Review: Apple iPhone 12 Pro

The iPhone 12 Pro is the awkward middle child in Apple's 2020 lineup. There are now four new iPhones to choose from (technically five, but I'm not counting the Face ID-less iPhone SE from earlier this year). You can get the same performance on all four phones, and the same screen quality too, now that the cheaper iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Mini have OLED displays and a bumped-up resolution.

Usually, when you spend a little more on an iPhone, you get all of the top-tier features. But even at $1,000, the iPhone 12 Pro doesn't get you all of the best tech. To get the really good stuff—a larger image sensor for brighter low-light images, a telephoto camera that can zoom further, and Apple's "sensor-shift" stabilization tech for better-quality videos—you have to spend $100 more and get the iPhone 12 Pro Max. If you're someone who buys into the Pro line for the advanced features, you'll want to wait until November for the Pro Max model. I haven't tested it yet, but presumably, those upgrades will yield better results than the standard iPhone 12 Pro.

By bringing the better screen down to the iPhone 12, and by saving some of the special camera tricks for the Pro Max, the 6.1-inch iPhone 12 Pro feels a little less special. But there is still a reason to spring for it: If you want some of the Pro perks but don't want to be burdened by a gigantic slab of glass in your pocket (the Max's screen is a whopping 6.7 inches, the biggest iPhone screen ever), then the Pro can do that for you. As a device you will be carrying everywhere, it's more manageable.

This middle child's best feature, and I can't believe I'm about to say this, is lidar. This is the same tech self-driving cars use to instantly map their surroundings and help them navigate busy streets. A lidar scanner lights up the area in front of it with lasers invisible to the naked eye in order to measure depth and to better understand the size and shape of nearby objects. Apple already uses a lidar scanner in the iPad Pro it introduced earlier this year, but the tech was relegated to improving the augmented reality experience. My colleague Lauren Goode said she "wasn't convinced it was the ultimate use case for lidar on a consumer device." She was right.

I couldn't care less about AR in a phone, but the scanner does a lot to improve the camera system on the iPhone 12 Pro. (The Pro Max will also have a lidar scanner.) Here, it enables faster autofocus and the ability to capture portrait photos in Night mode. The latter has been my favorite camera feature to test. I no longer encounter that "Not enough light" message when taking a Portrait mode photo in low light. It doesn't work perfectly every single time, but the results are often well detailed and colorful, with a pleasant "bokeh" blur effect around the subject. If you use Portrait mode extensively, as I do, this is the upgrade you've been waiting for.

This Pro has a triple-camera system just like Pros past: a main camera paired with an ultrawide and zoom, with 12-megapixel sensors behind each lens. It snaps great photos, handling high-contrast scenes well with a balanced exposure, and it hardly ever oversaturates. Night mode now works on all but the zoom camera, and you should use it whenever you can. It dramatically improves photo quality, though it's best still on the main camera.

With the ultrawide, Night mode is better suited for dusk-like scenes, when there's enough light for the camera to absorb without requiring you to hold still for too long and potentially introduce hand shake (and a blurry photo), but the results are still not as impressive as Apple might suggest. Most of my low-light shots came out blotchy, grainy, and sometimes a little blurry. To be fair, the additional cameras on most phones usually underperform after the sun sets.

The camera system here is excellent overall. But I tested it alongside my favorite Android-powered camera at the moment, the one on the Google Pixel 5. It's hard to say one camera is outright better than the other, and that in itself lends Google a lot of credit for its computational photography prowess. Google even introduced a Portrait mode that worked in conjunction with its Night Sight mode this year, and while the iPhone produces slightly sharper details with its own portrait night shots, the Pixel 5 is a very close second.

Video, however, is where Apple excels, offering some smooth-looking stabilization that's rivaled only by Samsung. In the iPhone 12 Pro, you can now shoot HDR videos at 4K and 60 frames per second that are enhanced by Dolby Vision, a software technology that adds greater color depth and dynamic range. You need a display that supports Dolby Vision in order to see all of the enhancements the iPhone brings to these clips, but you can still see a difference between HDR and non-HDR footage side-by-side on a non-Dolby Vision display. It's a small difference, but it is noticeable, and if you're routinely filming on your iPhone, you'll want the extended range of colors afforded. I should note, though, that this HDR video is also available for the cheaper iPhone 12, but that model is restricted to 4K at 30 fps.

The iPhone 12 Pro's other cool photo feature, ProRaw, is not available yet. It's coming soon as a software update to the Pro and Pro Max, so I haven't been able to test it. But as a digital photography enthusiast, I'm looking forward to it. I capture photos in RAW format instead of JPEG with my mirrorless camera, because it gives me more granular control while editing. With the RAW file, I can drastically change the exposure and colors while retaining the same great detail in my shots. ProRAW lets you capture iPhone photos in a RAW format, but it also utilizes Apple's computational photography to produce a better image, giving you an excellent starting point before you edit. (Update: ProRAW is out now, here's what it's like).

The flat edges around these new iPhones are reminiscent of older models, and the lack of curved edges makes the phone easier to grip. I do wish Apple added a matte finish to the edges like it put on the glass on the back—I found myself frequently wiping the edges down because holy fingerprints.

