If these two phrases sound contradictory to each other, then let me explain. The iPhone 14 is very capable. Its chipset can handle everything from daily tasks to graphics-intensive games. Its cameras are capable of very good photos and record the best video clips you will see from any phone in its class. All of this applies to the 14, but it also applies to the iPhone 13. The iPhone 14 is a very good phone, with a handful of useful upgrades over the 13. But it’s a small handful, and that leaves the 14 in a tight spot. The iPhone 13, which was released a year ago and is still being sold by Apple, is almost identical to the $14 and $100 cheaper, while the iPhone 14 Pro introduces a lot of interesting new features. And the upcoming iPhone 14 Plus has the same hardware as the 14, but a massive 6.7-inch screen. If the Great iPhone Mini Experiment taught us anything, it’s that people love big screens.

The good

Best selfie camera Good battery life Collision detection and satellite SOS are neat

The bad

It looks more like an iPhone 13S The screen is still 60Hz The eSIM transition will be easy for most, but painful for some

The iPhone 14 has some really impressive new features: an upgraded sensor on the main camera and a slightly wider aperture and autofocus on the selfie camera. traffic accident detection; and satellite SOS, but other than that, it’s really almost identical to the iPhone 13. It looks the same, with the same flat aluminum rails and roughly the same dimensions. There are still only two rear cameras — a standard wide and an ultra-wide — but the camera bump is slightly thicker to accommodate the larger main sensor, enough to not fit an iPhone 13 case. A slightly larger camera bump means an iPhone 13 case doesn’t quite match the 14. The similarities between the iPhone 14 and 13 go deeper than the surface. While the 14 Pro and Pro Max have the new A16 Bionic chipset, the 14 uses an A15 Bionic, which is the same generation used by the iPhone 13 series, albeit with one more GPU core than the 13. This is an unusual move for Apple, which usually puts its newest chip in all its new iPhones. The A15 is still very capable. However, having the latest processor isn’t just about getting the best performance now — it probably also has something to do with how many OS updates a phone gets and whether it’ll support some of the new features Apple adds to iOS in the coming years. Even when previous iPhone models included modest updates over their predecessors, getting this current-gen chipset was an argument in favor of buying the latest model—if anything, you’ll likely get OS upgrades a bit more. That’s less certain with the iPhone 14. Like the iPhone 13, the 14 has 15W MagSafe charging, IP68 water resistance and between 128GB and 512GB of storage. The US version of the 14 supports 5G and sub-6GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave), although the international version is only sub-6GHz, which is fine because the US is the only country pretending to care about mmWave. You’ll see a mmWave window on the side of the phone, but one thing you won’t spot on the US version is a physical SIM tray — it’s all eSIM, baby. More on that later. There’s Wi-Fi 6 support, just like the 13, and Bluetooth has been upgraded from 5.0 to 5.3. The 6.1-inch display is still only 60Hz. The iPhone 14’s screen is what the 13 is — because for all intents and purposes, it’s the same screen. It’s still a 6.1-inch OLED with a little better than 1080p resolution (Super Retina XDR if you’re fluent in Apple) with a typical 60Hz refresh rate. It’s a good screen, but the competition is running circles around Apple here. Android phones from the top of the range up to the $350 Samsung A53 5G offer screens with 120Hz refresh rates. It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s one area where it feels like the standard iPhone is overdue for an update. For the ultra-smooth 120Hz ProMotion display, you should still go for the Pro model. Battery life is another area I’d expect to see a year-over-year improvement in a new flagship model, and in this department, Apple is reporting a slight increase in performance. The 14 will have up to 20 hours of video playback versus 19 on the iPhone 13, according to official specs. In the real world, after three to four hours of screen-on time, I had between 40 and 50 percent charge at the end of the day. It’s hard to say whether this is much better than the already quite excellent iPhone 13, but it’s good enough to get most people through a full day, and that’s what counts. So far, I’ve mostly talked about what hasn’t changed, so here’s what’s new. With some new hardware features, Apple is touting the iPhone 14 as a literal lifesaver. The first is Crash Detection, and it’s very similar to Google’s car accident detection. The 14 has