iPhone 12 pro
Buy now from £999, Apple.com
Size: 5.78in x 2.82in x 0.29in
Weight: 189g
Connectivity: 5G
Display: 6.1in OLED (2532 x 1170)
Rear camera: 12-megapixel wide (f/1.6), 12-megapixel ultra-wide (f/2.4), 12-megapixel telephoto (f/2.0)
Front-facing camera: 12-megapixel TrueDepth (f/2.2)
CPU: A14 Bionic chip
Storage: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB
Battery: 2,815mAh
Water resistance: IP68 dust/water resistant (up to 6m for 30 minutes)
Colours: Pacific blue, graphite, gold, silver
Price: £999/£1,099/£1,299
Let’s start with the more expensive iPhone 12 pro model. The pro features a lovely new flat-edge design, harking back to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 days. There’s an edge-to-edge 6.1in OLED display and a notch for the phone’s sensors.
The iPhone 12 pro display is made with Apple’s ceramic shield glass technology, offering four times better drop protection than the iPhone 11 pro, and it also has Apple’s TrueTone technology. Sadly, it only has a 60Hz refresh rate instead of the rumoured 120Hz, so it’s not buttery smooth like the Galaxy S21 Ultra. The iPhone 12 pro has an IP68 rating, meaning you can dunk it in six metres of water for a maximum of 30 minutes.
We’re big fans of the sleek stainless steel finish – which, along with the colour differences, is really the only difference between the design of the iPhone 12 pro and the iPhone 12, which features an aluminium design. This does add a little more heft to the iPhone 12 pro compared to the iPhone 12, but side by side, you won’t notice any difference at all. The iPhone comes in more premium colours, like pacific blue, graphite, gold and silver.
In terms of specifications, the iPhone 12 pro runs on Apple’s snappy A14 Bionic chip and features a 16-core neural engine, offering up an 80 per cent performance boost over its predecessor. All of this just made the iPhone 12 pro feel really speedy when using it. Another distinction between the iPhone 12 pro and the 12 is that the 12 pro has 6GB of RAM, compared to the iPhone 12’s 4GB. This will make a negligible difference if you’re big on mobile gaming.
As for the battery, well, it’s slightly less good than the iPhone 11 pro, featuring a smaller 2,815mAh battery, but it will still last you most of the day before needing a recharge, plus it has fast charging. Inside the back panel is an array of magnets for Apple’s fancy new MagSafe feature, which allows you to stick on a bunch of accessories and charge via the back. It can only charge at a speed of 15W, however, which we found was a lot slower than just plugging it into the bottom.
The differences between the two phones really only become apparent when we start looking at the cameras. The iPhone 12 pro has one of the best camera systems on any current smartphone. It has a 12-megapixel wide lens, an ultra-wide lens and a telephoto lens for two varying angles. The big camera feature on the pro is the LiDAR scanner for depth sensing, something that really highlights Apple’s push into the AR space, but it also helps to improve low light photography.
On top of that, the iPhone 12 pro also has a night mode, so the photos we took always remained bright in the dark – even when zoomed in using the telephoto lens. The iPhone 12 pro can also take ProRAW photos. If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t need an iPhone 12 Pro. In all seriousness, it essentially preserves the raw file format in combination with Apple’s image processing. Lastly, with the iPhone 12 Pro, you can record in Dolby Vision, boosting the dynamic range of whatever you film to 4K and 60 frames per second. These are future-proofing features that the standard iPhone 12 doesn’t have.
You can get the iPhone 12 pro in three different storage amounts – 128GB, 256GB or 512GB, which are larger storage sizes than the iPhone 12. The iPhone 12 pro base model starts at £999.