The Pro model is made of stainless steel, a step up from the aluminum build on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Mini. It should give you a little more peace of mind with durability, along with the IP68 water-resistance rating, but Apple also thinks you shouldn't worry about the screen shattering, thanks to its new Ceramic Shield glass. There are ceramic crystals in the glass itself that purportedly make it more durable. Sure. I haven't dropped this phone yet, but I'd still slap a case on just in case (I like this one).

Centered on the glass back is an array of magnets Apple has dubbed MagSafe. The new system lets you attach various things like cases and accessories to the back of the phone, and it's in all the new iPhone 12 models. You can read more about MagSafe and how it works in Lauren Goode's review of the base-model iPhone 12, but I'll point out here that the introduction of a brand-new accessory system—especially one that relies on magnets—surely runs counter to Apple's much-touted efforts to reduce e-waste. Accessory makers in the Made for iPhone program will be able to use the same 100 percent recycled rare-earth components in the magnets as Apple uses, but I imagine there will be many manufacturers that won't. This MagSafe system could produce even more e-waste, especially as people upgrade and toss out older accessories for MagSafe ones.

Speaking of e-waste, Apple also doesn't include a power adapter in the box, just a USB-C to Lightning cable. If you're coming from the iPhone 11 Pro, you can use the adapter you got last year, but if you're upgrading from any other older iPhone—even the iPhone 11—you'll need a new charging adapter. It's a noble attempt to reduce the number of adapters out there, but honestly, Apple, I'd have much preferred to see a USB-C charging port. At least I can then plug in my iPad Pro, MacBook, and iPhone with one cable.

It's hard to find faults with the rest of the iPhone 12 Pro. The display gets very bright, so much so that I've had no trouble reading it outdoors in the bright sunlight this past weekend. I was able to discern the nighttime scenes of Enola Holmes (though I did have to crank the brightness to the max), and the colorful scenes of the English countryside in the film look spectacular. The speakers do the content justice too; they get really loud and don't sound tinny at all.

What's there to say about the A14 Bionic processor powering it all? It's powerful, offering speedy access to apps and running them smoothly. I saw no noticeable throttling after playing games like Genshin Impact for more than an hour, though the phone did get quite warm. I did notice some lag in the camera app in ultra-dark scenes, not when taking a photo, but in the preview. It seems the phone struggles to generate a live preview in those conditions.

It would've been nice to see a screen refresh rate faster than 60 Hz, especially since 90 or 120 Hz has become the norm on flagship Android phones. These higher rates make everything on the screen look and feel more responsive, because the screen is displaying more images per second. Heck, Apple was among the first to debut this "ProMotion" tech for faster screen refreshing in its 2017 iPad Pro. It's bizarre that it hasn't made its way to the iPhone.

But you get 5G instead. Honestly? I'd rather have a higher refresh rate. Don't get me wrong, the promise of faster speeds with 5G is exciting. I'd love to be able to download large files, games, and 4K movies to my phone in seconds rather than minutes. The problem is that 5G is very sparse across the US. It's also complicated, with carriers using different variants of 5G on different parts of the wireless spectrum. We have a guide that breaks it all down.

I don't have a 5G-supported data plan on my AT&T SIM (yes, you will likely need to upgrade your plan to get 5G), so I popped an Apple-provided Verizon SIM into the review phone. I'm able to connect to Verizon's "Nationwide" 5G pretty easily in my area. This is not the same as Verizon's Ultra Wideband 5G, which offers tremendously faster speeds. On Nationwide 5G, the fastest download speed I hit was 119 Mbps with a 26-Mbps upload speed. The rest of my download speed results hovered between 70 to 100 Mbps. It's higher than Verizon's average download speeds in New York City on 4G LTE, but not by much.

So I took a stroll to a nearby Verizon Ultra Wideband 5G node (as indicated by Verizon's own coverage map) to see if I could hit those promised gigabit speeds. It didn't work. I stood across the street from the node, and my speeds were lower than what I hit on the carrier's Nationwide 5G spectrum. I'm chalking it up to there being some kind of issue with this node (Update: Verizon says that node was down, but it's now been "repaired"), but even if it did work, it wouldn't have changed much. This type of millimeter-wave 5G offers superfast speeds but only works for about a block, and (at the moment) it puts you back on 4G when you enter a nearby building.

Give 5G another year or two and we'll start seeing more coverage, and perhaps more apps and services that make use of those faster speeds. It's nice that it's included here, but as we say in our Best Android Phones guide, don't buy this phone just because it has 5G. Do not believe the hype. You're not going to see a dramatic difference over your current 4G iPhone.

Finally, there's battery life. It's solid, getting me through a full day of average to heavy use (around five to six hours of screen-on time), and not much more. I'd be happier with a slightly thicker phone if it meant comfortably extending battery life to a day and a half, but I suppose that's why the iPhone 12 Pro Max exists. It's the iPhone to get if you need your phone to run longer than a day.

Do you see my conundrum? Lidar for nighttime portrait-mode photos, the promise of ProRAW, a stainless steel frame, and that additional 2X zoom camera are among the biggest reasons to go for the iPhone 12 Pro over the standard iPhone 12. Are those features worth the $200 more? I find the iPhone 12 Pro Max to be a far more exciting premise with its camera-specific upgrades, and it's only $100 more than the regular Pro.

Then you need to carry a Big Phone around. Considering Apple debuted an iPhone 12 Mini this year, that must mean a lot of people don't want a Big Phone, right? It's just strange knowing that with the iPhone 12 Pro, you're not quite getting the best iPhone.