Review: Apple iPhone 14

As I was getting a haircut last week, my hairdresser asked if I’d seen the new iPhone. She didn’t know my occupation but saw my Apple Watch and, as is obligatory in that line of work, was making small talk. “Does it look any different?” was the main query. I reached into my back pocket and with a flourish handed her the iPhone 14. A surprised smile quickly gave way to disappointment. “It’s exactly the same as my iPhone 11,” she said. 

This is the problem for Apple. The few elements the public might recognize as new have gone to the iPhone 14 Pro models, such as the Always-On display and Dynamic Island. The Pros also have new 48-megapixel sensors for the primary rear camera, something Apple hasn’t fiddled with since 2015. This means the phones capture more detail so you can print your pics large, for example, and it allows for more editing options. But be honest—how many people do you know who print poster-sized photos or delve into RAW settings on their handset?

The vanilla iPhone is arguably the most important handset for Apple. After all, it sells the most by some margin. If Apple wants you to upgrade, there needs to be an obvious reason, or reasons, to do so—ones the average person can recognize and get excited about. So let’s take a look at what Apple wants us to consider when looking at the new iPhone 14.

Photograph: Apple

Yes, it looks exactly the same as the iPhone 13. Well, I’ll give you a prize if you can detect the 0.31-inch thickness compared to the predecessor’s 0.30 inches, or the nearly 2 grams shaved off in weight. You get the same 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display, still—yes, still—running at 60 Hz. Unlike most other phones at this price, you won’t get a slick 120-Hz screen refresh rate. You’ll have to upgrade to a Pro model if you really want it. 

Apple has ditched the iPhone Mini design (it bombed, sadly) and returned to “bigger is better,” adding in a 6.7-inch Plus model. This iPhone 14 Plus is virtually the same as the iPhone 14, except it will have slightly longer battery life and arrives on October 7 (you can preorder it now). 

These iPhones remain IP68 water- and dust-resistant. You get the same toughened ceramic glass and aluminum as on the 13. The same brightness levels. Even the processor powering it is the same—the A15 Bionic chip instead of the A16 in the Pro, but here at least Apple has given you the iPhone 13 Pro version with an extra graphics core. Apple has fiddled with the battery to give you an almost unnoticeable extra hour of video playback, from 19 to 20. But the larger design of the iPhone 14 Plus bumps this up to 26 hours.

Load up the iPhone 13 and iPhone 14 on Apple’s own comparison tool and you can see for yourself how few differences there are between the two. 

Two of the most significant upgrades for the new iPhones are features that you will hopefully never use and that are hard to test. I love my job, but I’m not about to get into a car accident or fall off a mountain on purpose. Sorry. 

Assuming Crash Detection works as stated, it is indeed a clever addition. A new dual-core accelerometer and high-dynamic-range gyroscope, along with sound monitoring, can detect severe crashes up to 256 gs. Once a prang is registered, the iPhone 14 can automatically dial emergency services and play a voice loop notifying responders of the crash and providing your location. The iPhone can also alert emergency contacts in the Health app. 

If you come to harm in a remote area where there’s no phone service, SOS Emergency via Satellite uses custom antennas to connect to Globalstar satellites in orbit, allowing you to text chat with emergency responders or Apple’s own Relay Center. The trick here will be having enough battery left to find those satellites (it also doesn’t work indoors). 

Photograph: Apple

With the iPhone 14, you don’t need a physical SIM card to connect to cellular networks. Instead, you can use an eSIM (electronic SIM). This is not new tech—it’s been available since the iPhone XS. However, Apple has completely nixed the physical SIM card slot for iPhones in the US. People in the UK (and the rest of the world) still get the option to use one.

The eSIM is easy for iPhone users to set up if their network provider supports it. Mine does not, so I was glad to have the old physical tray. My colleague, WIRED reviews editor Julian Chokkattu, had no trouble transferring his number from an iPhone 13 Pro to a few different iPhone 14 models. It was merely a matter of pressing a button or two, and within a few minutes his number was on the new phone. 

