IPhone 12 review: release date, price, specifications and features

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Introduction

Then: The iPhone 12 has a brand-new design, a new screen, is powered by a new processor, and can perform some new party tricks, including 5G support for the first time.

Now: Apple's iPhone 12 has been superseded by the iPhone 14 for more than two years. But that doesn't mean it's dead, as Apple is still selling it, making it one of the more affordable ways to get an iPhone capable of handling everything iOS can throw at it.

Price

Given its premium status, the iPhone 12 isn't the cheapest smartphone available. It is actually £100 ($100) more expensive than the iPhone 11 in all storage sizes.

The 64GB iPhone 12 costs £799 ($799, AU$1349), the 128GB model costs £849 ($849, AU$1429), and the top-of-the-line 256GB model costs £949 ($949, AUS$1599).

This still puts a bit of distance between itself and the flagship iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, which start at £999 ($999, AU$1699) and £1099 ($1099, AU$1849) respectively. However, both of these start at 128GB and go up to 512GB. It's a shame the standard iPhone 12 doesn't offer something similar.

It should be noted that the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini remain in Apple's lineup at lower prices. The iPhone 13 costs $100 more than the iPhone 12. The iPhone 13 is also $599, so Apple is asking you to pay for newer features or a larger screen.

Design & screen

Apple rarely changes the physical design of the iPhone from generation to generation, so any change — no matter how minor — is usually welcomed. The iPhone 12's flat-edge design is one of the more modest revisions from previous editions.
Sure, the flat edges look nice enough and provide a welcome change from the previous several years of rounded iPhones. Furthermore, they improve the iPhone 12's durability in tandem with Apple's new Ceramic Shield material, whereas previous iPhones' rounded frames actually made them more fragile.

Having said that, I can't say my hands have adapted well to the sharper design. Few smartphones employ flat sides these days, and the iPhone 12 reminds me why. The edges dig into your palm, making the entire device more difficult to hold. For example, the iPhone 12 is 0.29 inches thick, which is virtually identical to the 0.31-inch-thick Pixel 5. The Pixel 5 feels more slender in the hand, however, because it naturally fits the curvature of your palm.

Furthermore — and I won't blame you if you dismiss this as a nitpick — as a longtime iPhone 11 Pro user, I couldn't help but notice that the 6.1-inch iPhone 12 is a hair taller than it needs to be. The term "responsibility" refers to the act of determining whether or not a person is responsible for his or her own actions. Those looking for a more compact device will now have to settle for the 5.4-inch iPhone 13 mini. (The iPhone 12 mini is no longer around.) And, while I applaud Apple for continuing to offer a small flagship phone, I can't help but think a 5.4-inch display is a little too small for modern users.

Nonetheless, I'm smitten by the design of the iPhone 12. I like how Apple has reduced the bezels significantly compared to the iPhone 11 and XR, though a slightly smaller notch would have been nice. While I'm not a fan of the new blue colour — I find this type of navy a little boring — I do like the mint green on offer, and I especially like the elegant simplicity of this design. The iPhone 12 is also available in four other colours: black, white, red, and purple.

MogSafe

Apple's brand of wireless charging isn't particularly distinctive. The company's own $30 MagSafe charging puck follows the same Qi standard as any other wireless charger for any other phone — it just has magnets. Your iPhone 12 will continue to work with any wireless chargers or Qi accessories you already own, but to achieve those peak 15-watt speeds, you'll need a first- or third-party solution that includes MagSafe.

The bad news is that MagSafe takes longer to charge than Apple's 20W wired charger. Much slower. The 20W fast charger charges the iPhone 12 to 50% capacity in 28 minutes. The 15W MagSafe charger took an hour.

That isn't to dismiss the MagSafe philosophy, which makes a lot of sense. The magnets aid in the positioning of the iPhone 12 on chargers and make accessory attachment easier. And it's certainly easier to charge your phone by placing it on a puck that instantly aligns itself perfectly, rather than fumbling around at your bedside for a tiny Lightning connector.

