Apple iPhone 12 Pro Review: Apple’s Awkward Middle Child | WIRED

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.

Pro Cameras

Photograph: Apple

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.