The iPhone Sweet Spot (Premium)

Because of my focus on photography, I typically buy the most expensive iPhone every year. But there’s a new sweet spot for 2020. And it’s not the Pro models.

As I wrote previously in Wearable (In)decision (Premium), I go through a see-sawing period of indecisiveness with any purchase, though I’m happy to report that the wearable choice I just made, the Fitbit Versa 3 smartwatch, was the right one for me. It’s so nice to be certain about something like this for a change.

But I also go back and forth on other similar, frequently-used products, like smart speakers/whole house audio—I chose Sonos earlier this year but revisit this decision a lot, most recently with Google’s new Nest Audio speakers, which are excellent—headphones/earbuds, and even tablets, though the iPad is so far ahead of the rest of the industry, it’s not much more beyond idle curiosity. I’d probably do the same with laptops, but I’m lucky enough to have such a steady stream of review units that it’s never been an issue. It absolutely would be otherwise.

And then there are smartphones. This is a weird thing for me to stress over since several handsets, mostly flagships, seem to find their way to my house each year either via review units or purchases. And yet, it’s always a moment of great indecision when certain manufacturers—Google, Huawei, OnePlus, and Samsung, especially—announced new models. Oddly enough, this indecision includes Apple and the iPhone too.

I buy at least one iPhone every year. And I’ve purchased almost every iPhone that Apple has released over the years, with only a  few major exceptions like the iPhone 4 (endemic reliability problems) and the new iPhone SE (too small, dated design). Regardless, I’ve not used an iPhone as my so-called daily driver—I hate that term, but I can’t think of a better one—since 2014-2015 and the iPhone 6 Plus. That handset, incidentally, was Apple’s first phablet, and I’ve been skewing towards larger handsets ever since. But I’ve been using Android, not iPhone, ever since as well.

The reasons for that are obvious enough: I prefer Android to iOS, and while Apple made big leaps in computational photography with the iPhone 11/11 Pro lineups in late 2019, they still lag behind Huawei, Samsung, and Google (roughly in that order though Samsung has made its own big gains this year).

And yet, hope springs eternal. And each year, I’ve purchased whichever iPhone has the best camera system because … well, you never know. Many seem to think that I “hate” Apple or whatever, but the truth is far more nuanced: No, I don’t like Apple’s smug, marketing-heavy public announcements, but its hardware products, in particular, are almost always excellent and I give them accordingly high marks in my reviews. With iOS 14 finally moving towards fixing my biggest concerns with this platform, I’m poised to return to iPhone if Apple just gets everything else right. And, again, a big piece of this puzzle, for me, is the camera system.

Last year, the choice was semi-obvious: The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max both had identical three-lens camera systems and so I chose the larger Max model because I’ve been skewing towards larger displays. The iPhone 11, which was an upgrade to the iPhone XR I reviewed the preview year, came with a less capable LCD display but was probably the best buy in the lineup for most users. But because of its less interesting two-lens camera system, I didn’t even consider it.

This year, a few things have changed.

First, and most obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has refocused our interest, collectively, in what I’ll call the “value” part of the market, which means in devices that that special blend of affordable, reliable, and viable for more than just a year or two. Devices that will both last and satisfy our needs for years to come.

Second, my experience with the ever-growing sizes of the devices at the upper end of the market—which are no longer called phablets for some reason, perhaps because they are basically tablets now—has demonstrated to me that perhaps these displays are getting too big. In this base, “big” means two things, not just the physical size of the display as measured on the diagonal, but also the other important size metrics of width and bulk that we have, to date, ignored. For example, the Samsung Note 20 Ultra is wonderful, but its incredible size and bulk, and its curved display edges, make it difficult to use, even for someone with larger hands like myself.

This makes the notion of a “sweet spot,” another term I’ve uncomfortably found myself repeating again and again over the years, a bit more difficult to quantify, and not just because everyone’s needs and preferences are different.

Third, smartphone camera systems have hit a wonderful place. I’ve been using a smartphone for photography—and only a smartphone—since our 2013 home swap in Amsterdam, when I arrived at Schiphol Airport with a Nokia 1020 in tow, unsure if it would meet my photographic needs. It did, and I’ve never looked back. And today, even mid-range smartphones (aside from iPhone SE) have multiple lenses and will meet the needs of almost anybody who’s not literally a photographer. I haven’t tested one yet, but I suspect I would be quite happy with a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE, for example.

Put this all together with the economic uncertainty that’s tied to my first point above, and I’ve been rethinking things. Helping matters, Apple has for the first time really made it difficult if not pointless for most to even choose an iPhone 12 Pro this year. The iPhone 12—which includes both the iPhone 12 and the smaller but otherwise identical iPhone 12 Mini—isn’t just the obvious choice, it’s a no-brainer.

Consider the following bit of Apple marketing.

“The singular new design. A reengineered chip. And 5G … The vertical band is precision-machined … The Ceramic Shield on the front is tougher than any smartphone glass. And tighter borders for even larger Super Retina XDR displays. 5G is set to change the world with radically faster speeds.  The hardware and software have been optimized for the best 5G experience. A14 Bionic has a smaller, five-nanometer transistor, which pushes the most powerful chip in a smartphone generations ahead.”

