The iPhone 13 Pro’s cameras are too good to be true

The iPhone is a lot like New Year’s Eve.

You see, every year, people (which is to say, select members of the press and public) work themselves into a frothing mess chasing the dragon that is the annual September iPhone event. Some even go so far as to proclaim it’s going to be “the best iPhone ever!” But we all know it’s never as good as that first time, whatever that first time was for you.

This hype cycle typically reaches a fever pitch shortly before the phone’s unveiling, spanning the likes of TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and every other conceivable media platform in the form of rumors, leaks, renders, and analyst forecasts. The next iPhone might not have a notch! The next iPhone will have a smaller notch! The next iPhone might fold! The next iPhone won’t have any ports! The next iPhone will be an NFT! (OK, I made that last one up.)

And then, “New Year’s Eve” happens and, inevitably, your expectations of an absolutely mind-melting iPhone experience are not met because, well, they were wildly out of proportion with reality in the first place. Turns out, the iPhone will not cure cancer. It will not fly, nor cook, nor do your taxes. But, you still wind up spending a lot of money on it anyway. Because you’re committed to your truth. You’re Team Apple. Besides, it feels good to spend beaucoup bucks on a shiny, new object. If it’s expensive (and the iPhone is!), it must be worth it.

And so the iPhone upgrade cycle goes…

That’s the kind of spot Apple and its adoring public have wedged the iPhone into. We want so badly to believe the iPhone is exciting because once upon a time it was. Hell, it was revolutionary for a period — just ask BlackBerry.

Now, it’s just another phone.

This iPhone — the iPhone 13 Pro, which starts at $999, and its larger sibling, the Pro Max, which starts at $1,099 — won’t transform your life. It has apps just like every Android phone. It has 5G like a lot of recent Android phones. It lets you make voice and video calls, as well as send texts like every Android phone. It has an AI assistant (which still sucks) just like Android phones do. And it has cameras on the front and back so you can exhaustively document your life and smear that manufactured “content” all over social media, just like Android phones.

SEE ALSO: The best travel tripods for those must-have shots

So why should you care about this 13th-generation iPhone — apart from Tim Apple commanding you to believe it’s “the most pro iPhone ever”?

It’s the cameras, dummy. Or, I should say, it’s the cameras for dummies, dummy.

What’s new in the iPhone 13 Pro

Before I walk you through how Apple’s fantastic iPhone 13 Pro cameras nearly ruined my idyllic Sunday with friends, let me first rundown what’s changed in the iPhone 13 Pro.

First off, that notch you all wish would go away is still there but now it’s…smaller, meaning its width has been reduced but it’s actually ever so slightly deeper than before. (Sorry. Maybe next year, kiddos.) Then, there’s its thiccness: This iPhone 13 Pro is one chunky monkey, weighing in at 7.19 ounces (204 grams) — a significant jump from the 12 Pro’s 6.66 ounces (189 grams) — thanks to a beefier battery that promises up to “22 hours of video playback,” which in human speak means it should last until you’re ready for bed. That also means it’s heavy in the hand— helpful if you ever find yourself in need of a blunt weapon late at night.

The iPhone 13 Pro still has the same but brighter 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display as its lesser, “regular” sibling, the iPhone 13, and the iPhone 12 Pro — except now it has ProMotion. No, it didn’t get a promotion, please excuse Apple’s marketing jargon. That nonsense term just means the screen’s refresh rate will ramp up to 120Hz for super-smooth app animations, scrolling, and gaming, depending on your activity. That said, not every app will benefit from this — Apple acknowledged that third-party developers will need to update their apps to take advantage of ProMotion as some are capped at 60Hz. (There’s also a hot fix coming from Apple’s end to address a related iOS bug which limited refresh rates for certain apps.)

Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, the camera bump is now offensively huge to accommodate the bigger sensor for its main wide-angle camera, which now has a larger f/1.5 aperture to let in even more light. Apple claims that imaging upgrade means you’ll get better low-light performance at “up to 2.2x when compared to iPhone 12 Pro, and nearly 1.5x when compared to iPhone 12 Pro Max.” The iPhone 13 Pro’s ultra-wide camera also has a larger f/1.8 aperture for — you guessed it! — more light and boasts the new ability to shoot macro photos (translation: super duper close-up shots). Finally, its telephoto lens, which is unique to the Pro line, now offers up to 3x optical zoom and (a pointless) 15x digital zoom, an improvement over the 12 Pro’s 2x optical zoom and 10x digital zoom.

But really, the only bullet point you need to know when bragging about your new iPhone 13 Pro or Pro Max is that its cameras can do something Apple calls “Cinematic mode.” Simply put, when recording video, you’ll have the option to enable this mode and record 1080p30 video with a shallow depth of field that “intelligently” shifts focus from one subject in the foreground to another in the background. If you watched Apple’s New Year’s Eve Special — sorry — its iPhone event, then you know it went hard on the this-thing-can-be-used-by-professional-filmmakers angle. Neat. But how does it fare with non-Hollywood types? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that.

Visually, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro. In fact, in the dim lighting of my apartment late one night, I mistakenly picked up the 12 Pro thinking it was the newer 13 Pro. That’s how similar they are, with the same flat-edged stainless steel wraparound banding, ceramic shield front, and matte glass back. The loaner unit Apple so very graciously sent me is of the Sierra Blue (whatever that means) variety. It’s basically a pale grey-blue and is really nothing to rave about. It doesn’t matter anyway because, regardless of the colorway you choose, you’ll more than likely cover the phone’s back with some sort of case. Womp womp.

What else? Oh yeah, it’s rated IP68 for water, splash, and dust resistance (but please don’t go diving with this expensive piece of technology in your pocket). It still uses FaceID to unlock (hence the notch) and is MagSafe compatible so you can charge it wirelessly and use an assortment of MagSafe accessories. How fun! Finally, storage for the iPhone 13 Pro now ranges from 128GB on the low end, all the way up to 1TB if you’re the kind of non-discerning photo and video taker who never deletes anything. And last but not least, it has Apple’s own A15 Bionic chip powering the whole affair.

Now, about my Sunday…

It was one of those glorious, sun-soaked, hyper-blue sky, cotton candy clouded, perfectly temperate New York autumn days that was made all the sweeter by the wind’s intermittent butterfly kisses. It was the kind of Sunday that made you want to share smiles with strangers or even give good directions to tourists. It was the kind of Sunday that made you forget the dreaded “p” and “c” words, despite the indoor masking. It was the kind of Sunday that needed to be lived, not documented.

Oh but this iPhone 13 Pro review had other plans for me and my friends.

Because I’m not an asshole, I warned my friends that our planned all-day outing on Governor’s Island here in New York would do double duty as a testing ground for the iPhone 13 Pro’s cameras. I wanted to give them an opt-out as I’m not the type to obsessively share my social life online and bulldoze the privacy of others. My friends aren’t very tech-savvy, so they just shrugged and said OK. What we didn’t know then was that this damned iPhone 13 Pro would become an unofficial fifth friend and an eventual frenemy.

I began the day by shooting some Cinematic mode video of the very, very pretty aquatic-themed carousel in Battery Park. With all the twisting and spinning seashell seats, I figured this would be a good test of the iPhone 13 Pro’s automatic rack focus capabilities. Given all the nonstop motion, it did an admirable job of quickly recognizing the handful of humans whirling about the scene, bringing them into full focus and then quickly blurring them as they shifted position behind another moving seat. I was impressed but also, I had a ferry to catch.