Display

The iPhone 11's LCD display was undeniably the Achilles' heel of Apple's entry-level premium iPhones, but that is no longer the case with the iPhone 12. It's all thanks to a 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display that matched what you got in the iPhone 12 Pro.
This panel has a 2532x1170 resolution, which significantly improves the clarity of on-screen content over the iPhone 11's 1792x898 display. It's also HDR10 certified, so you can watch videos recorded with the device's Dolby Vision-enabled rear camera the way they were meant to be seen.

The iPhone 12's screen is still not perfect, and anyone who has used a recent Galaxy, Pixel, or OnePlus phone for any length of time understands why. Following months of rumours to the contrary, Apple decided to forego high refresh-rate displays on the entire iPhone 12 line, despite the fact that they have become quite common in the flagship smartphone space over the past year. (Even if you get the new iPhone 14 lineup, you'll need to get one of Apple's Pro phones to get faster refresh rates on an iPhone.)

As a result, animations aren't as smooth, and taps and scrolls don't respond as quickly as they do on, say, the 90Hz Pixel 5 or 120Hz Galaxy S20. Even though the iPhone 12 is more powerful than those devices, as we'll see later in the review, it feels slower to use at times due to the display's lack of athleticism.

In terms of brightness, the iPhone 12 measured 569 nits at its brightest setting, falling far short of Apple's 625-nit estimate. It was able to render 114.5% of the sRGB colour space — just shy of the Samsung Galaxy Note 20's 122.8% — indicating slightly more restrained and natural hues rather than oversaturation.

Looking to the Delta-E color accuracy test, the iPhone 12 scored a result of 0.29, which is surprisingly a bit worse than the iPhone 11’s 0.22 result. (Numbers closer to zero indicate more accurate hues.) Nevertheless, colors seemed appropriate to my eye, and the switch to OLED alone makes this a massive leap compared to the previous generation, generally speaking.

Performance

The iPhone 12 delivers best-in-class performance that never wavered, thanks to the first 5-nanometer processor ever embedded in a smartphone, Apple's A14 Bionic. The iPhone 11 series' A13 Bionic chip was already faster than Qualcomm's top-tier 2020 silicon, the Snapdragon 865 Plus, but the A14 widens the gap even more. Android phones are catching up by 2022, but the iPhone 12 still holds its own.

The Geekbench 5 test, which measures overall system performance, shows that Apple's newest CPU has a similar advantage. The iPhone 12 set a blistering pace in this section, scoring 3,859 in the multicore portion of the benchmark. The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra received 3,440 points.

Apple has also not skimped on the graphics department. According to Apple, the GPU in the A14 Bionic is 50% faster than the one in the A13. While the most recent mobile games don't always take full advantage of phone manufacturers' rapid innovation, I can say that Asphalt 9 Legends — a game that can occasionally be choppy on some higher-end Android phones — felt smooth and sharp on the iPhone 12. (Of course, a higher refresh rate display would have enhanced the illusion of responsiveness and immersion, but that's a different issue.)

Apple hasn't skimped on graphics either. Apple claims that the GPU in the A14 Bionic is 50% faster than the one in the A13. While the latest mobile games don't always take full advantage of phone makers' rapid innovation, I can say that Asphalt 9 Legends — a game that can occasionally be chuggy on some higher-end Android phones — felt smooth and sharp on the iPhone 12. (Of course, a faster refresh rate display would have enhanced the illusion of responsiveness and immersion, but that's another story.)

3DMark's Wild Life graphics benchmark, which tasks devices with rendering complex, taxing scenes in real-time, is a better measure of performance. In this test, the Galaxy S21 Ultra achieves a top frame rate of 34 frames per second. In our testing, the iPhone 12 achieved 39 frames per second.

Cameras

• Similar technology to the iPhone 11 in 2019, but with a few improvements.

• The rear camera has two 12MP sensors.

• The front sensor also functions as a 12MP selfie camera.