This description is from the iPhone 12 Pro introduction, and it isn’t until nearly one-minute into this commercial that a feature unique to the Pro lineup, its “Pro camera system,” is introduced. Until that point, everything Apple notes of the iPhone 12 Pro (and Pro Max) also applies to the iPhone 12 (and Mini). (Well, OK, not everything: The iPhone 12 utilizes aluminum, not stainless steel. But you get the idea.)

Put another way, the big differentiator between the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pros last year—and between the iPhone XR and iPhone 11 XS previously—was the displays. The lesser iPhones had LCD displays with larger bezels while the more expensive Pro models had superior OLED displays with smaller (but still large) bezels.

This year, that differentiator is gone: All iPhone 12 models—iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max—have the same fantastic Super Retina XDR display. (Granted, all of them all suffer from a larger notch and what are still too-large bezels, too. Apple. What are you going to do?)

But there’s another difference: The displays used on the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro are identical, literally: Both 6.1‑inch panels with a resolution of 2532 x 1170 pixels and a pixel density of 460 PPI. Previously, the iPhone 11 Pro had a smaller, but higher resolution 5.8-inch display and the iPhone 11/XR had a larger but lower-resolution (and LCD) 6.1-inch display.

In other words, the lines are really blurring between the iPhone and iPhone Pro lines. In fact, Apple did an astonishingly bad job of explaining why anyone would want a Pro this year. Here’s the one differentiator, from that same video:

“A new and improved Pro Camera system makes the 12 Pro the photographer’s iPhone,” Apple says. “The larger iPhone 12 Pro Max takes these innovations even further.”

That’s it. If you care about photography more than anything and are an iPhone fan, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is the phone for you. It’s unclear why anyone would buy the smaller iPhone 12, given that the Max has better cameras for some reason.

Well, except for the screen size, right? But the thing is, if you prefer that 6.1-inch display to the mammoth 6.7-incher on the Max, why not just get the iPhone 12 instead and save a lot of money?

Why indeed? The camera? No: One can’t really make that argument because if you compare the camera system on the iPhone 12 to that of the iPhone 12 Pro, you’ll discover something interesting. They’re almost identical.

The iPhone 12 (and Mini) has two camera lenses, a 12 MP wide (main) lens with a ƒ/1.6 aperture and optical image stabilization, and a 12 MP ultra-wide lens with a ƒ/2.4 aperture and a 120-degree field of view. It features 2x optical zoom (unchanged since the iPhone 7 Plus in 2015), and 5x digital zoom.

The iPhone 12 Pro has a three-lens camera system. The first two are identical to what’s listed above for the iPhone 12, except that the wide lens sports dual optical image stabilization. The third lens is a telephoto unit with an ƒ/2.0 aperture, so it provides 10x digital zoom. But the optical zoom? It’s just 2.5x. (Or what Apple calls “2.5x zoom in” with a total zoom range of 5x, because you can also zoom out at 2.5x.) The Max bumps up the telephoto and ultra-wide lenses, if you’re curious. But they seem like minor upgrades to me.

As I noted last year of the Pixel 4 XL, Google screwed up when it went with a telephoto lens instead of ultra-wide in its two-lens camera system: If you’re only going to have two lenses, you want an ultra-wide as the second lens, not telephoto, because the use cases are so much more common. But with the iPhone 12, Apple is nicely bridging the gap: It has the correct two lenses, wide/main and ultra-wide, but it also provides some form of optical zoom too. (Google figured this out and uses the correct lenses this year on its Pixel 4a with 5G and Pixel 5, and it uses computational photography to overcome the lack of optical zoom.)

What this all means is that the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Mini are unique values this year. What I’ll call the iPhone 12 (I mean both) is the new sweet spot in the 2020 iPhone lineup.

That’s true generally. But it’s also true for me: For the first time, well, forever, I’ll be ordering a “normal” iPhone and not the Pro/Plus/Max version with the superior camera system. I just don’t think it would make a big enough difference to justify the price. And that’s true even if the iPhone 12 is good enough for me to take a break from Android. Or, at least I believe it is.

Helping matters, because I do have last year’s most expensive iPhone, Apple is offering me $500 on trade-in, and that money will go further on an iPhone 12, which normally starts at $799, vs. $999 for the iPhone 12 Pro.

How much further? Well, it depends. Where the iPhone 12 Pro starts with 128 GB of storage, the iPhone 12 starts with only 64 GB, and bumping it up to 128 GB costs an additional $100, cutting the savings in half. If I could live with 64 GB, and I could, my final cost would be just $339. (And it would be a hilarious $239 if I could stomach the Mini’s smaller display and form factor; I can’t.)

Mehedi is buying an iPhone 12 Pro, and he will review that device. And I’ll buy an iPhone 12 and review that. If it’s good enough, I may stick with it. If it’s not, I can always return it and grab an iPhone 12 Pro, I guess. But I’m thinking I won’t need to return it. And that the iPhone 12 will work as well for me as it will for most people thinking about a new iPhone this year.