a new ‘high dynamic range’ gyro sensor and a high-G accelerometer. If data collected by the phone’s sensors indicates you’ve been in an accident, it’ll ask if you’re OK and call emergency services if you don’t respond in a certain period of time. The iPhone 13 doesn’t have these new sensors, so it’s unlikely that older phones will be able to support Crash Detection, even if Apple felt generous enough to bring it to older iPhones. I haven’t been in a car accident in the week I’ve been testing the phone, so I can’t say for sure that it works. I’ll leave that to the more avid testers than myself, but in any case, it’s something that just happens on the phone and doesn’t require anything from the user to activate. It’s the definition of a nice feature. Apple is touting the iPhone 14 as a literal lifesaver. 14 also features Emergency SOS, a separate service coming this November. In areas without cellular coverage, the phone can send a message to emergency responders by communicating via satellite. This is due to some custom components and software unique to the iPhone 14 series, according to Apple’s launch presentation, so don’t expect to see this carried over to older models. You’ll answer a few questions to help emergency services better understand your situation, and the user interface guides you to point your phone to the nearest satellite. If you regularly spend time out of cell coverage, then Satellite SOS could give you some peace of mind I got a demo of the feature in a field on Apple’s campus in Cupertino—not exactly a wilderness area, so take it with a huge grain of salt—but it seemed intuitive enough. You can even see the satellite’s position change on your phone screen as it crosses the sky. According to Apple’s documentation, sending a message can take anywhere from 15 seconds to “over a minute” depending on how blocked the satellite view is. In one spot with light foliage, messages in my demo went through in less than 30 seconds. If you regularly spend time out of cell coverage, then Satellite SOS could give you some real peace of mind. I do some hiking in the greater Seattle area and you don’t have to go very far outside of the city to find yourself in a wireless dead zone. That’s where turning or twisting an ankle on a less traveled path can get you into real trouble. I’m not a serious enough hiker to invest in a separate GPS unit and its subscription service, but something like this built into my phone is very appealing. The big question in my mind is the cost — it will come with two years of free service on the iPhone 14, but other than that, you’ll have to pay, and Apple isn’t saying how much it will cost yet. Maybe it’s a Photonic Engine; maybe it’s just good old fashioned physics Collision detection and satellite SOS bring to mind some pretty grim scenarios, so let’s look at the bright side: the iPhone 14 cameras. Here you’ll see an improvement from the 13 to the 14 — it’s not dramatic, but it’s there. For starters, there’s some upgraded hardware. The 14 essentially inherits the main camera from the 13 Pro and Pro Max, with a larger sensor, bigger pixels and a faster f/1.5 aperture compared to f/1.6. The selfie camera also has a wider aperture — no change to the ultra-wide-angle hardware, though. On the software side, Apple has made some changes to the way it processes images with a technology it calls the “Photonic Engine.” It applies Deep Fusion earlier in the image processing pipeline to uncompressed data, which Apple says improves low-light performance compared to the iPhone 13 without the Photonic Engine. After shooting side-by-side samples in all sorts of conditions, I can report that the iPhone 14’s low-light images are slightly more detailed than the 13’s, but I’m not convinced the Photonic Engine has much to do with it. In many cases, the 14 can simply use a lower ISO than the 13 thanks to this larger sensor. With less noise to deal with, there’s more detail and colors in low-light photos are more accurate. Maybe it’s a Photonic Engine; maybe it’s just good old fashioned physics. iPhone 13 ultra-wide (left) vs iPhone 14 ultra-wide with photonic engine (right). The difference is most apparent when I look at selfies and ultrawide shots side-by-side on the 13 and 14. In low light, the 14’s ultrawide shots look less water-colored, and the selfies have much more detail and better skin tone rendition. Using the front-facing cameras on both, while standing at the front of a moving ferry boat, I got a sharp shot from the iPhone 14 while the iPhone 13 struggled mightily. The portrait mode of the main camera also looks a bit improved. Nothing can stand up to the sectioning torture test that is my kid’s hair, but the way the 14 handles cat fur seems a little more refined. However, it’s not going to dethrone the current portrait mode…