IPhone 13 Pro review - a fantastic evolution

iOS, however, is primarily a package of perfectly integrated services. ICloud cloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Handoff, Apple TV +, Apple Music, iCloud Drive, Apple Arcade - it's a complete ecosystem that works the better the more Apple hardware we have, and at the same time does not exclude connection to Google and Microsoft services.

Among the novelties that have recently appeared as part of the so-called iCloud +, worth mentioning iCloud private upload, hide my email address or custom email domain. The first encrypts network traffic from the browser and redirects connections through two proxies, masking (optionally) both the IP address and preventing ISP from monitoring the traffic.

The second one is responsible for creating temporary e-mail addresses, useful when registering on online services - if a significant amount of spam starts to come to us, we will eliminate the address without any problem, without affecting the main mailbox. And thanks to a non-standard domain, we can connect iCloud e-mail to our own address, purchased from an external provider. Some services are still in beta testing, but we can turn them on anyway if we pay for an iCloud subscription.

Communication

Apple iPhone 13 Pro can work on 5G and LTE-A networks. It is also a dual SIM device, although it has a slot for only one nano-sized card - the other must be implemented as an eSIM. The iPhone 13 Pro can also have BOTH cards in the eSIM version and several cellular plans from different operators have been programmed for this, freely switchable in the settings. The iPhone 13 Pro supports VoLTE in Orange FLEX, and VoWiFi after turning on in the settings. In both modes, the codec EVS (also known as HD Voice +) is available in the super-wideband version, which guarantees very high sound quality.

In LTE-A performance tests, the maximum transfers were close to 250 Mbps - only Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 achieved a similar transfer in my area. Unfortunately, we will have to wait for the 5G test, because Orange has the nearest 5G station at a distance of ~ 100 km from my home.

The Apple iPhone 13 Pro has a WiFi 6 chip, capable of working with channels up to 80 MHz wide. The maximum transfer, obtained during the connection with Funbox 6, reached 800 MB / s - this is a lot, but also clearly less than devices capable of using the 160 MHz channel provided for in 802.11ax specification.

Location on the iPhone 13 Pro is possible using the A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS and QZSS satellite systems. I have no reason to complain about the accuracy - the differences between the map and the recorded track are usually minimal.

The iPhone 13 Pro also has an Ultra Wideband short-haul communication system, used to communicate with some accessories and help locate devices.

The last point I would like to make here is that of the Lightning jack. I am not in favor of replacing it with USB-C, which is mechanically more prone to damage and difficult to clean if debris collects there. However, the fact that Apple used in the iPhone 13 Pro Lightning working with USB 2.0 instead of 3.0 (and that this is possible was proved by Apple in the iPad Pro from 2015) is difficult to accept, especially when we are going to enter the ProRes codec - files encoded with it they will be very large and the transfer over a slow link will be lengthy.

Performance

The iPhone 13 Pro is equipped with the new Apple A15 Bionic SoC with two high-performance Avalanche CPU cores and four fuel-efficient Blizzard cores. The chip also includes a 5-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. The smartphone offers 6 GB of RAM and communicates with the disk memory using NVMe. What is the performance of such a team?

The test results leave no doubt - there is only one king. The A15 chip is clearly faster than the Snapdragon 888, and there are no problems with draining the battery and high operating temperatures. The differences in the Geekbench Compute test, in which the A15 turned out to be three times faster than the Snapdragon 888, and in the GPU test, are particularly drastic - the difference reaches 100% there. In stress tests, you can see a drop in power due to throttling - but a throttled A15 GPU still scores better than the cool Adreno 660.

As in the iPad mini 2021 test, the test results vary drastically depending on the test program, so they should be treated rather as a curiosity. Nevertheless, the comparison between the iPhone 13 Pro and the iPad mini is interesting: it is clear here that the smartphone has much more efficient storage than the tablet - possibly also a question of greater capacity.

Audio

The iPhone 13 Pro doesn't have a headphone jack, and there's no built-in DAC at all for this - it relies on external devices. There is also no audio adapter in the set, you need to buy it separately, fortunately the company one costs only 45 zlotys and is quite decent at the same time, offering 24 bit / 48 kHz sound. To fully use the potential of Hi-Res Audio from Apple Music, however, you need a device of a higher class than Apple offers.

However, when it comes to speakers, the iPhone 13 Pro works great. The sound is loud, clear, and has a lot of treble and bass. Apple supports surround sound on the speakers and, despite the small base, the effect is quite convincing. This is all active by default, and Apple gives almost no control over the audio features to the user.

When working with wireless headphones, the iPhone 13 Pro allows the use of SBC and AAC codecs - the latter of a much higher quality than in Android devices. However, there is still no high bit rate codec.

