An Apple A Year...

IPHONE SEASON IS always exciting for the features the new phones bring, but we've gone through enough iterations of “best iPhone yet” statements to look past performance boasting. Case in point, if you didn't notice, Apple didn't actually announce how much better the A15 is over the A14 chipset during their California Streaming event. An oddity perhaps, or even wilder conspiracy theories regarding diminishing improvements, but I'd like to see it as a shift in focus towards real-world usability over paper specifications.

As our mobile phones become an indispensable extension to our daily lives, it's no longer a ‘device' sitting in the domain of tech geeks where victory is declared based on arbitrary numbers churned out by a benchmark. Sure, the numbers are there if you want to look, but have we plateaued in the experience of what these numbers mean? Would you really feel the iPhone 13 any faster watching YouTube videos, scrolling Instagram or messaging your mom on WhatsApp? Probably not. And in just about all day-today scenarios, you probably won't notice any difference at all between the brand new iPhone 13 and the past one, or even two generations.

I think Apple knows this, and they're now drilling down on showcasing experiences almost everyone can see and use the moment they unbox their shiny new devices. And that experience is video. The iPhone 12 saw its most advanced video features limited to the highest-end Pro Max model, but with the iPhone 13, even the mini gets it, giving pro-level tools to amateur videographers; a boon in the age of YouTube, TikTok and vlogging. And that's perhaps more valuable than another 100-200 points in Geekebench.