It was a farewell day at Apple’s iPhone Far Out launch event. In addition to getting rid of the iPhone mini variant, Apple has also ditched the notch on the iPhone 14 Pro in favor of a pill-shaped cutout, which the company calls the Dynamic Island at the top of the display.
iPhone 14 Pro abandons the giant screen hole (live broadcast)
iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max also feature brighter screens and offer Always On Display so you can always see your most important information. At the Apple event in Cupertino, I spent some time with the new hardware and have to say that while the dynamic island is still very straightforward, it also looks a lot more useful.
The difference is that the interface now makes better use of space by displaying different information about it. When you start a countdown in the timer app or play a song on Apple Music, the island will display an orange dot to indicate that something has happened. Then, when I left the app, Al Jazeera displayed a waveform to indicate that my voice recorder was still playing, or that the music was playing. When I long pressed the island while one of these activities was going on, the chest was expanded to show more controls.
Apple Music, for example, has been expanded to show the playback progress bar and the rewind, pause, and skip buttons below. For Timer and Voice Memo, controls for stopping countdowns and recordings have appeared respectively. The software cleverly blurs the aperture here, so it never interrupts the content and is hidden by a blank black space in that area. Of course, until now, I’ve used Apple’s first-party apps on the iPhone 14, and the third-party options may not adapt to the island either.
When nothing happens, a long press on the dynamic island results in a slight stretching of the animation and subtle haptic feedback. You can also see the 12MP TrueDepth camera on the right below. Again, it’s not a full screen display, but the camera clip looks better hidden than before.
Speaking of which, the iPhone 14 Pro also gets an upgraded camera system, with a new 48MP primary rear sensor powered by Apple’s new photonic engine for better low-light performance. This isn’t something I can test here in the brightly lit demo space, and I haven’t been able to verify the new motion mode of the video stabilization. But there are a lot of improvements on iPhone 14 Pros on the video interface and camera, such as support for Cinematic Mode for resolutions up to
4K and 30fps are the frames we have to check out in a full review.
iPhone 14 Pro is set against a white background, with the new dynamic island clip showing the Apple Music playback box.
Another new feature that I was able to try out for a while is Always On Display. When your iPhone 14 Pro is left to sit for a while, it dims its screen, but it remains bright enough so that you can see the contents of the lock screen. When I raised the iPhone 14 Pro a bit, its screen quickly returned to full brightness, just like older iPhones responded from sleep.
Unlike the Samsung or Pixel approach, the Apple version keeps things like the wallpaper and visuals as well as the clock. This may tax the battery a bit more, but the company still promises all-day endurance for the iPhone 14 Pro series. That could be thanks to the new A16 Bionic chip, which is based on a 4nm design process that should be more energy efficient. But this is something again, we have to wait until we can test ourselves to verify it.
Although the 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch screens of both the Pro and Pro Max were quite bright, it wasn’t easy to determine if the new phones’ screens were brighter than their predecessors.
If you’re already late to the upgrade or don’t want to be sure you’ll get an upgrade next week, you can pre-order the iPhone 14 Pro on September 9. Those who can wait until we can do a full review, the phones will be available from September 16 starting at $999 for the Pro and $1,099 for the Max.