Since I wanted to use the iPhone 13 Pro the way any “normal” would, I didn’t fuss with its settings at the outset of the day and, instead, just snapped shots with abandon. As you can see in the below photos, the ferry was somewhat shaded, but this happened to produce the most true-to-life photos of the day (at least for the subjects inside the boat). There’s no oversaturation evident or unnecessary brightening of the interior scene. In fact, the 13 Pro did an amazing job of highlighting the texture of my friend’s floppy hat. What is apparent, however, is the enhanced greens and reds from the exterior of the boat.

Shortly after disembarking, and whilst en route to Margaritaville, I remembered the iPhone 13 Pro’s brand-spankin’ new macro function. So I did what any good friend would do — I shoved the camera into my friends’ faces real close like.

It’s kind of crazy how, if you zoom in, you can see the fine striations in my friend’s iris and even the miniscule clumps of mascara clinging to her lashes and skin. To be clear, I did nothing more than shove that camera bump close to her eyeball — the iPhone 13 Pro makes the switch to macro mode automatically. In fact, you’ll notice when it happens because there’s a somewhat inelegant and abrupt transition visible on screen.

The same detail can be seen in my other friend’s luscious salt and pepper beard. Facial hair very close up is certainly something to behold. But look at those lips and the reflections on the teeth. It’s wondrous. Who knew mouths could be so pretty?

Now here’s where things started to very quickly get a bit too surreal for the surreal day we were already having, and the iPhone 13 Pro’s cameras become a bit addictive to my friends. The photos I’d snapped were majestic but almost too majestic. It was as if the iPhone 13 Pro’s imaging software wasn’t content with the “10s across the board” style day we were living and had to enhance it to the point of absurdity. Allow me to show you:

C’mon. The day was jaw-dropping in its natural splendor but those saturated colors, those highlights, the contrast — it was all too perfect to the point of seeming blatantly artificial. I guess that hyperrealism makes these shots like-worthy but I’m not a fan. It did, however, have the opposite effect on my friends. In fact, when one of them tried to snap a shot of me with their Android phone, another friend interrupted by saying: “I think you’d look better on the iPhone.”

Ouch.

To further rub salt on that wound, at a later point in the day, another friend playfully tossed their “old” iPhone onto the trail in mock disgust for not taking photos as oh-so-pretty as the iPhone 13 Pro.

The iPhone 13 Pro’s 3x optical zoom is equally impressive as those “plain” wide-angle shots. Just take a look below at my best bud posing against the undeniably artificial blue sky in the first ultrawide shot and then contrast that with the clarity of detail in the 3x telephoto shot. (Yes, he temporarily lost his hat to the wind but it was worth it.) You can even see the fine blonde hairs on his leg highlighted against the sky in that second pic. It’s neat stuff, Apple. Totally fake but neat nonetheless.

Here’s some more zoom action featuring NYC landmarks.

Too much of a good thing

It was about this point in the day that the iPhone 13 Pro turned from friend to foe, usurping any spontaneous moment and replacing it with a staged photo op. My friends began to sour on its supernatural ability to make our day seem like the stuff of fantasy. One of them even urged me to “chuck it into the ocean.” I was tempted but also grossly hooked on its imaging sorcery.

I mean…

And then night fell and we had to vacate the island. Which meant it was time for more photos (wheee!) to test the iPhone 13 Pro’s low-light prowess. Except these nighttime shots didn’t elicit the same gobsmacked response that the sun-drenched, cloyingly sweet, hyperreal ones did. As you can see, there’s a softness that permeates the shots, with visible halos surrounding the sources of light. It was kind of underwhelming and didn’t prompt the same sort of volunteer modeling I’d come to expect from my friends.

At the close of our very full day of fun in the sun, I wondered aloud if any of my friends were interested in actually buying the iPhone 13 Pro. Would the manic glee its photo powers had instilled in them earlier in the day translate into an eventual purchase? In unison, they responded with an emphatic no. I was surprised. The iPhone 13 Pro, they explained, was something you’d want someone else to own and take pictures of you with. It was too expensive and fragile, they said. “But can you send us the pictures?”

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