Apple has announced the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus, preserving much of the iPhone 13’s design — including a notch for the phone’s selfie camera and Face ID sensors. That’s in line with rumors that indicated only the 14 Pro models would lose the notch. Either way, the 14 looks an awful lot like the 13 at first glance, with the same flat display and rails.
The iPhone 14 sticks with a 6.1-inch screen, while the 14 Plus offers a big 6.7-inch screen. The 14 Plus model claims to offer the best battery life of any iPhone. Both models continue to offer last year’s A15 Bionic chipset — a major shift for Apple, which has typically introduced a new processor to be used by its entire iPhone portfolio every year.
On the camera front, there’s an ultrawide, and a new 12-megapixel main camera with f/1.5 aperture and sensor-based stabilization. Apple claims there’s a 49% improvement in low light image quality, and that Night Mode is twice as fast now. There’s also a new 12-megapixel TrueDepth camera with autofocus around front. Apple says its also applying its Deep Fusion image processing earlier in the image pipeline, improving low light performance and color rendering, calling this technology “Photonic Engine.”
The iPhone 14’s debut comes at a unique moment: inflation is driving the price of absolutely everything up — consumer tech included — and household budgets are stretched thin. Google has launched a public shaming campaign calling out Apple to adopt its open standard for messaging. And the company is having to face the fact that people in the US just don’t want a small iPhone, despite its efforts to sell one over the past couple of years. It all boils down to an unusual amount of pressure as Apple stages its annual iPhone unveiling from its gleaming Silicon Valley campus.
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