Biometrics

The iPhone 13 Pro, like its predecessors, relies entirely on facial recognition, or FaceID. It is based on a very detailed 3D scan made by the TrueDepth camera hidden in the notch. In addition to the optical image, it also uses an infrared scan, with the use of a grid of points projected onto the face.

The system is fast, very accurate, it does not allow you to unlock if you do not look in the direction of the phone and, above all, it is widely recognized by banking institutions and administration as safe enough to be used to authorize banking transactions or to log into systems official. He also learns, so he won't have any problems if we put on glasses or dress in a non-standard way - he was only overcome by the necessity to wear protective masks.

FaceID detects the presence of the mask on and does not try to force the face to match the pattern, going straight to authorization with a code or (recently) authorization with an unlocked Apple Watch, if the user has it, of course. It works very efficiently, but it is worth remembering that the phone unlocked with the watch will require additional authorization during payment - this is not an equivalent of FaceID, but a simplification.

Battery, reactor or something :)

iPhone 13 Pro is equipped with a 3095 mAh (12.11 Wh) lithium-polymer battery. In fact, it is not a lot, in the Android world the standard is 4500-5000 mAh, and yet ... working time is a strong point of the device. After almost three weeks from the first start and the end of the background scans always performed in the first days, a fully charged battery lasts for two days of work, with a total SoT of 6-8 hours. As of this writing, the battery status is 63% and it's been almost a day since I unplugged the phone from the charger.

When it comes to charging, the iPhone 13 Pro will certainly not break any records - the officially stated maximum power is 20 W in the Power Delivery 2.0 standard and this is the charger that Apple recommends for its smartphone. In fact, it can run a bit faster at the start of the process - up to 23W if the power supply is able to deliver more power.

iPhone 13 Pro also supports wireless charging. The maximum power is 7.5 W in the case of typical devices compatible with Qi (I tested with Green Cell AirJuice), while with the help of Apple MagSafe, charging is performed with a capacity of up to 15 W.

By default, refilling energy (regardless of the method) is adaptive, i.e. the battery is filled to 80% with maximum efficiency, and the rest is "per hour" - the iPhone learns our habits to make the battery ready when we usually disconnect the smartphone from power.

The camera

In the iPhone 13 Pro, a set of three 12 Mpix cameras is used again for photography. Under the hood, however, there have been a lot of changes compared to last year's model. Let's recall what we have at our disposal:

The main wide-angle camera with a focal length of 26 mm has a new, larger matrix, stabilized and a brighter f / 1.5 lens. The second camera finally got a real telephoto lens with a focal length of 77 mm (but with a slightly lower brightness, f / 2.8), instead of the standard 52 mm. The ultra-wide angle lens has significantly improved in brightness (f / 1.8), it also has autofocus and the ability to work as a unit for macro photography.

The quality of the photos is generally good, and from the main camera even very good. White balance is correct and its consistency is maintained between all cameras. Smart HDR is always active, but not as aggressive anymore. Burnouts occur more often, but it must be admitted that the tonal reliability of frames is usually better - there is no longer a situation where some image elements are too dark.

The detail of the photos is good if we stick to the physical focal lengths - values ​​above x3 are much weaker, than poverty can be considered a useful x5 zoom, everything above is rather art for art of low value. The photos are quite sharp (sometimes even too much), sometimes you can also see quite aggressive image processing.

The lens with the equivalent of 13 mm FF is sharp in the center, but on the periphery of the frame the quality is clearly worse - a drop in resolution and significant chromatic aberrations are visible. By default, the software corrects strong distortion, typical for such wide structures, but the improvement of geometry takes place with an additional loss of quality, so it is worth checking whether the image will suit us better without correction.

The longest optical focal length is the equivalent of 77 mm for the full frame, introduced instead of the 52 mm standard. In my opinion, this is a very good change - perfectly suited to the needs of the portrait (my favorite mirrorless portrait camera has an almost identical field of view). The optical system is stabilized, qualitatively good, but the extension of the focal length also resulted in a decrease in brightness to f / 2.8 - in worse lighting conditions, greater image noise will be noticeable.

The iPhone 13 Pro also gained the ability to take macro photos. Instead of a separate camera for this purpose (which is traditionally very meager), it uses an ultra-wide-angle lens that is able to focus already at a distance of 2 cm from the camera and interpolation of the resolution using the Neural Engine system.

The effects are generally very encouraging, although microscopic depth of field under these conditions does not make it easy to get a really good photo. A certain disadvantage is the inability to turn on the macro function manually - the iPhone 13 Pro turns it on automatically, after detecting an object in front of the camera - sometimes it works well, and sometimes not, so in the next version of iOS there is to be a switch that allows you to turn off the machine and manually decide on macro mode.

