Alright, Wordsmith fans, I’ve had my iPhone 13 Pro in my hands since the end of launch day. I have held it and started putting it through its paces. But, how does it live up? Am I okay after the break-up with my iPhone 12 Pro? Do I wish I had gone with the iPhone 13 Pro Max?

While this isn’t a full iPhone 13 Pro review, here are my first impressions of my new device in Sierra Blue

Unboxing the iPhone 13 Pro

Apple has always made it super easy to get into the iPhone boxes. There used to be a plastic cover with a pull tab that you had to pull off to get into the box. This year though, there was no plastic wrap on the outside. It was just a simple pull-tab on the cardboard box this year and you were into the box and ready to grab your iPhone.

I liked the fact that I didn’t have all this plastic sitting around. I hope this is a trend that keeps continuing for other devices as well.

I don’t see a need for all of the extra waste. I don’t think dust is getting into the box and ruining phones.

It was also the easiest box to get into quickly. When that excitement is riding in your body for a whole day and you are anxious to get into it, that plastic is a crappy gift wrap.

Everything was tightly packed in, although there isn’t much. Just the phone, USB-C power cable and the paperwork/stickers.

First Impressions before Powering Up

This year, I bought the Sierra Blue model. Last year, I went with a silver iPhone 12 Pro because, the year before I bought the green iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I never took to the color. I never saw the iPhone 11 Pro Max as anything but a boring grey. The iPhone 12 Pro in silver wasn’t much more fun, but at least I knew what I was getting myself into. I bought a fun-colored case to make it pop and only thought about how boring the silver color was a few times.

This year, I thought about going with the graphite color because I didn’t want to be disappointed by the blue color. Upon opening the box, I felt a little disheartened. The blue wasn’t very prominent. It felt like it was just a drab grey color again. Oh well, I have a fun case coming anyway.

But, taking it out of the box and looking at it, the color definitely looked bluer than I first thought. It’s still not the light blue that I thought, but I’m okay with it. I don’t really feel like the Graphite option would have made me feel much more joy.

I do sometimes feel jealousy over the regular iPhone colors. The coral color of the iPhone XR has been my favorite of all iPhones, but most of the colors haven’t sparked enough joy for me to make the switch over. Maybe when the base model iPhone gets the ProMotion display, I might be okay making the jump, but for now, I’m sticking to the Pro models.

The iPhone 13 Pro itself felt a little heavier in the hand. It has a good heft to it. It feels good to hold. While it is technically thicker, I didn’t really notice it because my iPhone 12 Pro was in a case most of the time anyway. But the thing I noticed most about my new device was just how much larger the cameras grew since the last model. I knew that the camera bump was going to be bigger than ever, but I hadn’t really taken into account what that meant or how much bigger the sensors would get as well.

These lenses are huge. I’m wondering how far we’re going to get with camera lenses before we are back to just having a normal old-style camera with a phone attached to it.

Other things to note, most of the buttons are in the same place, but the sim card slot has moved up closer to the volume buttons. I’m sure this was just to get the larger batteries crammed inside, but it was interesting to note.

Also, the FaceID camera notch has slimmed down to not take as much space on the width of the iPhone 13, but it does creep out a little more.

With my physical inspection over, it was time to fire this baby up.

Setting Up My iPhone 13 Pro

When starting up your new iPhone, you pick a language and country, and then it tells you to bring your old iPhone close to transfer using Quick Start. Once you do that, you get a pop-up on the old phone asking if you want to port everything over and that’s that. It’s very simple and most of the big tech names recommend doing it. Of course, you can also set up as new, restore from an iCloud backup or plug into your computer and restore from a backup that way. The Quick Start method has gotten much better over the years but isn’t without issues.

But before I really get into the process, I want to talk about how much smoother the iPhone 13 Pro screen is with ProMotion. It isn’t something you can show off in a video sadly, but it is the most notable thing about the iPhone 13 Pro line, besides the larger camera bump. Even from just starting up the phone, the difference in the refresh rate is apparent, and I don’t know how I went without it for so long.