From the outside, it appears that not much has changed in the iPhone 12 camera department. The dual-lens rear shooters are arranged similarly to last year, and both the wide and ultrawide optics are supported by 12-megapixel sensors.
However, don't let your eyes fool you; upgrades have been made. The primary camera, in particular, features a 7-element design with a /1.6 aperture, the largest available in an iPhone at the time. Both of these changes result in a 27% improvement in low-light performance, which, when combined with advancements in Smart HDR and Deep Fusion, should translate to more detail in even the most challenging lighting conditions.

So let's start, then, with a couple of Night mode shots that show what a year of improvements has brought to the iPhone's low-light performance. Both images offer dramatic and stunning night scenes, but the iPhone 12's display is sharper across the board, with more realistic tones for these trees and on the concrete floor, and better sensitivity to visual highlights.

Having said that, Apple has some work to do. According to how the iPhone 12's best work compares to the Pixel 5's in the example above, Google appears to have the upper hand at night. While Apple's software emphasises object boundaries, giving everything in the frame a bit more depth, Google's algorithms produce a universally more visible result, along with significantly less overall noise. The iPhone 12's shot has some ugly vignetting around the edges that the Pixel's shot does not.

In daylight, the iPhone 12's main camera gives you little to complain about. While the Note 20 painted a nice view of this palm and the clouds above it a bit more sharply, especially the sunlight amidst the clouds, I vastly prefer the iPhone 12's attempt at its more realistic color handling, from the overcast sky in the middle of the afternoon to the color.

Samsung again went overboard in post-processing here, as it's so used to doing.

When we zoom in on the palm and the trees around it to the right, the iPhone 12's limitations become painfully clear. There's no optical zoom offered with the iPhone 12 — for that, you'll have to spend more on the iPhone 12 Pro or Pro Max. But even then, you won't get the same crystal clear clarity as the Note 20's 5x hybrid zoom, which brings out the colors of plants, leaf shapes, and wall color in the background.

portrait

Photographs taken with the iPhone 12 and the Pixel 5. Surprisingly, the iPhone 12 adopts a more drawn-out portrait perspective than the Pixel 5, which automatically applies some cropping.

The iPhone 12 version, on the other hand, appears clearer on the eyes, with better skin tone handling and Smart HDR brilliantly managing contrast between deep shadows. The iPhone 12 also uses a more subtle hair-around bokeh effect, which can be difficult to replicate in photos with shallow depth of field like these.

It's possible that he's looking deep within Apple's mind, which prefers to think about the nitty-gritty of what scenarios will become and rest, beginning with the development of the iPhone 12 and Pixel 5 to take a shot at a bouquet of flowers. The full bodice's bulk is designed to have a full block for a nice look. Using different colours, colours, and background colours results in a more appealing image.

Video Capture

With the iPhone 12 line, Apple went all-in on 4K HDR video recording. The regular iPhone 12 (and the smaller iPhone 12 mini) can record Dolby Vision video, just like the iPhone 12 and Pro Max, albeit at 30 frames per second rather than the Pro models' 60. Dolby Vision is a type of HDR encoding that goes above and beyond the standard HDR10 format in order to provide superior colour depth while ensuring a consistent visual presentation that is as close to the source material as possible, regardless of where or how the content is viewed.

It may be difficult to see, but trust us when we say that the difference is immediately visible when viewing the same content in HDR and SDR side by side. I shot a short video in a park as the sun set behind the trees, and the contrast in each case was startling. For starters, the sky was noticeably brighter in the Dolby Vision capture, and I could see individual leaves and trees reflecting the sun. These elements were faded, washed out, and obscured in the SDR take, and as someone who has been shooting video on an iPhone 11 Pro for the past year, I had no idea what I'd been missing.

To be fair, the iPhone 12 is far from the only smartphone capable of shooting HDR video. However, it is the only one that is Dolby Vision-certified, and HDR video I've shot on our Galaxy S20 Plus has never looked anywhere near as good unedited as what the iPhone 12 produces by default.

iPhone 12: 5G review

Many smartphones now support 5G, particularly in the two years since we published this iPhone 12 review. You don't even have to pay more for the privilege any longer. However, Apple's approach to 5G is what sets the iPhone 12 apart from all other 5G phones.

