Apple's Best iPhone in 2021

 

Apple's Best iPhone in 2021

Today, I will talk about Apple's best iPhone in 2021. We also discuss and compare price, display, battery life, camera, performance, video, face ID, Touch ID among Apple's Latest iPhone in 2021 ( iPhone 8, 8Plus, iPhone 11, iPhone XR, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 pro max).

Good news will come that this is the current offering of iPhones from Apple for 2021. This Year, every phone that Apple currently sells new on their website or in their stores. Now, you may be able to get other phones that are not here used or refurbished. But they are not sold in stores or anything like that. So, these are everything that's currently sold by Apple new, and so, we'll start on the left with the iPhone 8.

The iPhone 8 starts at four hundred and forty-nine dollars and goes all the way up to the iPhone 11 Pro Max. on the far right here, that ends at one thousand four hundred & forty-nine dollars for the largest storage option of 512 gigabytes. So, we have an extensive range of prices from left to right. So, we have a couple differences between them.

The iPhone 8 obviously has a home button and have Face-ID. On the rest, we'll talk about the offerings from each one of these phones, so as you can see, this is the silver iPhone 8, and the silver iPhone 8 is for 49 and then goes to $4.99 with 64 128 gigabytes of storage.

You can also get the larger-sized iPhone 8 plus, and again, it comes in at similar prices, similar storage, and is available in space grey, silver, and gold. So, we have space grey here silver with the iPhone 8. Now with the iPhone XR, we have a lot more colors. It starts at 599 dollars and goes up to six hundred and forty-nine dollars you can get 64 or 128 gigabytes currently it comes in white, black-blue, yellow coral or product red like this one, so you'll see this is the red one its product which means they donate some of the profits to the AIDS Foundation to help get rid of AIDS around the world and then we have the iPhone 11.

iPhone 11 starts at $6.99 and goes to eight hundred and forty-nine dollars. It's available in 64, 128, or 256 gigabytes. It comes in in white, black, yellow this color green, purple and again, product red, so this is this nice green color, and that's a new color this year compared to the iPhone XR when it comes to the iPhone 11 Pro and eleven Promax.

 I phoned 11pro comes in at 999 dollars, and goes up to thirteen hundred and forty-nine dollars. It's available in 64 256 or 512 gigabytes. You can see here this is the new midnight green color. Still, it also comes in space grey, silver, and gold. With the iPhone 11 Pro max, you can see this is the Space Gray variant, and this starts at 1099 and goes all the way up to 1 thousand 4 hundred and forty-nine dollars. It comes in 64 256 gigabytes or 512 gigabytes and again has the same space grey, silver gold, and midnight green colors. When it comes to the overall build of the phones, they're a little bit different. The four phones on the Left weigh a little bit less because they're made of aluminum and then glass, so the actual frame around the outside edge of the eight 8 + XR + 11 have aluminum around the entire outside edge and glass front and back with the 11 pro and the 11pro Max.

These are stainless steel, so the outside ring is stainless steel and then again glass front and back. Hence, they're all the same as far as that goes with the pros, and then they're all the same as far as the other models as well. Now, when it comes to overall weight, the phone's on the right are going to feel a little bit heavier due to their stainless steel construction. Still, they're not too much heavier overall, so here are the different weights of all of them, and it goes from 148 grams all the way up to 226 grams for all of them, so from lightest to heaviest now one of the greatest differences on these phones is the display the four on the left are all LCD. The two on the right, the 11 Pro and 11 Pro max, are OLED displays, and they've really made them very nice.

This year they've made them a little bit brighter but let's talk about the displays and the resolution because the LCD displays these are some of the best LCD panels ever made and I know some people will say with the XR and the 11 which have the exact same displays that it is a lower resolution than the other displays but because the pixel density is above 300 you're not really going to see any of those pixels and it looks fantastic it has great viewing angles and that's true of any of the LCD displays from Apple they're very vibrant they're very nice and they go nice and bright but they're not as bright as the OLED displays on the 11pro and the 11pro max the 11 Pro and 11 Pro max can go very very bright in fact 800 nits is the peak brightness and then it can go even higher when playing HDR content so the 11 Pro and 11 Pro max can play HDR and technically the iPhone 11 can do the same but the OLED displays give you deeper blacks and then brighter colors overall with a little bit more saturation. 