The transfer process felt smooth. It wasn’t very convenient that I couldn’t use either of my phones during the nearly forty-minute process, but once it was done everything was on my new phone. I didn’t have to put in too many passwords, although some apps did ask me for that info. Using a password manager makes this process way less painless than it used to be. And while I have been a 1Password user for the longest time, Apple has done such a great job with iCloud passwords, that I’m going to try to consolidate to just using that. It even added 2 Factor Authorization keys this year!

If you have an Apple Watch, once you start using the new phone, your Watch will ask if you want to transfer your Apple Watch profile to the new phone. Press okay, you’ll get the Apple Setup Ring on the watch face for a little while and then you’re good to go.

But transferring using Quick Start left me with four issues:

1. Apps that I hadn’t opened on the new phone weren’t sending notifications. It wasn’t a huge deal, but I was sad that I could have lost my nearly 600 day streak on duolingo. Luckily, I had a streak freeze. So, if you do this phone to phone transfer, just make sure that you at least open apps whose notifications are important to you.
2. I couldn’t access all my devices in the Now Playing app on my Apple Watch. At home, on wifi, I could only control my iPhone and Apple Watch. All my Apple TVs and HomePods were no where to be found. I ended up just unpairing the watch and repairing it with a backup and everything showed back up.
3. Another issue on the Watch was that if you transfered your iPhone and watch to the new phone, you couldn’t use your Apple Watch to unlock your phone if you’re wearing a mask, but Apple will provide a fix in an update. There’s just no telling when that will happen.
4. Finally, I’m sure this has to do with my celluar carrier more than anything, but even though my iPhone asked me if my phone number was my phone number when I was setting it up, my number didn’t get ported over to the new esim card. Any call or text that went through was only going to my old iPhone. Luckily, I found how to go to your account online and change the sim over. I think most of the carriers moved to esims this year and there were bound to be some issues. I had to do this for my wife’s phone as well.

Battery Life For Days

My biggest issue with the iPhone 12 Pro was battery life. The phone just couldn’t last me all day as the iPhone 11 Pro Max did. But, Apple did a lot with battery life on this new phone. They crammed a bigger battery inside. They optimized the processor to use less energy. And, while running a display at 120Hz is very battery intensive, the great thing about ProMotion is that the refresh rate can lower down so it doesn’t use as much battery life as well. It takes a lot less battery to run a screen at 10hz vs 120hz. So when there isn’t anything moving on the screen, Apple can lower that refresh rate to use less energy. If you watch a movie, most movies are shot in 30 frames or less, so you actually get better battery life than normal, even when watching a movie.

So far, in my normal day’s use, the battery is so good that I haven’t even really worried about it. I did some pretty intensive work on my phone the first couple of days, taking lots of videos, photos, tagging pictures, as well as the usual stuff that comes with moving to a new phone. While I pushed it pretty far on Saturday, I went the entire day until I got the Low Power Mode option.

My first day back at work was amazing as well. I used my phone just as much as normal. Where my iPhone 12 Pro would have made it lower than 40% by the time I got home from work, the iPhone 13 Pro still had about 60% remaining. This is such an upgrade for me, and it fixes one of my biggest complaints.

Connectivity

I’m not sure if I should chalk this up to T-Mobile, iOS 15, or the new iPhone, but my 5G service has improved since iOS 15 came out last week. Of course, T-Mobile also updated the carrier settings once iOS 15 came out. Since then, even the service on my iPhone 12 had improved.

I haven’t had any of the issues that I had with 5G for the past year. My connection feels stable and often fairly fast. Running speed tests have proved interesting though. I’ve gotten speeds up to 360mbps or as slow as 8mbps while standing in the same spot.

Regardless of the speeds, it’s the connection that I’m appreciating more than anything. If you had issues with 5G on T-mobile before, I think the latest Carrier update fixed most of them.

Now, I just hope that 5G keeps improving. The speed and the connection should keep improving.

But speed hasn’t really been an issue to this point.

I also noticed that I was getting faster wifi speeds at home compared to last year’s iPhone model. I’m not sure that Apple mentioned anything about updated Wifi speeds, but I’m getting them. I’ve gotten almost 150mbps more than I got on last year without updating any of my equipment at home.