Unlike the vast majority of 5G handsets released at the time, which supported only one type of 5G and not another, or only the specific bands required to work on a specific network, the iPhone 12 went all in. It is built to run on the most bands of any 5G phone, which means a greater chance of 5G coverage, especially these days. Furthermore, the iPhone 12 supports both sub-6GHz 5G — the nationwide 5G that has so far formed the backbone of T-Mobile and AT&T's service — and much faster and shorter-range millimeter-wave 5G, which Verizon is focusing on deploying in America's cities.

This dual-pronged approach to 5G is critical because it ensures that when 5G becomes ubiquitous, your 5G-capable iPhone won't be hampered by a modem that only supports some networks and not others.

Mind you, that day was not when I first tested the iPhone 12 in 2020. On AT&T's network in a Pennsylvania suburb, I saw download speeds of around 85 Mbps on our iPhone 12 while pulling a two-bar signal. That's adequate, but only about a third as fast as the fastest LTE Advanced networks we've tested.

However, 5G increases the demand on the iPhone's battery, so Apple created Smart Data Mode. This feature intelligently switches between LTE and 5G depending on whether the device truly requires the additional speed.

For example, if you're just listening to music on Spotify with the screen turned off, your iPhone 12 may choose to stay on 4G to save power. However, the moment you start actively web browsing or making a FaceTime HD call, 5G will kick in full force. Smart Data Mode is completely optional; if you prefer to have 5G active at all times, you can enable it in the phone's settings.

Iphone 12 Battery

Apple never discloses battery capacity figures for its devices, making it difficult to derive any insights about longevity from a spec sheet. According to a teardown (opens in new tab), the iPhone 12 could be powered by a 2,815-mAh battery, which is roughly 200 mAh less capacity than the iPhone 11 Pro.

Nonetheless, larger-screen iPhones perform well in our custom battery test, in which devices continuously surf the web via cellular at 150 nits of screen brightness.

In this test, the iPhone 11 lasted 11 hours and 16 minutes, and anything longer than 11 hours is considered very good. In the same test, the iPhone 12 averaged 8 hours and 25 minutes, which appears to be a significant decrease.

However, there is more to this story. Apple rates the iPhone 12 for an identical 17 hours of video playback and 65 hours of audio playback as the iPhone11.

However, the iPhone 11 didn't have to deal with 5G. And when we repeated our test with 5G turned off in favour of LTE, the iPhone 12 performed significantly better.

The iPhone 12 had a 4G battery life of 10 hours and 23 minutes, which was two hours longer than its 5G battery life. If we had to guess, the culprit could be that 5G consumes more power, or that the iPhone 12 struggles to maintain a consistent 5G connection, forcing it to switch between 5G and 4G.

With the iPhone 13, Apple significantly improved battery life, so if you're considering a discounted older Apple device, know that you have long-lasting options.
The iPhone 12 battery story worsens as we approach the elephant in the room: Apple's decision to no longer include a charging brick and wired headphones with every iPhone going forward.

Say what you want about how much of this can be attributed to Cupertino's environmental initiative, but the fact remains that prospective iPhone buyers will be without the fastest-charging solution for the iPhone 12 unless they pay an extra $20 for Apple's 20-watt USB-C adapter. To make matters worse, the Lightning-to-USB-C cable included with the iPhone 12 will not work with older chargers and will be useless unless you purchase a new brick.

For buyers in the United Kingdom, the charger situation is the same, with Apple charging £39 for the MagSafe charger and £19 for the wired 20-watt charging block.

The 20-watt adapter charged the iPhone 12 from 0% to 57% in 30 minutes in our testing. That exceeds Apple's 50% estimate, though you won't see that kind of speed if you charge your new device with your old 5-watt brick from previous iPhones.

The iPhone 12 can now charge wirelessly at a maximum speed of 15 watts, which is noticeably faster than Apple's previous 7.5-watt requirement.