The iPhone 14 Pro is now in early adopters’ hands, and invariably some are more than happy to pull it apart on day one to find out the specs that Apple chooses not to reveal.
Chinese YouTube channel WekiHome has saved you the trouble of invalidating your warranty and done it for you with an 11-minute video pulling apart the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max handsets.
In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment around 6:49, a couple of upgrades for the Pro models are revealed, which should explain some of the improved performance on the previous generation. Apple has upgraded both the RAM and modem for the 2022 Pro models.
Last year’s iPhone 13 Pro handsets came with 6GB of LPDDR4X memory. While 2022’s iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max stick with the same capacity, it’s now newer and faster LPDDR5 RAM. This could explain why Apple boasted that the 5-core GPU in the A16 Bionic offers “50% more memory bandwidth for complex graphics in the latest mobile games.”
The modem, meanwhile, is now Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X65, which offers faster speeds via the new 10 Gigabit 5G modem and antenna system, alongside wider mmWave spectrum support.
Crucially, both the modem and RAM upgrades should lead to greater power efficiency, which is why it’s slightly confusing that our early battery test shows a significant reduction in the iPhone 14 Pro’s battery life. While the iPhone 13 Pro managed 12 hours and 18 minutes in our 150-nits cellular web browsing test, the iPhone 14 Pro conked out at just 10 hours and 13 minutes.
While ten hours is a decent time, that’s obviously disappointing, and we were hoping that it was a sign that iOS 16 has yet to be optimized for maximum battery performance. But then we tested the iPhone 14 Pro Max and found it took second place on our list of phones with the best battery life with a massive 13 hours and 39 minutes. That’s an advance of an hour and 23 minutes on the already stellar stamina of the iPhone 13 Pro Max.
With that battery enhancement, as well as the addition of the Dynamic Island, always-on display and improved camera, Apple’s priciest phone got a solid thumbs up from us. As Mark Spoonauer, our global editor-in-chief, wrote in his iPhone 14 Pro Max review; it’s a “beast of a phone that’s Pro-level powerful” and great to use.
“It’s the best phone you can buy, period,” he concluded.
Next: iPhone 14 vs iPhone 13 benchmarks are here — you can read about how much faster the new phone is.