So Apple does a good job of balancing all of these displays, but they are not the same when watching different content. So you have your choice of 4.7 inches that's actually a rectangular display all the way up to 6.5 inches with rounded corners on the OLED displays of the 11pro max, so you have a wide variety of what works for you; however, there's one thing I should mention that has to do with OLED display specifically that I don't hear a lot of others talk about. Still, I've mentioned regularly, and that's something called PWM or pulse width modulation that's the way OLED displays regulate their brightness. Some people are sensitive to this, about 1 in 10 people, and what that means is when you brighten or dim.

An OLED display it's actually flickering faster or slower, and the longer it keeps the light on, the brighter it looks. LCD displays with the 8 plus or the 8 and the XR and the 11 don't do this. They don't flicker at all in any way, and they are nice and bright or dim, and they're just always lit, so they don't have that flicker going on. That flicker may bother some people's eyes, cause them to feel nauseated, or give them headaches, so that's something to keep in mind; however, with this year's phones, the 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max have a higher rate of flicker which most people can't see and doesn't bother as many people. However, it's still something that's there, so I thought I'd mention it.

It now another thing to mention is only the iPhone 8 and 8 plus have 3d touch and what that means is there's a pressure-sensitive layer under the display that allows you to push a little bit or push harder for different action to take place and you're probably familiar with this you can press on it slide your finger to adjust brightness but what Apple has done with all of the newer phones from the ten are on is get rid of that and then replace it with a press and hold so you've got a press and hold you accomplish the same task and while it works it is nowhere near as fast so with pressure sensitivity on the music app for example if I press and hold we'll try it again you'll see it didn't work the first time on the iPhone 11 Pro let's try it again and you'll see it works but it's a little bit slower let me try it one more time so you can see again it's it works just fine gives you the same sort of functions but it is a little bit slower so just keep that in mind if you love 3d touch while they've changed.

It dramatically with iOS 13 it's still there it's just not as good but it's definitely better than the haptic touch or the press and hold that we have on the newer phones now with Apple's newer phones the iPhone 11 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max they seem to be more shatter resistant but by doing that it softens the glass and makes them more prone to scratching so for example on my iPhone 11 pro max it's fairly scratched and it scratched much easier than say the iPhone 8 plus that I have here over the years of using this it really doesn't have many scratches on it and I don't use a screen protector but with the newer phone it seems to gather scratches much more easily and that's by putting it in my pocket with nothing else in there I'm very careful where I said it but it's just something to know and I would be highly recommended a screen protector if you are going to have one of the newer phones while they are more shatter resistant you probably will get more light scratches on them more easily but the shadow resistance is not a bad thing because if you were to shatter these and you did not have Apple Care the price to replace the displays is very expensive also the price to replace the back is very expensive so I would highly recommend Apple care on these devices so that your maximum cost with anything is about $100 because it can get very expensive if you were to break this back glass.

 Apple replaces the whole device for five to six hundred dollars whether when it comes to the older devices if you were to shatter the glass it's much more reasonable to get the display replaced the back is not reasonable but the front is reasonable to get replaced if you needed to so just keep that in mind with the LCD displays they are cheaper to repair should you shatter the screen now finally something that I actually don't think about anymore with the displays is the knotch the knotch may bother some people it doesn't really bother me much you get used to it very quickly but if it's something that bothers you most people that actually switch to a phone with a knob don't really notice it after a day or so most people have talked to have said it's not a big deal I thought it would be but it's not so just keep that in mind but for the most part that it's not really something to worry about but if it drives you nuts it is a consideration of course now despite the resolution differences the displays look great overall you're not going to complain about it.

I don't think even though some people will say that the iPhone XR and the 11 are 720p displays they're actually closer to 1080p you can still watch 1080p content on YouTube there's no issues with that and there's no reason you can't watch quality content on these and you will never notice the difference so let's go into one of my videos so I can show you if we go to some of the options in the upper right here you'll see here is the quality and you have 1080p is an option so you can watch 1080p video it will just scale and it's closer to 1080p than it is to 720p but again the resolution is less important as opposed to the pixel density so you're not going to see those pixels now let's talk about the specs overall because while there are quite a big step in specs between all of these different devices it's not as big as you might think for example the iPhone 8 has the a 11 Bionic processor with 2 gigabytes of RAM the 8 plus has the same a 11 Bionic but with 3 gigabytes of RAM usually due to that larger display the iPhone XR has the a 12 Bionic with 3 gigabytes of RAM the iPhone 11 has the a 13 Bionic as does the iPhone 11 Pro and pro max they all have the a 13 Bionic and they  have all four GB of RAM so they all should compete very well as far as speed.

