I waited a week after the Apple iPhone 12 conference to form an opinion. There are many reasons not to buy it, especially in Romania.
Last week, Apple launched the most expensive iPhones it has ever had on offer. Although, on paper, the same purchase values are practiced from iPhone X and so far, the reality is a bit more complicated than it seems at first glance.
Apple no longer includes the charger and headphones in your package. You have to buy them. iPhone 12 has a slower graphics chipset than iPhone 11. The design is a recycled combination of iPhone 5 and iPhone 10. 5G connectivity, enthusiastically discussed in Apple's presentation, doesn't work if you're using an iPhone 12 or 12 Pro in dual-SIM mode.
All these are some of the peculiarities that make iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Pro a bad or very bad deal, depending on the phone you already have in your pocket. In a pandemic, while many people have lost their jobs and others' incomes have plummeted, the Cupertino giant has decided to rob you more aggressively than it has ever done.
He never sold cheap gadgets, but when it comes to new smartphones, he never even tried to hide behind his finger. Even if you're not good at technology and don't quite understand what 5G connectivity and computing power are all about, Apple's presentation was absolutely offensive. The company run by Tim Cook has launched some devices that seem revolutionary only in theory.
How Apple steals your accessories to make an iPhone 12 more expensive
In practice, 5G smartphones have been around for over a year, as have compatible networks. When it comes to wireless charging, Apple is pouring water on MagSafe, another fabulous additional investment on your part, while Xiaomi, Huawei or Samsung charge your cordless phone twice as fast, if not five times.
For reference, Xiaomi is selling a 50W wireless charger for the Mi 10 Ultra for $ 46. Apple charges you 44 euros for a 15W MagSafe charger. Mi 10 Ultra charges from 0 to 100% in 40 minutes. Apple refuses to provide a clear reference for charging time with MagSafe. All we know is that it will charge twice as fast as the iPhone 11, which was limited to 7.5W.
Needless to say, in addition to the 44 euros for the MagSafe charger, you have to pay 210 lei for a USB Type-C socket charger, because it doesn't exist in the phone case and it doesn't come with the "jewel" of MagSafe ?
If you want to go the MagSafe route, a detail that I do not recommend, keep in mind that you have to buy a case compatible with the new magnetic charging mechanism, and Apple is ready to offer you some options at a premium. "Only" 53 euros are the cheapest MagSafe compatible cases, and if you add another 63 euros on the little magnetic wallet for a few cards, you're done. I am also afraid to think about what values they will reach in Romania, but probably the values will be even more exaggerated than in Germany, where I got the reference figures in euros.
Why did Apple leave you without a headset and charger when you pay so much for them?
iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro will come with the smallest and thinnest cases you've ever seen on an iPhone. They are so small that even Apple boasted that it managed to cram up to 70% more copies into one container.
The reason for the thinness is that he took your headphones and charger out of the box. Every iPhone only comes with a UBS-C to Lightning charger, that's all.
Considering that most of those who will get a new iPhone will have to buy a plug-in charger, it would be good to know that a USB-C charger costs 210 lei at iStyle. This is the model you find in the box of iPhone 11 Pro. If you also need the wired headphones that until yesterday you found delivered with every iPhone, you pay another 165 lei.
Remember a little bit of what I wrote above and you'll realize why it seems to me that Apple is robbing you of the highway. It forces you to make additional purchases of 375 lei, it also saves on transport (because it delivers several units in the same space), but it also charges you $ 1,000 for the iPhone 12 Pro with minimal storage space. There is no point in insisting that the figure will turn into 5,600 lei in Romania or 1,120 euros in Germany.
This practice is terrifying for a company that is consistently in the top 5 richest in the world. If it was ever time to throw in a discreet discount of $ 50 or $ 50, the pandemic would have impressed many with that expression of empathy.
iPhone 12, slower than iPhone 11 and more expensive
If we've clarified the more expensive part, let's see why the iPhone 12 is worse than the iPhone 11 Pro. The new Apple smartphone uses a state-of-the-art processor called the Apple A14 developed in-house by the American company. It's the same processor you find in the latest iPad Air, but a bit slower, because you don't have the same ventilation space in an iPhone case.
When it comes to raw computing power, the processor in question has been tested using the AnTuTu benchmark and, as you can see in the screenshot above, it looks about 20% faster than the Apple A13 processor in the iPhone 11 Pro.
In the context in which many iPhone owners use Apple phones to play games, you would expect the emphasis to be on the graphics processing side, given by the GPU or Graphics Processing Unit. You are very wrong. Apple boasts that the new GPU in the A14 SoC is 8% faster than the one in the Apple A13, while AnTuTu confirms that it is about 7% slower.
