Linked List: September 21, 2021

Tuesday, 21 September 2021

Brian X. Chen on the iPhones 13: ‘The Most Incremental Upgrade Ever’ ★

Brian X. Chen’s review of the new iPhones for The New York Times is the least enthusiastic I’ve seen:

This is all to say the annual phone upgrade, which companies like Apple and Samsung tout with enormous marketing events and ad campaigns to gin up sales for the holiday shopping season, has become a mirage of tech innovation. In reality, the upgrades are now a celebration of capitalism in the form of ruthless incrementalism.

Fair enough, but I found it curious that Chen’s review didn’t contain the word “battery”. The consensus is pretty strong that the two standout features are better cameras and improved battery life.

Joanna Stern: ‘From Mini to Pro Max, It’s All About the Battery and Cameras’ ★

Joanna Stern, reviewing the iPhone 13 lineup for the WSJ:

With videos, gosh, I was really excited about the new Cinematic mode. Aaaand gosh, was it a let down. The feature — which you could call “Portrait mode for video” — adds artistic blur around the object in focus. The coolest thing is that you can tap to refocus while you shoot (and even do it afterward in the Photos app).

Except, as you can see in my video, the software struggles to know where objects begin and end. It’s a lot like the early days of Portrait Mode, but it’s worse because now the blur moves and warps. I shot footage where the software lost parts of noses and fingers, and struggled with items such as a phone or camera. The Apple spokeswoman said Cinematic mode is a “breakthrough innovation that will keep getting better over time.”

Stern went all-in on Cinematic mode for the video accompanying her review.

Raymond Wong’s iPhone 13 Pro Review for Input ★

Raymond Wong shot a bunch of great camera comparisons for his Input review. He was annoyed by the same jarring automatic switch between the 1× to 0.5× lens when entering or leaving macro mode that I mentioned in my review:

I welcome greater detail for close-ups and it’s clever that Apple is using the ultra-wide to augment the 1× wide and 3× telephoto at short distances, but the transitioning of cameras is disorienting. Apple makes no mention of this camera switching/augmenting on its iPhone 13 Pro website. I get that it’s supposed to be one of those “it just works” features. At least that was Apple’s intention I’m told, but it just doesn’t.

Here’s a screen recording of the automatic camera switching in action. In this shot, I was trying to frame these delicious soup dumplings using the grid. Holding the iPhone 13 Pro still, you can see the 1× wide switching to another slightly different FOV that’s using the ultra-wide autofocusing. The viewfinder keeps jittering as it tries to choose between a regular wide or wide-macro shot. A regular person wouldn’t look at this and think to themselves, this is normal. They’d look at the jittering and think something is broken with their iPhone camera. The framing should never change from what you compose and never automatically.

Wong’s screen recording illustrates the issue perfectly.

When I first pressed Apple and made them aware of the jarring camera switching, I was told it’s how the camera system works. On the eve of this review, Apple changed course and said it’s going to release a software update to let users disable the camera switching. According to Apple:

A new setting will be added in a software update this fall to turn off automatic camera switching when shooting at close distances for macro photography and video.

Panzarino Takes the iPhone 13 Pro to Disneyland ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch, regarding Cinematic video mode:

I did some test shooting with my kids walking through crowds and riding on carousels that was genuinely, shockingly good. It really does provide a filmic, dreamy quality to the video that I was previously only able to get with quick and continuous focus adjustments on an SLR shooting video with a manually focused lens.

That, I think, is the major key to understanding Cinematic Mode. Despite the marketing, this mode is intended to unlock new creative possibilities for the vast majority of iPhone users who have no idea how to set focal distances, bend their knees to stabilize and crouch-walk-rack-focus their way to these kinds of tracking shots. It really does open up a big bucket that was just inaccessible before. And in many cases I think that those willing to experiment and deal with its near-term foibles will be rewarded with some great looking shots to add to their iPhone memories widget.

That sounds right to me.

Dieter Bohn on the iPhone 13 Pro ★

Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:

Apple’s marketing for the camera system on the 13 Pro is that it’s the “biggest advancement ever.” I don’t know that I would go that far, but I also can’t remember the last time I’ve said “whoa, look at this photo” as many times as I have during this review. […]

Where the Pro 13 camera system shines is in low light. The main wide-angle sensor has seen a massive upgrade this year. Unlike Android phones that are chasing big megapixel counts and then “pixel binning” to achieve low light performance, Apple is sticking with 12 megapixels, the same resolution it’s used since 2015’s iPhone 6S. The sensor itself is much bigger now and features 1.9 µm pixels, which are about as big as anything we’ve seen on a smartphone. And on top of all that, the lens now has an ƒ/1.5 aperture.

All of that adds up to a camera that can very quickly take in a massive amount of light relative to other phones. Combined with some tuning and improvements to Apple’s computational photography, the low light performance on the 13 Pro is simply second to none.

I came away super impressed with the low light performance of the 13 Pro, too.

Bohn makes an important point in his corresponding review of the 13 and 13 Mini too: because the camera bumps are all new sizes, cases for the iPhone 13 won’t fit the 13 Pro, nor vice-versa.

More, Smaller Apps ★

Apple Newsroom, back on August 30:

Primephonic is no longer available for new subscribers and will be taken offline beginning September 7. Apple Music plans to launch a dedicated classical music app next year combining Primephonic’s classical user interface that fans have grown to love with more added features. In the meantime, current Primephonic subscribers will receive six months of Apple Music for free, providing access to hundreds of thousands of classical albums, all in Lossless and high-resolution audio, as well as hundreds of classical albums in Apple Music’s Spatial Audio, with new albums added regularly.

I’ve had this flagged for a few weeks. What I find interesting is Apple is going to use this acquisition to launch a dedicated classical music app, not to expand the Music app. iTunes, infamously, expanded greatly over the years, and everyone seems to agree that the user experience suffered for it. I wonder if that’s in the back of Apple’s mind here.