One of the ways we can sort of test this is to go to the oldest device. One of the newer devices, see, maybe we'll use the 11pro here and open Minecraft, so let's open the game. You'll see I'm opening it for the first time here. It'll take a moment. You can see the color temperature differences between the displays. The OLED is a little bit different. The newer phones do support true tome, or these do as well. Still, I have turned off on all of them so let's go ahead and hit confirm continue. Let's get rid of this here and continue, and then what I'm going to do is create a new world, so we'll just see how quickly it loads because you'll see right now things look pretty similar here, so we'll hit create and let's see how quick both of them create a world. After all, they're going to be very similar.

Despite the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus having a little bit older processor, so you'll see we're within a second or so, they're both going to be highly playable. There won't be any issues with that, but I wanted to do one test that's a little more taxing on the processor. Some people have said this isn't something you would do in real life, and that's true. Still, it's really one of the ways you can push the processor or the graphics chip in it to the max to see what the difference is, so what I was going to do will compress a 4k video that I've put in iMovie on all of these devices so let me get that ready for you. Now I've closed out every application that I was using, and let's go ahead and open iMovie, so you'll see there are no other applications open on any of the phones there's nothing stored in memory.

So I've imported a clip, split the clip into, and then added a title on every single one of these. This is a 4k clip and also, let's bring in the iPhone SE since maybe we'll have a use later on in the year, but here is a stopwatch that we'll use, so what I'm going to do is export this clip. You'll see I added the title here. I'm done with that, so we're going to export this clip and then see how quickly they can compress on all of these because sometimes, on a Mac, this can take quite a while to do. Still, it's actually quite fast on the phone, so this particular clip is a little over three minutes or almost four minutes. Hence, if I go to the end where they're all identical three minutes and 46 seconds now I have all of these videos ready to export, I'm going to try and hit them all at the same time so we can get them all exporting at the same time, and then I'll hit the stopwatch so let's try that. We'll hit start, and let's see how long this.

Actually takes I'll speed this up, so you don't have to wait the whole time. Now we're a little over halfway through, and you'll see some of the older phones, such as the ten, are. The eight-plus are doing quite well, so the RAM on the iPhone eight makes it slightly slower. Still, it's pretty impressive to see how they're all doing now. As expected, the iPhone 1111 Pro and 11 Pro Mac's were all even in export times. The 10r was just behind it by maybe a second or half a second, and then the iPhone 8 plus was behind that, not too much at all. Still, the eight was much further behind, and I suspect that's due to RAM's amount. It's the least amount of RAM, and video exporting can be fairly RAM intensive.

But either way, they all did really well, even compared to exporting on a MacBook, so that should give you a general idea of how fast they are compared to one another when doing an intensive task. However, I don't suspect this is something you would regularly do when it comes to the iPhone. One of the biggest reasons people buy an iPhone is that their cameras are very consistent. Still, there are huge differences from the iPhone 8 all the way to the iPhone 11 pro max, so I wanted to show you the differences. First, I'll show you the forward-facing camera. Then I'll show you the rear-facing camera so when it comes to the forward-facing camera.

 The iPhone 8, 8 plus, and iPhone XR all have a 7 megapixel F 2.2 aperture. They all record in 1080p, and the iPhone XR can do 1080p 60 off the front camera, so if I turn on the front camera of the XR, for example, I will spin it around here. If we go to the video and do the same with the 8 or the 8 plus, it will be identical, the quality will be the same. I'll show you a different sample in a moment now when we take a show at the iPhone 1111 Pro and 11 pro max. This is an all-new 12-megapixel camera, so it's got a front-facing camera that's 12 megapixels and an F 2.2 aperture. Hence, the quality is much better, and it can record in 4k 60, so it has a very high resolution.

