It’s a little hard to get excited about an iPhone that features last year's design, last year’s screen, and last year’s CPU, but taken on its own – out of the substantial shadow of the new iPhone 14 Pro – Apple’s new iPhone 14 looks like a pretty darn good smartphone.
Even though the iPhone 14 looks a lot like the iPhone 13, there are numerous upgrades under the hood that promise to deliver an improved experience overall.
The phone's two rear cameras – a 12MP wide and 12MP ultra-wide – have new sensors, and the 12MP TrueDepth camera gobbles up more light and can now autofocus. All the lenses are backed by Apple’s new Photonic Engine ("photonic" refers to the management of photons, or light particles – read more about it in our iPhone 14 camera explainer). In a practical sense, it’s a reordering of Apple's imaging pipeline, which now applies the Deep Fusion neural engine image processing to uncompressed images (rather than compressed ones, as it did previously).
What you won’t find here is a 48MP sensor with quad-pixel binning or any kind of zoom. For those, you need to upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max.
There’s still the excellent Super Retina XDR OLED screen, but if you’re not a fan of that notch you may again want to go for the 14 Pro or Pro Max, which are rocking Apple’s nifty new Dynamic Island, along with an adaptive refresh rate and always-on display.
Apple also made the decision to keep the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus on last year’s Apple silicon. Granted, it’s not the same A15 Bionic that ran last year’s iPhone 13 and 13 mini. Instead of a four-core GPU, this A15 Bionic has a five-core GPU. It’s essentially the same chip that was in last year’s iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, and should promise improved performance over the iPhone 13’s chip.
For all that hasn’t changed, there are some cool new (though hard-to-test) features, like crash detection; where the phone will know if you’re in a car crash and automatically alert emergency services and key contacts. In a similar vein, the iPhone 14 can now use satellite communications to contact emergency services. It’s an industry first, and it’s good to see that even Apple’s entry-level iPhone 14 got this new ability.
There are some other significant under-the-hood updates, specifically a new heat dissipation system that will help the phone manage temperatures better, and work more efficiently (this phone has better battery life than the iPhone 13). Apple also contends that this iPhone is easier to repair than previous models, as – among other things, the back glass can now be replaced without have to swap out the entire enclosure.
