Expert rating
pros
- Comes in a variety of colors, now including yellow
- Fantastic battery life
- Amazing performance and video quality
Minuses
- Image processing is no longer best in class
- Expensive
- Not much of a jump over the iPhone 13
Our verdict
The problem with the iPhone 14 Plus is its price. It’s a very good phone, a modest but welcome upgrade over the iPhone 13. But it doesn’t justify its $900 price tag, especially when it’s so close to the Pro models that give you so much more.
It’s been almost half a year since the release of the iPhone 14 Plus, and since Apple is updating the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus with a new yellow color, and we haven’t tested or tested the iPhone 14 Plus since the release, it was felt. what a good time to check it out.
In general, what applies to the iPhone 14 also applies to the 14 Plus. It’s the same phone, just bigger. A bigger battery gives you longer life, but other than that it’s just choosing the phone/display size that works best for you.
It’s a good phone and a worthy upgrade (especially if you’re using a model no older than two or three years), but it’s hard to recommend. Starting at $900, that’s just $100 less than the regular-sized iPhone 14 Pro. The Pro models always offer more, but this year the gap is wider than ever as the Pro models have a newer A16 processor, a brighter always-on display, Dynamic Island, a telephoto lens and a 48MP main camera.
Apple’s pricing and product differentiation strategy puts the iPhone 14 Plus in the quandary of being too expensive to be an “affordable big phone” and too limited compared to the iPhone 14 Pro to justify its high price tag.
It’s definitely yellow
The new yellow is not for everyone. My wife saw my test phone on my desk and asked, “Do you have a yellow iPhone case?”
“No, it’s a yellow iPhone. I’m checking it out, I said.
“His horrible. Why did they do it? she answered, turning it over in her hands.
Some will love it, some will hate it. It’s yellow. It’s hard to describe it any other way, because that’s what it is. Close your eyes and imagine “yellow”. You did it! When Crayola makes yellow crayons—not “sunshine” or “canary” or “laser lemon”—it’s that color. This is not “yellow, but with a touch.” It’s yellow “no modifier”. Luckily, this is just one option out of five other colors: midnight, starlight, blue, purple, and red.
Foundry
Otherwise, this is a very modern iPhone. There’s a notch for the front camera and Face ID (rather than the tablet-shaped Dynamic Island of the Pro models), a camera bump with rounded corners on the back with two cameras (12MP wide and 12MP ultra-wide), buttons on the side, and a lightning port on the bottom. The 6.7-inch display makes it quite large, and little phone fans are definitely upset that the iPhone 13 mini has been replaced by this larger, more expensive model.
The new battery life champion? Not really!
There’s little reason to delve into the specific features and performance of the iPhone 14 Plus other than to confirm that yes, it’s exactly the same as the iPhone 14. If you’re interested in camera quality, performance, display quality and all. these other features apply to our iPhone 14 review. The iPhone 14 Plus is identical—or close enough not to matter.
With one exception: battery life. With a larger battery and display, you can reasonably expect the iPhone 14 Plus to have a different battery life than the smaller model. Apple claims it has the longest battery life any iPhone, including iPhone 14 Pro Max.
In our testing, it didn’t quite work. The iPhone 14 Plus is the second longest lasting iPhone after the iPhone 14 Pro Max, more or less related to the iPhone 13 Pro Max. Considering the iPhone 13 Pro Max has a similar display and A15 processor, this makes a lot of sense.
Please note that we test with a different methodology than Apple. We use the Geekbench 4 battery test, which constantly runs this (legacy) test with the display on. We set the display to a measured brightness of 200 nits. Apple uses a different brightness setting and measures latency, video playback, audio playback, and phone call duration. Our benchmarks tend to be much more CPU and GPU intensive than Apple’s benchmarks.
In our testing, the iPhone 14 Plus isn’t the most durable iPhone available, but it still delivers some really great battery life. It’s impressive how battery life in Apple’s biggest phones has grown by more than 60 percent in just a few years, even with massive improvements in display performance and quality.
Good phone hard to recommend
There is no doubt that the iPhone 14 Plus is a good phone. It has fantastic performance, battery life and a great camera.
But this nine hundred dollars good? It’s a little less clear. Of course, it’s annoying that this model replaces the iPhone 13 mini, which not only replaces the only small phone in Apple’s lineup with a larger one, but also replaces a $699 phone with an $899 phone.
However, perhaps more importantly, the iPhone 14 Pro can be purchased for just $100 more and gives you quite a lot: a more powerful A16 processor, an always-on display, a higher maximum brightness, Dynamic Island, a telephoto lens, and more. 48 MP wide-angle camera. To be frank, the iPhone 14 non-professional models are not a big leap over the iPhone 13, unlike the iPhone 14 Pro.
If you can spend $900 on it, you can spend $1,000 on Pro. Even $1,100 for an iPhone 14 Pro Max is probably the best idea if you really want a bigger iPhone. If you plan on using your iPhone for at least a couple of years (and you probably should), you’ll get all the features of the Pro and Pro Max models for a relatively small investment.