 Sometimes phone reviews are hard. There are new features to explore, new hardware technologies to explain, entirely new camera systems, and new designs to talk about. Yeah, I don't think this is gonna be that kind of review. This review should be pretty easy. This is the iPhone 13, and this is the iPhone 13 mini. And there are only three things you need to know. Okay, four. Maybe five. Will this be easy? This might not be quite as simple as I thought. I figured it would be pretty simple, because you know, when I review an iPad, I get to say, it's just an iPad, but now when I review a phone, I gotta talk about this camera, and that camera, and there's a third camera, and then I compare it to other cameras. Okay. Let's just start going over the things. And I wanna do it in order from the most important thing to the least important stuff. I think the most important parts of a phone are the fundamental things that make your life easier, and that means that we are going to start with battery. Apple made the batteries bigger. Apple says that the iPhone 13 lasts two years longer. And that's not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. And the usual doom scrolling and emails and work, and really bad chess, which I'm really bad at. So that's impressive, but it's not magic. When we had a day where we had to shoot a lot more 4K video testing, I was looking for a charger by like seven or 8 p.m. Now the iPhone 13 mini is going to be a different story. I just have to admit that I haven't had a chance to fully test it yet. We don't do just video rundown tests here at The Verge. We like to have real world use, and there are only so many phones I can actually use in the real world at a time. I am gonna be doing a full longer term battery test on the iPhone 13 mini over the next couple of weeks, and I will publish a full rundown on theverge.com. But I do have an early impression, and it's that Apple's one and a half hour longer claim does seem reasonable. However, that's kind of faint praise. I used the iPhone 12 mini a lot over the last year, and what I said when I first reviewed it has turned out to be true. If you use a little tiny smartphone, like it's a very big smartphone, you're gonna end up draining the battery by early afternoon or even lunch. So my takeaway for the iPhone 13 mini is unfortunately wait and see. My takeaway for the regular iPhone 13 is that we are back to having really good battery life on an iPhone after an off year last year, because again, the batteries are bigger. Now the second thing I wanna talk about is also a smartphone fundamental, cameras. Apple made the main wide angle camera sensor bigger too, and bigger is better when it comes to camera sensors. The sensor is so big they had to switch the camera layout to diagonal to fit it all. They also had to make the whole thing a little bit thicker, so cases from the iPhone 12 aren't gonna fit around this new bigger camera bump. This new bigger sensor is the same one that came on the iPhone 12 Pro Max last year, and that camera held on to the crown for best photo and video quality since it was released. And in my testing, the results from this main camera are as good or better, thanks to software improvements, than the top tier 12 Pro Max from last year. Which is to say, the only better camera than the iPhone 13 on the market today is the iPhone 13 Pro. Details out of this camera are sharp and accurate, colors are rich without being oversaturated, focusing is fast and reliable, portrait mode is really good enough to use day to day, and low light and night sight are both exceptional. Video quality is also great. The main camera has sensor stabilization, which helps when you're walking around. It can do all of the modes that matter most in terms of 4K and slow-mo, and it handles them all really well. The only way to be unhappy with this camera is if you compare photos taken in difficult situations on a big screen, head to head, with the 13 Pro. The ultra-wide sensor was also updated for better low light performance, but it's fairly minor. What I mostly see is improved white balance and color when it's in night mode. If I could have one wish for this camera system, it's that the selfie camera would have been updated. It does have software improvements just like all of the other cameras, and it is inside a smaller notch on the screen now, but the selfie camera's just too important for Apple to have left the same for this many years in a row. So after battery and camera, my third most important thing to know is a curveball. It's last year's iPhone 12. The iPhone 12 has come up a lot already in this video because, well, you know, it's natural to compare this phone to the one that came last year, and it would be totally fair to call this iPhone 13 an iPhone 12S. It's basically the same idea, but better. But the reality is many people looking to upgrade to the iPhone 13 are gonna be coming from older phones than last year's 12, and if that's you, I have very good news. Nearly everything the iPhone 13 is inheriting from last year's iPhone 12 is excellent and a big upgrade. All new design is beautiful and modern. The OLED screen has deep blacks and bright brights. It's got the MagSafe system for wireless charging. That ecosystem still needs work, but it's convenient. You're getting everything that's good about this phone and everything that was good from the phone that came before it. The fourth thing is just answering this question, should you get the iPhone 13 or the 13 Pro? I have a full review of the iPhone 13 Pro and the Pro Max, which I encourage you to go watch if you're thinking about getting the Pro. What you get with the 13 Pro is a better camera system overall and a telephoto camera. The 13 Pro Max has the biggest screen and the biggest battery, and both of those phones have a fast refresh display, which makes animation and scrolling look and feel smoother. Are those things worth the extra money? Well, they are to me, but I love phones and I use them