It looks great, and you could honestly use it for vlogging most of the time, as long as you have good lighting. So, it's a really impressive camera. So let me show you a little sample between all of them. I'm recording with the forward-facing camera on three different phones the 8 Plus, which is the same as the 8, the XR, and the 11 Pro, so the 11pro of the 11 Promax and the 11 all have the same cameras so as you can see, the background of the 8 plus is a little bit blown out where the XR and the 11pro are a little bit different, and they have better dynamic range overall.

 And you can hear the audio between all three the 11pro the XR and the 8 plus now, when it would come to the rear cameras this is a huge difference so with the iPhone 8 for example we have a single lens and this lens is a 12 megapixel camera and it can record 4k 60 all of them have that capability and they all have at least one optical image stabilized lens the 8 plus has a dual camera it has a regular camera and then a telephoto lens when it comes to the iPhone XR we go back to one camera but again this is a very nice camera it's a 12 megapixel F 1.8 lens it does have digital zoom and looks really nice and then on the iPhone 11 we add another lens but this time it's not a telephoto this time it's an ultra wide lens so on the 11 we have a 12 megapixel sensor but it's a new sensor on the 1111 Pro and 11 Pro max as compared to the 12 megapixel sensors in the older phones so with the 11 we have a dual camera setup 12 megapixel F one point 8 and 12 megapixel F 2 point 4 ultra wide they can record in 4k 60 and they use the knurl engine in the processor to process the video in real time it's very impressive what it can do with the iPhone 11 Pro.

In the 11pro max, they have the exact same camera setup, so now we have triple lenses. We have a normal lens that's 12 megapixels F 1.8. We haven't a 12 megapixel F 2.0 optical zoom lens, and then we have an all-new ultra-wide lens that's on the 11 that is an F 2.4. Hence, all of them are really nice cameras but let me show you some samples comparing them along with some video here. You can see video stabilization between all six phones. Each camera has a telephoto lens except the iPhone XR.

The iPhone XR uses digital zoom, but it's better than you might expect, so here's 2x and then here's 1x. You'll see all of them look about the same, but the newer iPhones, the 11, the 11 Pro, and the 11 Pro max, also have an ultra-wide lens where you can zoom way out and see a lot more.

Now another consideration between the phones is touch ID verse face ID. Now when the newest phone's face ID is super fast, and what you normally do is you just pick up the phone, look at it, and swipe up while you're lifting the phone up. Still, if you have a touch ID, you're going to have a different situation. You either have this home button here, or you can pick it up, turn it on, and do it that way but let me show you what I mean.

 I'll pick it up and swipe and, at the same time, hit the home button. You'll see it's a little bit hard to compare the two, but let's try again, and you'll see the home button seems to be a little bit faster. Still, many people like the ability to have a larger screen because you don't need the bezel for the home button, so this is a big consideration for some people. Face ID is much more secure, except maybe if you have a twin. Still, overall they're both great after using face ID, and finally, in the newer generation, I think it's more than adequate, and most people I talk to would much rather have face ID than touch ID.

 I could really go with either/or, but some people will be very picky about that. Now let's talk a little bit about the battery because this is a huge difference between all of them. Starting with the iPhone 8, we have a smaller battery, of course, because we have a smaller body of the phone, so it's eighteen hundred and twenty-one milliamp hours that will give you about five hours of screen on time depending on your usage when we move to the eighth plus we have a two thousand six hundred and ninety-one milliamp-hour battery most people will get six or seven hours of screen on time depending on use closer to six hours. Still, it just depends on how you're using the phone when we get to the iPhone 10 hours.

The battery gets a little bit bigger this last year's best phone as far as battery goes it's got a two thousand nine hundred and forty two milliamp hour battery you're going to get about seven hours of screen on time some people can do a little bit better depending on how they use it but that's what I see pretty much is average you'll get an additional hour of screen on time with the iPhone 11 it has a slightly larger 3110 milliamp hour battery so maybe seven to nine hours depending on how you use it some people will get less if they're heavy on using games and things like that and then if we are talking about the iPhone 11 pro and pro max Apple has increased the battery size for the size of the chassis by quite a bit the iPhone 11 pro has a three thousand forty six milliamp hour battery that will get you about five hours more screen on time than the iPhone XS that it replaced so most people are seeing 10 to 11 hours of screen on time with the iPhone 11 Pro with the 11 Pro max.

