David's Take on the iPhones 12

Mostly, it's a bunch of iterative improvements and polish. It's not a revolutionary new phone but it's definitely a better iPhone and is definitely a step forward. Mostly it's a better processor and a better screen with a better camera. The screen is much less likely to crack but the cases are just as likely to scratch/dent. Wireless charging works a little better. There's a nice blue color. The ability to shoot in 10-bit color 4k60 Dolby Vision for video and ProRAW for photos is pretty neat and they've clearly invested a lot in making very difficult shots look very good. This is an impressive camera system. Screen pixel density, contrast, and brightness are unchanged. (A little surprising; as far as I can tell other than a better screen coating and smaller bezels there's literally no improvement in the screen emissive quality over last year.)

As a funny aside, my eyebrow went up when I saw them showcasing a lot of drone footage for a segment putatively shot entirely on iPhone - I wondered if they were going to show a custom iPhone 12 drone mount or (much more improbably) introduce an Apple Drone to compete with DJI. Sadly but predictably that didn't happen.

They didn't do any of the big changes people were holding their breath for (high-refresh rate screen, USB C connector, notchless design, 1TB storage) or that would have been game changers (displays both sides, cases-with-displays, camera behind screen for eye-to-eye conversation, image projection, all-sapphire construction). LIDAR is on the pro models but mostly app developers haven't figured out what to do with it.

Lots of folks with smaller hands (I'm looking at you, ladyfriends!) are going to be happy with the iPhone 12 Mini which unlike its predecessor SE is an uncompromising small (or some would say "reasonably sized") phone.

I'm disappointed there was no LE Audio covered here; Apple had a chance to really take the lead on high quality wireless audio headsets and next-gen hearing aids but they will likely cede this opportunity to Android. I'd guess they're going to focus on their own proprietary AirPods, but that's an ecosystem of one. The iPhones 12 are all just BT5.0, same as the 11's.

The 5G announcements were center-stage but frankly mostly moot given the paucity of UWB deployments and the excellent speeds available with 4G LTE. Let me spell it out: DON'T UPGRADE JUST FOR 5G. You won't see speeds any faster almost anywhere. In the whole of the Bay Area for instance, there are literally only five 5G UWB (mmWave) Verizon nodes and they're all within a few blocks of each other in downtown San Jose. So don't expect to buy this phone and suddenly see superfast internet. It's only with the much-later <6Ghz rollouts and WiFi 6E that we're going to see a big lift from current cell + WiFi speeds. To wit, I'm also surprised they didn't say much of anything about WiFi others than to throw shade by implying you were in danger connecting to public WiFi (all modern systems should use end-to-end encryption and authentication, so should be robust to transport adversaries - i.e. it shouldn't matter!). There was no 3x3 WiFi6 capability in the Pro, and WiFi6E would have been an exciting leadership position and a client first. But we'll have to wait for the iPhone 13 for these radio capabilities.

Small improvement in water rating (still IP68 but 6m 30min vs 4m 30min). Storage still caps out at 512GB, which is kind of silly given how cheap high-speed flash storage is (go take a gander at Samsung's latest 980 Pro M.2 sticks!). Optical zoom on the Pro now goes to 2.5x vs 2x.

And there's their own Echo / Home / Nest Audio. There's no special reason to get it or not get it other than it doesn't look like Spotify will work on it - it didn't seem like there was any integration with Apple TV, which if true seems like a bit of an oversight. There's a notion of being able to broadcast a message to everyone in your family but it doesn't look like they've explored the idea of sending messages to other groups this way.

Somewhat appallingly they are touting it as being highly private -- but they still stream all of your audio after wakeword to Apple and do recognition on their servers, because they haven't figured out how to compress a quality recognition model to run on your local device, despite all the chipset improvements therein. This part is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser to me. I'm fine personally with streaming audio for transcription/recognition but the fact that Apple goes to such lengths to highlight their voice capabilities _and_ the ML performance of their devices but somehow just whiffs on the very idea that quality recognition could be performed on-device is baffling.