enough that every little detail makes a difference in my experience. If you have to have the nicest things, get the one with the nice to haves. For me, the camera improvements on the Pro are good enough to justify the extra costs, plus I'm a sucker for the extra screen. All right, how many things are we at? Five, okay, five means we're gonna go back to the camera to talk about some features that are fun, but they're not reasons to go out and buy this phone. The first of those features is photographic profiles. It's a new option in the camera that changes the default look of the pictures you're taking. Apple says that these are not filters, but instead they change how the computational photography system makes decisions about things like contrast and white balance and color. You know how Samsung takes super vivid photos? And if you like that look, then you can make the iPhone take super vivid photos and have that be your new default. Or you know how pixels are really contrasty and blue? Same sort of deal, you can make the iPhone do that. Profiles are a toggle that sticks, so every time you open the camera, you get that look. They're there all the time by default, but of course you can turn them off if you don't wanna use them. Here's some examples. This is the iPhone shot with the standard profile next to a Samsung Z Flip 3, and now the iPhone's vibrant profile. Now here is the iPhone shot in standard next to a Pixel 5, and now the iPhone's rich contrast profile. Apple's photos are better across the board, but in these profiles, they are tuned in a way that makes them look a little bit more like what those other phones do. One thing these profiles don't do is apply these tone and warmth settings to the entire picture. The iPhone knows when it sees grass or faces or sky, and so it adjusts how it applies these color preferences accordingly so you don't get weird looking skin tones or purple skies or whatever. You also can't change these in the edit after the fact. Profiles are baked into the file. I get more into the weeds on how all this stuff works in the iPhone 13 Pro video if you're interested. Okay, thing 5.5, there's another camera thing. It's a new feature called cinematic mode. Think of it like portrait mode, but for video. So this is cinematic mode, and what you're seeing here is it lock on my face and use software to make the background blurry. And then I could, if I wanted to, choose it to focus on Viren over there. Now it's locked on him, now I can lock it on me. What's interesting is when I look at him, now it sees his face and not my face. And so when it sees a face, it wants to lock on the biggest face in the frame, and that's what it does. You can edit this after the fact, and so what you're gonna see here is it's gonna shift over to Viren. But I did that in edit. I didn't do it while we were just sitting here. So that's kind of fun. There are a few more notes about what it's like to use cinematic mode. It locks onto faces or human-shaped bodies, so just looking away on your own isn't necessarily enough to trigger a depth change. Also, it is very aggressive at wanting to shift focus to the biggest face, but you can double tap on something else to lock the focus elsewhere if you need to. Finally, it can only shoot at 1080p and 30 FPS. Now, cinematic mode is a software blur. It just looks for human faces and kind of blurs everything else. And that means it's the equivalent of portrait mode, but for video, and that means it can have the same portrait mode problems. It can't work very well in low light, and it can have weird or bad cutouts around hair, for example. That's a little bit less noticeable because it's a video and not a still photo, but it's still there. All that said, I think that cinematic mode generally looks pretty okay for casual video. And just so you know, it is light years ahead of what Samsung was trying to do with portrait mode video. You can go in afterwards and edit cinematic mode, including changing the amounts of blur for the entire video, and then also going through and picking moments when you want the focus to shift between different parts of the scene. It's actually really intuitive to do it in the Apple Photos app. But if you want to get even more pro and do it in desktop software, you have to do it in Apple software on macOS Monterey, like Final Cut or Apple Photos again. This format isn't something that can be edited in other apps. I think of cinematic mode in the same way I thought of portrait mode when it first came out. It's fun, but don't use it for anything super important. At most, it's maybe good for some corny TikToks. I know, I'm very cringe. I just have to embrace it at this point. All right, is there a sixth thing? I mean, there's lots of little things. This has an A15 processor and it's fast because all new iPhones have fast processors. The base storage has been increased to 128 gigs and that is great, thank you. The best color of the five iPhone 13 colors that are available is pink, it just is. iOS 15 has a lot of neat features, but to me, it's starting to feel a little bit complicated. Haim Gartenberg has a full review and he did find a lot to like. Here, I'm just gonna say that the iPhone's camera interface is getting super crowded and hard to understand what with all the disparate settings and strange unlabeled icons. All that stuff is small potatoes though. Here's the important thing to remember with the iPhone 13. Just think back to those first three fundamentals, better battery life, better cameras, and you get all the improvements from last year's iPhone 12. It turns out the cliche is true. If you improve the fundamentals, the whole game gets better. Hey everybody, thanks so much for watching. We've got the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max video right over there and then right down in the comments, you're all gonna talk about whether this is the iPhone for you or if you're gonna get the Pro or neither. Probably not both though, that'd be weird.