In other words, a newer and more expensive phone is actually slower in games than the model a year ago. I don't even insist that the power of graphics processing is used in manipulating photos or editing videos. If you live with the impression that the above discrepancy is due to the resolution or the amount of RAM, you have no reason. The iPhone 11 Pro has 4GB of RAM, as does the iPhone 12, while the screen resolution has remained unchanged, as has the 60Hz refresh rate.
While the entire industry has made the transition to phones with up to 120Hz and 12GB of RAM, Apple is selling you 2019 specifications at 2021 prices.
Even 5G connectivity "steals" you from Apple
I mentioned in the introduction that I decided to wait a week to find out if the iPhone 12 is a good deal or not. In the meantime, almost every day there are more offensive details about customers, new details about how the company robs you and, unfortunately, is not completely honest.
The iPhone 12 manual for phone operators and third-party merchants has recently arrived online. Among the details in the document are some that are aimed at 5G connectivity or, rather, its lack.
Remember that half of Apple's presentation on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro was about 5G? In fact, not all users will be able to take advantage of that option, even if they are on a 5G network in an area with 5G coverage.
"When you use two lines in Dual SIM mode, a 5G data connection is not supported on either line, and the phone will operate on 4G LTE. If customers use only one eSIM and are on a 5G network and have a 5G subscription, they will have access to 5G, ”reads Apple's documentation for iPhone 12 vendors.
As a reference, Apple has been selling Dual SIM iPhones for a long time. The practice began a few years ago. Including most of the iPhone 11 Pro units on the market are Dual SIM, with the mention that one is standard nanoSIM and the other is eSIM. If you have not heard the terminology, the latter is a card inside the terminal that the telephone operator registers in its own network. You don't have access to it.
But if you buy an iPhone 12 with the idea of using it on two 5G networks or one 4G and one 5G, think about it. You will only have 5G if you use your phone on a single network, that's all. Theoretically, there is a promise that this unpleasant situation will be fixed by a firmware update, but it is not clear when or if it will come too soon.
If 5G is important to you and you need a dual-SIM, get a Galaxy Note 20 5G. That works without problems on 5G, even if you have two SIMs in the device, with the mention that the 5G data traffic will be generated only on the first card in the device, not on the second one. That's normal.
Even repairing it is expensive: the screen on the iPhone 12, more expensive than the 11
Before the iPhone 12 hit stores, Apple announced the service costs for the new gadgets. The most important detail is the change of the broken screen, given that no guarantee covers such an investment. Because the values below are in dollars, I'm also afraid to think about how they translate into lei. You probably put an extra 30% in the most optimistic case.
But the details are superfluous. The important thing is that the iPhone 12, which is Apple's "cheap" phone launched in 2020, comes with a $ 279 broken screen replacement cost, compared to only $ 199 for the iPhone 11 launched a year ago. .
The "good" part is that you have to pay $ 279 to change the screen on the iPhone 12 Pro, just like the iPhone 11 Pro.
If you ruin your iPhone altogether, that water has gotten into it, for example, replacing it with the old one will cost you $ 449 for an iPhone 12 and $ 399 for an iPhone. 11. In the case of iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro, you pay the same amount of $ 549.
Even this detail is offensive, in the context in which we are talking about phones launched a year away.
Why not buy your iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Pro
With a design far from revolutionary, with a higher price due to the accessories you have to buy separately and with features such as 5G connectivity that does not work all the time, Apple tried to steal your eyes with the iPhone 12 in a grumpy manner.
In 2020, for the first time in the company's history, the giant founded by Steve Jobs could make a human gesture and lower the price of phones a bit. He didn't have to lose money, he made more money than any other smartphone company. But given the economy of accessories and the fact that it delivers multiple units in one space, it might at least not boast.
This phone looks like a 3-camera iPhone with no home button. It's nothing revolutionary, unless you consider that it comes with 5G, a technology present on Samsung, Huawei or Xiaomi phones from the middle of last year. Not even on the photo-video capture side, Apple hasn't been making waves for a long time. In the DxOMark rankings, shoot with your cannon and don't hit an iPhone, as you can see in the screenshot below.
I understand that you might buy an iPhone out of habit or because you like the color, but you better get an iPhone 11 or, in the most optimistic case, an iPhone 11 Pro. iPhone 12 is a bad deal, from all points of view, both in the standard version and in Pro.
In any other case, this detail would be irrelevant, but in a pandemic, it might be useful not to throw your savings on an expensive phone and that's it.
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