Is the iPhone 12 worth it?
by Hashim Farooq
Last week Apple held their annual October iPhone event where they launched their latest and greatest phones. This year’s theme was Speed, with the launch of 5G in North America, Apple have focused their attention on making the new iPhone 12 take advantage of everything 5G has to offer.
Let’s talk about the design. As I said before this phone is focused on taking advantage of the 5G and the design reflects that. It may look like Apple took a step back a decade to the iPhone 4 with the “boxy” design, but in fact the “boxy” design made space for more antennas and drastically reduced the size of the phone. Some can argue that the iPhone 4 is the most sold phone by Apple (also one of the most sold of all time) and Apple is just going back to what works (the “boxy” design). This would actually be surprising because Apple isn’t known to listen to its consumers, their slogan “think different” has them taking drastic steps to be different in the phone industry and not repeat the past. Whatever the inspiration may be, the fact is boxy equals faster, slimmer and reduced screen to body ratio. This design isn’t surprising as it was predicted by many people on the internet for the iPhone 5 SE back in 2015.
iPhone 12 has some other upgrades; they made the camera better by adding LiDAR (which enhances the AI in the camera to give better portrait shots), it can also take 4K HDR videos, massively improved night-sight technology, it has a big magnet in the back to stick to the wireless charger and different accessories Apple made to make money off you, and the phone is packing their new A14 bionic processor which is supposed to be the fastest processor on a phone to date.
Apple released 4 phones at 4 different price points to attract more consumers as their cheaper phones tend to attract a new audience, specifically the Android audience. Apple tries to match their cheapest phone with the average cost of a “flagship” Android phone to attract a cheaper phone that offers the exact same speed and design as the other iPhone 12s. Out of the 4 phones, iPhone 12 mini (slightly smaller than iPhone 6 ), iPhone 12, iPhone 12 pro and iPhone 12 pro max, the iPhone 12 mini is probably the best bang for your buck. Before we talk prices, let’s talk about one of the biggest scams in phones, which is their memory (storage) , how much gigabytes it has, this scheme was made just so phone companies can slap a number on phones and increase the price by a $100, when consumers started to realize this, the higher storage phones didn’t sell well. After realizing this, Apple, Samsung, Google, Huawei and many other companies needed to do something to the phone physically so people could tell the difference between the “rich consumer” and “not an idiot who wants to spend hundreds on a phone with 20 cameras,” so they decided to increase the size, cause bigger is better right? This worked, and soon came the generation of pluses and maxes. Now phones are in the 1000s just for being an inch bigger and having 1 or 2 extra circles on the back which lets the customer take better photos of their friends who by the way didn’t even buy the damn thing, now they can have all their friends give them photo creds in their Instagram posts, congrats $1000+ for creds which they may or may not mention.
Alright, let’s look at the prices (these are prices on the Apple website and not from cell service provides as they may vary); iPhone 12 mini $979 CAD, iPhone 12 $1,129 CAD, iPhone 12 Pro $1,399 CAD, get ready to refinance your house or get a mortgage on this next phone, iPhone 12 Pro Max $1,959 (I should probably mention, if you live in Manitoba, which you probably do because your reading this, get ready to pay 13% tax on this.). These phone prices are starting to get out of hand. The iPhone 12 Pro Max costs as much as a used car, which is insane to comprehend, it’s about the average monthly income (considering that they are working and not in school studying like 80% of them) of a 18-24 year old (which is the main audience for this massive mistake of a phone which everyone will buy and take selfies with on the bus cause they can’t buy a car anymore).
Now the big question, Is it worth it? As much as I want you (the reader) not to buy this overpriced, big, metal domino, majority of you will. Maybe you’ll buy it because you want to upgrade your phone or because your friends have it and you don’t want to look like a “not an idiot who wants to spend hundreds on a phone with 20 cameras” just know this, selling your kidney for this phone is not worth it, but if you’re rich go for it. All jokes aside, Apple didn’t do a bad job on the iPhone 12, it looks different and is a bigger upgrade since the iPhone X. If money wasn’t a factor, this would be the one to buy.
(source: Apple ) iPhone 12 specs sheet