I would like to add here that the developers of the independent Halide application managed to get a similar (and sometimes better) not only on the iPhone 13 Pro, but also on older iPhone models, but Halide uses manual focusing, which works better in many situations.

The camera on the iPhone 13 Pro handles the depth detection necessary to properly blur the background and create a convincing bokeh effect, and this applies to both the front and rear cameras - no wonder, since both are supported by 3D scanners. Hair with small artifacts at the edges is the most problematic. The amount of blur and focus point can be set when editing after taking the photo, there are also additional effects (lightening or darkening the background, etc.).

In the most difficult situations, you can use the independent Focos application, in which you can edit the depth map, correcting the errors of the machine, and you can also interfere with the nature of the blur by simulating various types of lenses.

Interestingly, due to quite large matrices, the cameras of the iPhone 13 Pro are capable of producing a natural bokeh effect resulting from the depth of field. There is nothing to expect blur straight from FF or APS-C cameras with bright lenses, but a useful effect can be achieved and the 26 mm camera fares better here, due to the very high brightness. At 77 mm, the effects are correct, but their aesthetics are worse.

The ability to take photos in RAW format by smartphones is no longer surprising - most flagships and a lot of medium and low-end equipment allow it. The RAW format includes a data dump straight from the matrix with virtually no processing. The advantage is the possibility of far-reaching interference in the material, but at the same time the entire software is omitted, often combining several exposures into one photo, in order to obtain the highest possible quality of photography.

In the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max models, for the first time there is the possibility of shooting in the ProRAW mode, i.e. in a format that includes source exposures and information about image and color processing algorithms specific to a given smartphone model.

All this data, saved in a DNG file, allows you to recreate the image processing path from the Neural Engine, but at the same time can be made more accurately due to the lack of the need to do calculations in real time and you can interfere with the process, just like with a regular RAW file.

The effects are very good and so far no one has attempted a similar implementation in other smartphones. The difference can be seen in the pictures above, but ProRAW opens the way for much more experiments - for example, for intensive processing of night photos and astrophotography.

Classic night mode works very well. For handheld shots, the machine proposes a time of about 3 seconds by default, usually enough to get a good effect. It can be increased to 10 seconds, as long as we have a firm grip, but after placing the smartphone on a tripod, the iPhone 13 Pro will even allow an exposure of 30 seconds. The brightest of the cameras, 26 mm, is doing best, also thanks to the excellent stabilization. However, night mode is available for each of the cameras.

iPhoneography

The cameras in the iPhone 13 Pro are very good and universal, but at the moment Apple is chasing the competition, not the other way around. In tests DXOMark took fourth place - it is not able to match the details of smartphones with dense matrices in their benchmarks, nor can it compete in terms of the focal length range.

The point is that this is the basis - cameras can do much more if we take the right tool. Focos, ProCamera, Halide are programs that I use often when I need to do something non-standard, just like FilMiC Pro is a tool that people who shoot filming use. Only specialized applications can squeeze everything you can out of the iPhone 13 Pro cameras. On the other hand, the basic application will allow you to achieve a good effect with a minimum of effort and is the easiest to use.

I will by necessity skip a broader discussion of video recording issues. I admit that I do not like filming and do not know much about it - so I leave it to the better than myself. iPhone 13 Pro supports [email protected] resolution, PAL (50 and 25) frames, cinematic 24 fps, FHD up to 240 fps, HDR10 and Dolby Vision.

The implementation of the cinematic effect in the recordings looks convincing and easy to use - it looks as if everyone was able to make meaningful material thanks to this and knowing Apple, it is just like that. Professional filmmakers, in turn, will surely appreciate the ProRes format, which is planned to be introduced soon, with a very low compression, perfectly suitable for later processing.

The image quality in the short samples that I made for my own use leaves no illusions: the iPhone 13 Pro is still the best choice for filming with a smartphone.

Summary

iPhone 13 Pro is an evolutionary development of its predecessors. Better in all respects, but it is difficult to name one killer feature. The most powerful SoC, reasonable size (I do not like too big smartphones), good battery life, stable system, very long software support, application selection, great camera and all those little things that make me regularly abandon the urge to try something that comes over me from time to time from Sony or Samsung ...

There are also disadvantages. Maybe a few, but they are. The first is the price - PLN 5199 for the poorest model is really a lot, in addition to the phone, there is only a luxurious fig with poppy seeds in the set. The warranty is only one year, the notch expected by AoD users has evaporated somewhere, although still technically justified, it does not look very good.

But overall, the iPhone 13 Pro is still one of the best smartphones on the market.