However, switching from Android to iPhone is not as painless (or going back to an Android, especially one without eSIM support). You’ll likely need to scan a QR code from your carrier, and you might have to call them to straighten things out. This transfer will hopefully get easier in time, and the fact that we are still using bits of plastic when we don’t need to is annoying. Apple forcing eSIM adoption is certainly a step in the right direction.

Photograph: Apple

There are a few subtle upgrades on the camera system from the iPhone 13 to the iPhone 14. The ultrawide lens is largely unchanged (unlike on the Pro models), but the main lens has an f/1.5 aperture as opposed to f/1.6, along with a larger image sensor, for a claimed 49 percent improvement in low light for photos and video. I could not, however, see such an improvement in my night photos. In fact, I found it hard to discern any real difference in several shots, though the iPhone 14 performed slightly better overall. 

A new TrueDepth front camera gives you autofocus for the first time, which is great and seems to function fine, but it leaves me wondering why it wasn’t there before. It also has a faster f/1.9 aperture for better low-light selfies (up to 2X, Apple says, “thanks to Photonic Engine”).

Ah yes, Photonic Engine. Not as good a name as Dynamic Island, but still catchy. Remember “Deep Fusion,” where an iPhone automatically took multiple images and cherry-picked the best bits? Photonic Engine is basically an amped-up version of this, as it applies Deep Fusion to uncompressed images earlier in the pipeline, supposedly enabling the use of more data for more detail. Apple says Photonic Engine dramatically improves photos taken in mid- to low-light scenes. I can’t agree with the word “dramatically” here. 

iPhone 14Photograph: Jeremy White

iPhone 14Photograph: Jeremy White

Basically, all of this new image processing is supposed to represent a huge improvement for the iPhone camera. But I have to agree with my colleague Julian’s view of the Pros on this one (he is a real photographer, rather than a point-and-click phone camera jockey like me): It’s hard to notice any significant upgrade from last year, particularly for casual users like me. 

Video is where the iPhone shines, and even more so with the new iPhone 14. I once showed a professional car videographer the stabilization built into the iPhone when we were shooting a video of the electric Mini. He couldn’t believe how good it was, and we immediately ditched his camera/gimbal setup and shot with the iPhone handheld. 

If that wasn’t enough, now the iPhone 14 has “Action mode,” which you can toggle on while shooting video for extra stabilization. It works up to 2.8 K resolution and 60 fps and effectively raises an already superb iPhone feature to a new level. It requires a lot of light to work well, but there is a toggle in the camera settings menu to enable Action mode in low light (the sacrifice being decreased stabilization). As a final flourish, Apple has also bumped up Cinematic mode from 1080p to support 4K resolution up to 30 fps.

We all know Apple likes saying its products are “the best yet.” That’s accurate, but it’s also deceptive. Any company can add an insignificant feature or reduce the weight of a product by 0.07 ounces and legitimately claim it is “the best yet.” The real measure of an upgrade is whether customers notice even if they haven’t been told about it. Does the iPhone 14 clear this bar? No.

I have spent more than a week playing with mine, streaming video, taking pictures, making calls, browsing sites, playing games (please do try the superb Grand Mountain Adventure), and listening to music, but if you took the iPhone 14 away and replaced it with not just the 13 but my old iPhone 12, I don’t think I’d notice much of a difference at all. This is the best vanilla iPhone yet, but the upgrades are so iterative that the vast majority of people, provided they have the latest version of iOS, simply won’t need to upgrade. 

All Apple had to do to make this iPhone 14 a bigger hit with potential upgraders was to give it the Dynamic Island, rather than saving that for one of next year’s trickledown improvements. Who cares if it’s not game-changing? It’s a clever trick that makes smart use of some dead space hiding the Face ID sensors. It makes it look new!

Ultimately, Apple itself underlines what’s wrong with the iPhone 14 upgrades. Take a look at the revamped AirPods Pro. We love them. Just like the iPhone 14, these wireless earbuds look the same, but such is the uplift in noise canceling, sound quality, and battery life, plus a charging case complete with its own speaker, that almost anyone would be hard-pressed to ignore the improvements. As for the iPhone 14, the best iPhone yet, how would I—and my hairdresser—sum it up? Underwhelming.