We have a 3969 milliamp-hour battery, which will get you 10 to 12 hours of screen on time. I seem to get about twelve hours of screen on time with average use, so if I go to my battery and battery health being at 100%, if it's lower than that, this can vary slightly. Still, if we take an example where I've used 25% of my battery today, I've used 2 hours and 24 minutes of screen on time, 1 hour and 3 minutes of screen off time if we do two and a half hours times 4 since I've only used a quarter of my battery. We're down to 77 percent. If we do 2 times 4, that gives us about 10 hours, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but most of the time 10 to 12 hours, and that's not including the screen off time that I'm using as well, so they're very very good batteries in the newer phones they all support fast charging, but only the iPhone 11 pro and pro max include a fast charger in the box.

So, you can fast-charge older phones. They may be a little bit slower to fast charge. Still, they will fast charge if you have the right adapter now, one thing that's very important obviously is a reception, and reception on the iPhone 8 and 8 plus if you have the Verizon variant can be much better than what you get with the modern phones of the 11 Pro and Promax and that it comes down to the use of Qualcomm modems verse Intel modems most people that have Qualcomm modems have a much better reception or experience with the older phones especially from the seven and older with the iPhone 11 Promax there are some spotty issues sometimes switching from Wi-Fi to LTE or LTE signal may drop. At the same time, it's not bad for most people. Some people have issues with it, and I have seen that myself from time to time, so the 8 m8 plus especially like.

 I said the CDMA or the Verizon variant will have the best reception of any of them so just keep that in mind. All of the rest are very similar. I find that the attend are, and the 11 seem to have better reception than the 11 Pro and Pro max. I don't know if that's due to the construction or not, but I do find that to be the case now when we're talking about the speakers of all of them. It's tough to hear the difference between all of them on a singular microphone that I've got here that I'm speaking into, but there is a huge difference between the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro max as compared to the rest of them, so from worst to best it's going to be an 8 plus in XR.

Then iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max, the volume on the 11, 11 Pro and Pro max, are very loud the 8 and 8 plus are fine. Still, you have a much more surround sound feel when you're listening to it with it, especially the iPhone 11 Pro Max or Pro, because you've just got that nice sound projecting out now. Another thing to remember is the landscape mode. If you have an 8 Plus, you can do landscape on the home screen. You can't do that on any other phone.

So any of the other phones currently offered, you can only do portrait mode, but the 8 plus offers landscape mode for the home screen. Some people really like that, and it's not available in newer phones and then finally, let's talk about IP rating because that's the ingress protection rating or protection against dust, dirt, and water, so the iPhone 8, 8 Plus & XR all have an ip67 rating for about one meter for 30 minutes, or so so if it was dropped in 1 meter of water it should work after 30 minutes however I've seen this not to be the case that in the past so just make sure you're careful with them Apple does not cover water damage so even if you were to shower with these or swim with these without a case.

They're not going to cover it. The iPhone 11 has an IP 68 certification that allows for a maximum depth of 2 meters for up to 30 minutes. Then Apple went a little bit further with the 11pro and Promax it's IP 68 for 4 meters up to 30 minutes. Still, again if they are water damaged, they will not cover them for free so just keep that in mind that's it for the offering this year of iPhones. The 8 and 8 plus are still fantastic phones. I know many people who are still picking them up because they like the home button, they prefer the squared-off display, they like the landscape on the home screen. There are numerous reasons to really like these devices.

They still have good cameras, good speakers, good reception decent battery life, but when you go to the higher end of the 11pro max, this is where you're going to get your absolute best battery life; of course, that's without putting an additional case on it with a battery as well,

where you can extend that dramatically and then the mid-tier phones that give you all of the features of the newer phones the iPhone XR and 11 are great consideration. The 11 for $50 more is probably the best way to go or $100 more depending on your storage options and things like that, but it's really a great phone. I think this is the phone that most people should pick up if you want the newest, latest and greatest but don't want to pay the extra $300 premium over it to get the stainless steel with the OLED display. 

So, if none of that matters to you the iPhone 11 would be the one I would choose for most people the XR is fine if you're on a little bit of a budget and all of them will be supported at least for a couple more years with the eight and eight-plus the rest of them for many more years to come.