User talk:Rawaanniscool/sandbox

With a few big exceptions. If you have an iPhone 12—especially if you have an iPhone 12 Pro—you don’t need to upgrade. If you’ve already decided that you’re splurging on the iPhone 13 Pro or Pro Max, then you should read my WIRED colleague Julian Chokkattu’s review of that phone. (The Pro’s features are slightly more advanced; plus, some people just want a really, really big phone.) And if you’re an Android user, as billions of people are, you might prefer to stick with Android. In fact, some of the best Android phones out there already have the fancier features of the iPhone 13.

But I’ve been using the non-Pro version of iPhone 13 for just under a week now, and I’ve used the iPhone 13 Mini for a few days too. I’m almost certainly going to upgrade to the iPhone 13 from the iPhone 11 I’ve been using as my daily phone. The iPhone 13’s build is nicer, a callback to the sleeker, flat-edged iPhones of the past. It has a bigger battery than last year. And I’ve been showing “cinematic video” clips of my cat to pretty much anyone who’s vaccinated and willing to come closer than social distancing rules allow.

The iPhone 13 is what a “basic” iPhone should be. As Apple has introduced variations of its phones over the years, with Pro, Max, and Mini now part of the annual lineup, it has also employed a classic product differentiation strategy; the standard models of iPhone have had less brilliant displays, lesser cameras, or pitiful base storage amounts compared to the Pros.

There are still some minor differences between the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, but the gap between the two has closed. If you’re one of those people who has been holding on to your iPhone for years—and kudos to you for that—and are now eyeing an upgraded device, the iPhone 13 may be all the phone you need.

Case Study At first glance the iPhone 13 looks exactly like the iPhone 12. The iPhone 13 has the same-sized 6.1-inch display. Its frame is made of aerospace-grade aluminum, its cover slip is glass, and its sides are flat, unlike the rounded edges of the iPhone 11. It has a “Super Retina XDR” display.

Look closely, though, and there are subtle build differences between the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13. The whole phone is less than a quarter of a millimeter thicker, to accommodate a larger battery and some additional camera tech. The camera lenses on the back jut out from the body a bit more. The display is a tad brighter. The “notch” on the front of the iPhone 13’s display is smaller.

The buttons on the side of the phone are seated lower than they are on the iPhone 12, which I didn’t notice until I jammed the iPhone 13 into my usual car mount and inadvertently powered the phone down a few times. And on the back of the phone the dual camera lenses are positioned diagonally from each other instead of vertically.

Otherwise: It’s an iPhone!

The base-model iPhone 13 and 13 Mini also ship with 128 gigabytes of internal storage. This is a long overdue improvement from last year, when the cheapest model of iPhone 12 came with just 64 gigabytes of internal storage. (This does establish a price difference between the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13—on Apple’s own site, the cheapest iPhone 12 will run you $100 less than a new iPhone 13. But given the difference in storage capacity, that $100 savings doesn’t seem like that great of a deal.)

The iPhone 13 starts at $799, while the iPhone 13 Mini starts at $699. Bump up your storage capacity to 256 gigabytes and you’re looking at $899 for the regular-sized phone and $799 for its tiny sibling, and then $999 and $899 for 512 gigabytes of internal storage. The iPhone 13 Pro Max can be configured with up to 1 terabyte of storage; these cannot.