with the iPhone 14 Pro, right?

I mean, there had been tons of rumors

about the notch turning into a cutout, or two cutouts,

but no one was expecting the dynamic island.

And while it was getting clearer

that Apple would have to follow the rest of the industry

and using bigger camera sensors eventually,

I certainly wasn't expecting the company

to reboot the entire

iPhone computational photography system

as the Photonic Engine.

There's a lot of that sort of thing in the iPhone 14 Pro.

Apple's late to having an always on display,

but this one's way more on than other phones.

In the United States, Apple's going all in on Essen,

which no one else is really doing.

There's a basic satellite connectivity system,

which isn't quite like anything else we've heard about.

But Apple's going to ship millions of these phones,

with the service coming later this year.

All in all, there are more beginnings of big ideas

in the new iPhone 14 Pro

than we've seen in an iPhone for a long time.

That's the easiest way to think about the iPhone 14 pro,

it feels like the first step towards a lot of new things

for Apple and the iPhone,

and maybe the first glimpse

of an entirely new kind of iPhone.

But that doesn't mean all these things are perfect yet.

Let's take a look.

(bright music)

We have to start with a Dynamic Island, right?

The name is ridiculous, but it's fun.

Everyone's talking about it, which is not normal

for a smartphone status indicator system.

That's a win, that's where I live every day.

But let's just agree that we're gonna call it the island

and move on.

So the island replaces Apple's notch.

It's where the front camera and the face ID system lives,

since they've got to take up someplace

in the front of the display.

Here's the thing about the notch though,

in almost every review,

going back to the iPhone 10,

I've said, "Hey after a couple minutes,

"you don't notice the notch."

The island is different.

You are supposed to notice it.

It's located lower on the screen than the notch.

And if you run your phone in light mode, like I do,

it's actually a high contrast interface element.

It's a black pill shape in the middle of white screen.

It's right there.

You're going to see it.

Especially since it's animating and moving all the time.

Now it's better in dark mode.

In fact, I would go so far as to say

this is the first iPhone

you should definitely run in dark mode because of it.

So why did Apple go from the notch is there,

but you can all but ignore it, to the dynamic island is here

and you are going to pay attention to it?

Well, it turns out that over the years,

there have been like three or four

different status indicator systems added on to iOS.

Plugging in a charger or flipping the mute switch

brings up an overlay.

Having a call in the background

puts a green pill in the corner.

The maps app is a blue pill.

Connecting AirPods is another overlay.

Some things like timers and music playing in the background

haven't really had status indicators at all.

The island is Apple's way of replacing and unifying

all those older status systems

with a new home for system alerts,

and making it work for things like music

and the new live activities API

that's coming to iOS 16 later this year,

which will allow apps to share even more background info

for things like your flight status or a sports score.

The simplest way of understanding the island

is that it's basically a new widget system

built on top of that live activities API.

And the widgets can have three views,

the main view, this expanded view,

and this ultra minimal icon

when you've got two things going at once.

Here's a list Apple sent over

of all the things that will support the island at launch

before live activities arrives

and third parties can use it too.

So that's the concept.

The execution is obviously where the action is.

And like all first versions of anything,

Apple's made some choices that really work,

and some others that, eh.

So here's a big choice that really works,

and it's just like purely Apple.

One of the reasons that it's called the island

is that it's meant to float over the rest of the system.

It's a layer on top of iOS.

It's supposed to feel more like hardware than software,

almost like a secondary display

that can get bigger or smaller.

To get this to feel right,

apple's actually using a new

dynamic sub-pixel anti-aliasing system

that makes the edges of the island up to three times crisper

than all the other animations in iOS.

Here's a macro shot of the individual RGB sub-pixels

of the display being anti-aliased

to create a sharp edge for the island.

In normal room lighting, this really works.

It feels like the cutout on the display

is getting bigger and smaller.

And the animations like this drop effect

for when the island splits in two are super fun.

In sunlight or brighter light,

yeah, you can see the camera sensors,

and the illusion kind of goes away, but it's still cool.

Other big thing that works is that

moving all these disparate status indicators to the island

and making them worth paying attention to

is actually pretty great.

It's nice having call info right on the screen.

