The iPhone 12 Pro is a phone for anyone who wants more than a basic iPhone, but isn’t sure about spending top money for the iPhone 13 Pro. It offers significant upgrades over the standard iPhone 12 camera system, and there’s more storage, too. Is it still worth buying now it’s no longer the latest thing? Dig deeper in our iPhone 12 Pro review.

Cons

• Gets warm when working hard
• No longer the latest iPhone
• You can’t buy it new from Apple

iPhone 12 Pro – overview

iPhone 12 Pro – design

The iPhone 12 Pro is almost indistinguishable from the standard iPhone 12. Spotters might notice the unique Pro colours – Pacific Blue, gold, graphite or silver – or that it’s all of 25 grams heavier, thanks to a stainless steel frame. In truth, the most obvious giveaway is a third camera plus an extra sensor on the back – we’ll cover those in the camera section, below.

Apple has pushed its bezel-free design to the limit with the iPhone 12 range, where the screen glass extends very nearly to the edge of the device. It lies flush with, and still protected by a thin metal border. The sides are straight, rather than a more typical curve, which looks distinctive but makes the phone less comfortable to hold. While the front glass is the much lauded Ceramic Shield, the rear is the same type used on earlier iPhones. Here it’s frosted, compared to the shiny finish on the standard iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini.

iPhone 12 Pro– display

The iPhone 12 Pro gets exactly the same 6.1” Organic LED (OLED) display as the iPhone 12. Its 2,532×1,170 pixel resolution gives it an impressive 460 pixels per inch (ppi). That translates to super-sharp detailing – you simply can’t spot any jagged lines with the naked eye. Like most OLED screens, the iPhone 12 Pro offers vivid colours, enhanced by exceptional contrast. Typically, a fully white pixel is around two million times brighter than a fully black one.

It’s a great screen, but it’s spoiled somewhat by the notch housing the speaker and front-facing camera. This sizable black bite out of the display isn’t noticeable in everyday use, but it puts more of a dent in full-screen media than the small cutout favoured by most rivals. Many reviewers have complained that the iPhone 12 Pro doesn’t have a 120Hz refresh rate – the iPhone 13 does, and it has a smaller camera notch, too.

Apple will charge you £266 to replace this phone’s screen, so it’s a good job that Ceramic Shield largely lives up to its billing. Testers have generally found that the new glass can be scratched, but it’s very hard to shatter it in a drop. It’s worth noting that doesn’t apply to the weaker glass at the rear – we’d still recommend a case.

iPhone 12 Pro – camera and video performance

Most of the iPhone 12 Pro’s improvements over the standard iPhone relate to its camera. Most significantly, it’s a triple system, offering a telephoto lens in addition to the iPhone 12’s wide and ultra-wide setup. Intriguingly, the iPhone 12 Pro also sneaks in LiDAR technology, used for creating depth maps. Apple says it’s used for a unique night portrait mode, ‘next-level augmented reality experiences’, and to accelerate autofocus in dim light.

There are some subtle feature changes, too. Aside from the Night mode portraits, the phone’s Dolby Vision HDR video capability is boosted from a 30 to 60fps maximum. You can save photos in Apple’s ProRAW format, enabling more exacting edits and higher quality results. With an extra lens, the optical zoom range is doubled to 4x, and the digital zoom to an impressive 10x. At the front, however, there are no changes – you get the same 12MP camera and features as the iPhone 12.

There’s precious little wrong with the iPhone 12 cameras, but the iPhone 12 Pro does manage to improve on them. Most immediately you’ll notice the additional zoom range, with telephoto helping you fill the frame with more of the subject. Night performance is strong on the standard iPhone, but the iPhone 12 Pro takes it to another level. It’s capable of resolving images in the kind of light that has you bumping into bedside cabinets. Somehow it conjured up a decent portrait in a bathroom lit only by another phone’s screen.

With optical image stabilisation, the iPhone 12 Pro shoots steady video – even when using the telephoto lens in low light. And as with other recent iPhones, abundant processing power means that you’re never waiting for the phone to process one shot before capturing the next.

While there’s no doubt this phone has a great camera system, Apple has comprehensively improved on it with the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max. If outright photo and video performance is important, try to stretch your budget to the latest models instead.

iPhone 12 Pro– performance

While leading Android phones run the iPhone 12 Pro close for camera, screen and design quality, show them a benchmark and it’s a different story. Apple’s A14 Bionic chip was the fastest available until the iPhone 13 launched, and the iPhone 12 family will still outperform anything other than the new iPhones. In Geekbench 5 the iPhone 12 Pro recorded a single-core score of 1,603 and a multi-core result of 3,967 – more than 15% faster than the Samsung Galaxy S21.

The iPhone 12 Pro is even more dominant in 3D benchmarks. We recorded a score of 7,929 in the 3DMark Wild Life stress test. That’s fully 31% better than even the Huawei Mate 40 Pro+.

It’s important to explain that most phones don’t have cooling fans, so it’s hard for them to sustain flat out performance on really power-hungry apps without getting warm and having to slow itself down.

iPhone 12 Pro– battery performance

Battery life (movie playback)*

Charge Time (0-80%)