5G Apple sent along a Verizon 5G SIM card for testing. (Two phones, but one SIM card — which is fine by me. But I’m sure some of you are curious about that.)
There are like a dozen or more different specific bands of 5G networking. You don’t need to worry about that. That’s like worrying about which channel your Wi-Fi connection is using. The basic story with 5G is that there are two primary flavors:
Sub-6GHz is more or less like LTE, but supposedly somewhat faster and better in terms of dealing with congestion. Verizon calls this “5G Nationwide”. I think of it as “regular 5G”. mmWave is incredibly fast, but also very short-range. It’s like a hotspot, and appropriate only for dense city areas and congested spots like stadiums and airports. Verizon calls this “5G Ultra Wideband”. I think of it as “holy-shit-this-is-fast 5G”. Juli Clover wrote a nice short 5G explainer last month for MacRumors covering the differences. If your carrier plan includes 5G service, you don’t need to do anything to use 5G.
Here’s Verizon’s 5G coverage map, and here is a screenshot showing their current map for Center City Philadelphia:
Verizon's coverage map for Center City Philadelphia.
Here’s a zoomed out screenshot showing the greater Philly metro area:
Verizon's coverage map for Center City Philadelphia.
Basically, Verizon claims to offer “5G Nationwide” — a.k.a. Sub-6GHz 5G — across the whole metro region except for the most densely populated area right in the heart of Philly. Which is where I live. I walked into areas that are red on Verizon’s map, but I never saw any regular 5G service. Only LTE. I pretty much live my life in Verizon’s pink zone.
But those dark maroon areas for “5G Ultra Wideband” — a.k.a. 5G mmWave — are for the most part very accurate on Verizon’s map. I went straight from LTE to 5G Ultra Wideband (the indicator in the iOS status bar changes to “5G” with with a little “UW” next to it) without seeing a lick of normal 5G all week.
And — I’ll repeat — holy shit is Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband fast. Using Ookla’s Speedtest app for testing, my LTE service here in Philly is generally in the range of 50-120 Mbps down, 10-20 Mbps up. Not bad. With 5G Ultra Wideband, I typically saw 1,200-1,800 Mbps down, 25-70 Mbps up. At a few spots I consistently saw 2,300-2,700 Mbps down. Wowza. Apple’s and Verizon’s advertised maximum under “ideal conditions” is 4,000 Mbps. That’s gigabit speeds in real life over a cellular network.
But these mmWave coverage zones really are like Wi-Fi hotspots in terms of range. At some spots, the coverage is literally just half a city block. And it supposedly doesn’t penetrate walls or even windows well. It’s an outdoor technology? It’s technically amazing, and I can vouch that it works and really does deliver downstream speed that’s 10 times or more faster than Verizon’s LTE. But if it doesn’t work indoors, I’m not sure when it’s ever going to be practically useful for me, other than when I’m at congested spots like airports, train stations, arenas, and stadium — places I haven’t seen since early March and won’t see again until who knows when.
Data caps are another practical concern. Anything you do that can make use of these insane speeds can chew threw 15-30 GB of data pretty quickly. Download Xcode once and boom, there goes 11 GB. But 5G will help you blow through your data cap really fast.
I can’t speak to Verizon’s regular 5G service, because I never encountered it.
As for testing 5G’s potentially deleterious effect on battery life: that’s beyond the scope of this review, alas. But I will point out that iOS 14.1 has three separate options in Settings → Cellular → Cellular Data Options → Voice & Data:
5G On 5G Auto LTE Apple’s description: “5G On uses 5G whenever it is available, even when it may reduce battery life. 5G Auto uses 5G only when it will not significantly reduce battery life.” 5G Auto is the default, and that’s where I left it all week. Overall daily battery life seemed about what I’d expect while using these devices pretty extensively.
There is also a section in Cellular Data Options for Data Mode:
Allow More Data on 5G Standard Low Data Mode On iPhones without 5G, this is just a toggle switch for Low Data Mode. Allow More Data on 5G, according to the descriptive text, “provides higher-quality video and FaceTime when connected to 5G cellular networks”. I think it more or less treats a 5G connection the same way it does a Wi-Fi connection. I don’t think this is a good idea. 5G may well be faster than LTE, but allowing more data over cellular should depend on your plan’s data cap, not the speed of the connection.