MagSafe – Hold on Loosely

MagSafe hasn’t changed this year. The magnets on the iPhone 13 aren’t any different than the ones on the 12. I had hoped that they would be a little stronger so that I would have more faith in the things I attach to my phone, like a wallet. If you had a good time with MagSafe, nothing should be changing, unless you have a MagSafe Duo charger. The larger camera bump of the iPhone 13 Pro moves into the territory the Duo charger would normally take up. Now, the iPhone doesn’t lay flat on it anymore. The Duo does still charge, but it doesn’t look great. I would be worried to use it, which is what Apple tried to avoid with MagSafe.

But I’m not sure Apple will ever change the strength of the magnet on the iPhone. I think it will be up to the accessory companies to increase the strength of the magnets on the devices they create. My MagSafe charger on my nightstand works great and holds strong. But I worry about attaching a wallet to it frequently. The wallet slips off much easier than the chargers seem to. Although, Apple did update their wallet to support Find My to allow you to know when and where a wallet became detached from the phone.

Cameras

I’m not a photographer. I think the photos from any iPhone in the last four or five years look great. But these photos do look better. I can tell that there is more detail in the pictures I take from the standard camera. Things look really good, and you can tailor your pictures a little more than before with Camera Styles.

Camera Styles are like a live filter that you can apply to your camera before you take a picture. They allow you to tint them as you like with presets and more to make your photos look better to you when you take them, before editing.

Of course, all the extra detail comes from the larger image sensors on the iPhone 13 Pro, that’s why the camera bump is so big. The bigger lens lets more light in, and with light comes the details.

Below are some of the pictures I’ve taken.

Of course, there is also a couple of new modes for shooting pictures: Macro and Cinematic. I haven’t messed around with Macro mode much yet, but there is already some hate for it. It’s not in how the pictures turn out, but how the iPhone deals with moving to Macro mode. When you bring your camera close to something to take a Macro shot, you’ll see a jump as it moves to the ultra-wide-angle lens. The user can’t control when or if the camera jumps to the macro camera. Apple is preparing a fix in a future update so that users can control this better.

Cinematic mode is basically Portrait mode for video. When using this mode, you’ll have a focus and the rest of the image will be blurred. If the focus moves, or if something else comes into view, the focus can change. It’s pretty amazing. In fact, since using it, I seem to default to the cinematic mode when taking videos now.

The mode isn’t perfect, hair seems to be a big problem for the system, but the videos just look so much more interesting to me. Also, you don’t get full-resolution videos, Cinematic mode is limited to 1080p and won’t record 4K video – for now.

Max Thoughts

Before ordering I really contemplated going with the iPhone 13 Pro Max. I had always used the larger phone size until this last generation where I had grown tired of how much space the phone took up in my pocket and hand. I’ve also started to use my iPad Pro less, so I thought about getting the Max-sized phone to bridge the gap. But I went to an Apple Store before the preorders and tried out an iPhone 12 Pro Max in my hand.

The thing felt huge.

It felt like more than what I wanted to really use on a daily basis. So I pre-ordered the regular Pro size. As soon as I did that though, I started to feel some FOMO that I made the wrong decision. I started to even scour the Apple Store for launch day iPhone 13 Pro Max to pick up in-store. Even though I had a chance to order one on launch day, I talked myself out of it.

And honestly, I’m more than happy with the Pro. Not once have I felt like it was too small. It still feels good in the pocket and I can get just as much done with the smaller size. It’s not exactly small anyway.

So if you like the big screen, I’d say go for it. For me, the smaller screen works and even feels better to take around with you. Plus the battery life is good enough (so far) that it isn’t a huge issue.

Final Thoughts

So, should you upgrade?

Normally, I wouldn’t recommend people upgrade from the previous model. If you are happy with your iPhone 12, this isn’t an upgrade that you need to go out and get. But if you were frustrated like me by the 12, or if your iPhone is a few years old and you’re looking for a new device, the iPhone 13 Pro is a great phone.

So far, I love my iPhone 13 Pro. It fixes most of the issues I had with my iPhone 12 Pro. Although, I’ve been pretty happy with an iPhone before, I still grew ready to trade it in the next year. This might be the first iPhone in a while to see two or more years of use though.

Did you pick up an iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro? What do you think of it?