it is updated, with Final Cut Pro.
This is possible because when the iPhone shoots in cinematic mode, it creates both a video file and what Apple calls a depth map, which records the image depth details of each frame.
The iPhone doesn’t record this depth map using a depth sensor; the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini don’t even have depth sensors on the back.
Rather, the four models perceive depth in cinematic mode by using two camera lenses, just as we humans do with two eyes.
A widescreen image taken with an iPhone 13 Pro.
You don’t need to be shooting a play or a sequence of people shots to make use of cinematic mode. I shot video in our garden moving from plant to plant, and then in editing mode, retrospectively applied spot focusing for each video sequence. I applied the same technique to a video of some paintings at home.
You may have to edit cinematic video more than you expect because the automatic focusing is sometimes inaccurate. Be aware you can’t pinch-to-zoom while videoing in cinematic and the resolution is invariably 1080p.
Photographic styles
Setting photographic styles in the camera app with iPhone 13
You may habitually like your shots to be warmer than average, more vibrant, richer in contrast, cooler or just the standard fare. All four models of iPhone 13 let you set up your iPhone to take all your photos according to your preference. It’s called photographic styles and is a new option in the camera app.
You don’t have to stick to these five choices. You can use a slider to tweak the tone and warmth in each case. Turn photographic styles on, and the look will be applied to image after image until you change it or toggle the feature off.
Photographic styles makes these changes to various parts of a photo while preserving skin tones at the same time.
Performance
The iPhone 13 models deliver on improved battery life. I performed our regular battery test on all models, playing 1080p video continuously at 50 per cent brightness on light mode. Last year iPhone 12 lasted 12.5 hours, iPhone 12 Pro 16.75 hours.
This year, iPhone 13 mini and iPhone 13 went 14 hours, 35 minutes, iPhone 13 Pro 18 hours 20 minutes and iPhone 13 Pro Max 22 hours and 20 minutes.
The figures show an improved performance.
Computational photography processes each person separately while preserving skin colours.
The same applies with the overall performance of the A15 Bionic chip on iPhone 13 models.
Last year iPhone 12 scored 573393 and iPhone 12 Pro 5584 82 using the AnTuTu performance benchmark.
This year, the AnTuTu scores for the iPhone 13 models were 805846, 851224, 840023 and 837054 for the mini, regular, Pro and Pro Max models respectively.
That is a big step up but probably necessary with computational photography, machine learning and smart HDR an increasing part of iPhone camera performance.
Conclusion
The iPhone 13 is clearly a major improvement on iPhone 12 and the four models offer amazing capability. In 2021, the question is not just what iPhones do, it’s also about how many iPhone features do you really need when selecting an Apple handset.
iPhone 13 goes on sale from Friday September 24 with starting prices of $1199, $1349, $1699 and $1849 for mini, standard, Pro and Pro Max models respectively.