One last 5G note: iOS hotspot tethering will share a 5G Ultra Wideband connection. At a location where the iPhone 12 was seeing speeds of 1,200-1,700 Mbps down, a connected device using the personal hotspot over Wi-Fi was seeing speeds of 500-600 Mbps. Impressive! According to Apple, modern Apple devices will see faster hotspot speeds tethering over the air with Wi-Fi than using a USB Lightning cable.
BENCHMARKS A serious analysis of the A14 is far beyond the scope of this piece, but I did poke around with Geekbench 5 and the browser-based Speedometer 2.0 just to see what the basic gist was. In my brief testing, the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro scored equivalently, so I’m not listing them separately. Geekbench does say there’s more RAM in the 12 Pro (6 GB vs. 4 GB), but that doesn’t seem to make any difference in these benchmarks, nor would I expect it to. In all of these benchmarks, higher numbers are faster, and are the average of three runs:
IPHONE 12 IPHONE 11 % FASTER GB5 Single-core 1590 1330 20 GB5 Multi-core 4010 3340 20 GB5 Compute 9190 7180 28 Speedometer 2.0 200 154 30 Apple’s silicon team continues not merely to impress, but to amaze. The A14 runs rings around both Qualcomm’s best offerings for Android phones and the Intel chips currently in Macs. Emphasis there on currently.
MISCELLANEOUS Did I take a bunch of photos and videos this week? Yes, I did. Everything seemed as good or better than last year. The one thing that jumped out at me is that in low light, you can easily see the improvement year over year with the 1× main lens going from ƒ/1.8 to ƒ/1.6 on both phones. Relegating the entirety of photography to a bullet point in the Miscellaneous seems silly, but really, this demands a feature-length review of its own.
Apple sent one of their new MagSafe leather wallets too. I actually use a small cards-only wallet, but I’m a wallet in one pocket, phone in the other person, so I have no interest in attaching my wallet to the back of my phone. But if you do, and don’t carry many cards, you might like it. The magnetic strength seems about right. The big question I’ve seen folks asking online is how many cards it holds. For me, no matter which combination of cards I try, the answer is very consistent: it holds three cards. I don’t know why Apple doesn’t just say that in the product description. If you put just one or two cards in, they’ll stay put, wedged into the bottom, but if you try adding a fourth card it’ll either be too tight or simply will not fit.
You know the protective sticker that covers the display on a new iPhone? The thing that’s so satisfyingly fun to peel off that Apple made an entire commercial about it for the new iPhone SE earlier this year? On the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, this sticker is now opaque white paper, not clear film. It now has cute little icons indicating what the buttons do. It maybe doesn’t look as cool but it’s still quite satisfying to peel off, and, Apple tells me, this reduces the amount of plastic waste. I’m not sure there’s any plastic in the entire package other than the USB-C-to-Lightning cable and the de rigueur Apple logo sticker. Otherwise it’s all paper and cardboard.
Apple’s usual schedule is for review embargoes to drop in the window between pre-orders and shipping. I can’t think of a product that was an exception to this. ↩︎
Which, this year, have clearly been made more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily shut down Apple’s supply chain in China earlier this year, and has severely restricted travel all year long. It’s impossible to overstate just how much of Apple’s usual process involves U.S. employees of the company flying back and forth to China to inspect and test components and oversee and approve assembly. It’s really quite remarkable that these new iPhones are debuting as close to the “normal” schedule as they are. ↩︎︎
In 2017, the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus went on sale in mid-September, the week after they were introduced. But the iPhone X didn’t ship until early November, with the first reviews dropping October 31. (My own iPhone X review didn’t appear until December 26.) In 2018 the schedule flip-flopped, with the not-yet-called-“Pro” iPhones XS and XS Max appearing “on time” in mid-September and the iPhone XR appearing five weeks later. Last year, the whole iPhone 11 family — 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max — debuted together in mid-September. ↩︎︎
That’s right — 1,200 or so words in, and I’m just now getting to the new phones. ↩︎︎
Apple’s depth measurements don’t account for the camera bumps, but the bumps on the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro don’t seem to protrude any more than on last year’s iPhones. ↩︎︎
I do miss hearing “aluminium” from Jony Ive’s voiceovers. And it occurs to me to wonder what he’s up to. ↩︎︎
Here’s a little detail where the iPhone 12 gets screwed on niceness. There are two tiny pentalobe screws next to the Lightning port on both phones. On the iPhone 12 Pro, they are color-matched to the steel band. On the iPhone 12, they’re not. Come on, Apple. ↩︎︎