It's genuinely useful having your timers right there,

making things like Airdrop and Face ID

all show up in consistent ways in the same place

make those things easier to understand, which is great.

The thing that kills me is that in a keynote,

and in all the ads, Apple shows the island is a thing

that's worth interacting with.

It's always moving, and going back and forth

between the main view and the expanded view.

In reality, it is not like that at all.

The island isn't a primary interface element.

It sits over whatever app you're actually using.

And apps are still very much the main point of the iPhone.

In fact, tapping on the island

doesn't open that expanded view.

It just switches you back

to whatever app that controls the widget.

To get the expanded view, you have to tap and hold.

This feels exactly backwards to me.

Now Apple knows I feel this way.

The idea apparently

is that things should be as simple as possible.

And going back to the app is the simplest thing.

Nah, I don't know.

I think a tap should pop open the widget,

and I definitely think

you should at least be able to choose.

This is kind of the whole tension of the island.

It's much more noticeable and useful than the notch,

but you're not really supposed to interact with it.

It's background information.

All those questions about whether

you're gonna get fingerprints all over the camera,

like, well, as it stands,

you don't touch this thing very much at all.

But because it's so much more prominent,

you're looking at it all the time.

I'm using it with a bunch of apps that haven't been updated.

So it kind of covers up some content

because it sits lower on the display.

So right at the second,

the trade off between how noticeable it is

and how useful it is is a little out of whack.

It doesn't quite do enough to always be in the way.

Now I think all this might change

when that live activities API rolls out later this year,

which is the other big thing Apple did right.

It made this system available to third party developers.

But right now the dynamic island

feels like one of those things

that needs a year of refinement and developer attention

before we really know how important it is.

The big feature of the iPhone 14 Pro camera system

is the new 48 megapixel main camera sensor.

Apple's actually a few years late to this trend.

Samsung has used 108 megapixel sensors since 2020,

and Google added a 50 megapixel sensor

to the Pixel 6 Pro last year.

The basic idea is the same all around,

to take better photos,

you need to collect as much light as possible.

And to do that, you need bigger pixels.

But at some point making the pixels physically bigger

gets hard, so instead you just add a lot more pixels

and use software to group them into giant virtual pixels.

This whole thing is called pixel bidding.

And the math on Apple's bidding is straightforward.

It uses four pixels to create a single virtual pixel,

which means that 48 megapixel sensor

generally shoots 12 megapixel photos.

Apple's also reworked its entire photo processing pipeline

and rebranded it the Photonic Engine.

The big change here is that the deep fusion

pixel by pixel analysis that happens

in mid and low light now happens earlier

in the process on uncompressed data.

It's never really been easy to see how much it's doing.

And well, it's the same on the iPhone 14 Pro.

Honestly the 14 Pro and 13 Pro take really similar photos.

Here's Verge video producer, Mariya Abdulkaf

in a really dim bar.

The 14 Pro is a little cooler,

and it captures a tiny bit more detail at 100%,

but you really have to go looking for it.

These photos of Mariya outside look pretty much the same.

But if you zoom in,

you can see the 14 Pro is getting a bit more detail,

and it has a nicer background blur

because of the substantially larger sensor.

This is all really nice, but in Instagram sizes,

it is not particularly noticeable.

Here's that same photo on the Pixel 6 Pro, by the way,

you can see it captures even more detail

with its Pixel Bend 50 megapixel sensor,

along with a wider range of colors.

This is about as different as the Pixel

and the iPhone have been in a few years.

They both grab a lot of detail

and have great low light performance,

but the pixel six pro makes very different choices

about highlights and shadow,

while the iPhone is way more willing

to let highlights blow out,

and even let some natural vignetting creep in.

Both of these photos are terrific,

and the one you prefer is entirely down to

subjective preference.

Where the iPhone 14 Pro falls down

is really in the details of the processing.

Apple's been ramping up the amount of noise reduction

and sharpening over the years.

And the 14 Pro has the most aggressive sharpening

and noise reduction yet.

Sometimes it just looks bad.

This night skyline shot is kind of an over processed mess

compared to the Pixel.

Compared to the Samsung S22 Ultra,

the iPhone is a little less predictable.

The S22 Ultra consistently holds onto more color detail