As an experienced tech product analyst, I‘ve gotten many questions recently about whether upgrading from an iPhone 12 to iPhone 13 is worth it. At first glance, they appear remarkably similar – after all, Apple retained the same overall design and display size between these two iPhone generations.
However, once you dive deeper across over a dozen different specifications from dimensions to components, meaningful improvements do emerge in key areas like camera technology, battery life, and power.
To help you evaluate if you should upgrade your iPhone 12 or buy either model new, let‘s comprehensively compare these two flagship phones. We‘ll analyze precise measurements, display quality, processor speeds, RAM counts, storage options and other factors side-by-side.
At a Glance: iPhone 12 versus iPhone 13
Before getting into detailed numbers, here is a high-level overview of how the iPhone 13 compares to its predecessor:
- Identical screen size: 6.1" OLED display
- Slightly thicker and heavier: 7.65mm thick vs. 7.4mm and 10 grams heavier
- Brighter display: 800 nits typical brightness versus 625 on iPhone 12
- Faster processor: A15 chip beats A14 chip on benchmarks
- Upgraded camera hardware: Larger sensor and sensor-shift stabilization
- Longer battery life: Estimated 2+ more hours runtime per charge
- More base storage: Starts at 128GB instead of 64GB
- New camera features: Photographic Styles, Cinematic mode video
While not radically changed in physical footprint, upgrades like the noticeably brighter screen, photography enhancements through improved hardware and software, increased battery capacity, and next-gen processor offer compelling reasons for iPhone 12 owners to consider upgrading to the iPhone 13.
Let‘s explore some of these improvements through detailed side-by-side metric and spec breakdowns.
Physical Dimensions and Weight
As mentioned earlier, Apple kept the physical width and height of the iPhone 13 exactly the same as its predecessor. Both measure the following:
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Height | 5.78 inches (146.7 mm) |
5.78 inches (146.7 mm) |
| Width | 2.81 inches (71.5 mm) |
2.81 inches (71.5 mm) |
However, slight changes emerge once we look at device thickness and overall weight:
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Thickness | 0.29 inches (7.4 mm) |
0.30 inches (7.65 mm) |
| Weight | 5.78 oz (164 g) |
6.14 oz (174 g) |
As you can see, the iPhone 13 comes in at 0.01 inches and 0.1 ounces bulkier than the iPhone 12. For an apples to apples (no pun intended) size comparison, note that‘s roughly equivalent to two stacked quarters or 10 paperclips extra heft.
These fractional increases stem from a combination of a thicker aluminum rim around the sides along with other internal component tweaks, including…
Battery Life and Charging Improvements
One notable internal upgrade on the iPhone 13 contributing to its additional size and weight comes in the form of a larger battery:
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Battery Capacity | 2,815 mAh | 3,240 mAh |
| Video playback time | Up to 17 hours | Up to 19 hours |
| Audio playback time | Up to 65 hours | Up to 75 hours |
As battery chemistry technology improves each year, Apple can stuff greater capacity into the same iPhone footprint to enable longer runtimes per charge. The 14% bigger battery allows around 2 extra hours of typical usage.
For context, that‘s enough extended endurance to watch an entire extra movie or thread dozens more email conversations per day without having to charge. Both welcome upgrades for heavy users accustomed to fretting over low battery statuses!
Fast charging remains pleasingly speedy across both models when you connect them to a 20W adapter or higher, with up to a 50% charge attained in around 30 minutes. But thanks to the increased battery size, iPhone 13 owners will enjoy longer stints away from the charger.
Display Size, Tech and Maximum Brightness
As noted earlier, both the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 boast identical 6.1” display sizes, built with Apple‘s Super Retina XDR panel technology incorporating OLED pixels for rich contrast and vivid colors.
You get the same crispiness too thanks to equivalent pixel densities:
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Screen Size | 6.1 inches | 6.1 inches |
| Pixel Density | 460 ppi | 460 ppi |
And they support all of Apple’s latest display innovation like True Tone white balancing, wide P3 color gamut, Haptic Touch and more.
However, the displays do diverge when it comes to peak brightness levels:
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical max brightness | 625 nits | 800 nits |
| Outdoor peak brightness | 1200 nits | 1200 nits |
As you can see, the iPhone 13 display can get almost 30% brighter topping out at 800 nits across common use cases like scrolling web pages or using apps. That gives it a visible edge in everyday legibility.
For HDR video playback and photography purposes, both can still peak at the same 1200 nit maximum. So contrast and punchiness for specialized high dynamic range content stay consistent.
According to display testing experts like DisplayMate President Dr. Raymond Soneira, keeping brightness levels higher for typical usage provides positive benefits:
“The iPhone 13 increases screen Brightness by an impressive 28% from 625 nits to 800 nits, which is a very substantial and noticeable improvement over the iPhone 12… Excellent Brightness is far more important than just bragging rights…”
By being able to maintain higher luminosity across more situations without crushed shadows or illegibility, the iPhone 13 display shines brighter in regular usage.
Cameras Upgraded Inside and Out
Similar to overall device size, not much changes visually when glancing at the rear camera bumps on these two iPhone models. Both feature two cameras spaced along a diagonal rising out of the upper left corner.
But underneath the glass, the iPhone 13 cameras have received meaningful upgrades – let’s compare the specs:
Rear Facing Cameras
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Main Camera | 12MP, ƒ/1.6 aperture | 12MP, ƒ/1.6 aperture |
| Secondary Camera | 12MP Ultrawide, ƒ/2.4 aperture | 12MP Ultrawide, ƒ/2.4 aperture |
| Optical Zoom | 2x out, 2x in | 2x out, 2x in |
| Sensor Size | Unknown | Larger |
| Sensor-Shift Stabilization | No | Yes |
While retaining similar 12MP sensors and lenses across standard and ultrawide configurations, the iPhone 13 main camera benefits from crucial upgrades to the physical sensor size and inclusion of sensor-shift optical image stabilization.
Sensor sizes have increased thanks to the new diagonal layout, allowing each photosite to be larger and gather more light – 47% more according to Apple. This major sensitivity boost pairs with sensor-shift stabilization, ensuring your shots stay crisp across extended exposures or action shots.
The massive influx of additional light data also powers the improved Night mode across all iPhone 13 cameras. Night photos and videos come out drastically cleaner and brighter.
Independent camera testing publications like DXOMARK have found these hardware changes provide visible real-world improvements:
“The Apple iPhone 13 offers good zoom performance up to a 2x factor… plus improved low-light scored compared to the iPhone 12.. for still photos the autofocus is very fast and reliable… exposures are very good, fine details are better preserved, and noise is lower compared to the iPhone 12”
So while megapixels haven’t increased, the photos each pixel captures has improved substantially.
These camera hardware enhancements work in conjunction with Apple‘s upgraded image signal processing in the A15 chip to drive new computational photography features too…
New Image Processing Capabilities
Thanks to greater Sensor-shift optical image stabilization and semiconductor power in the iPhone 13‘s A15 Bionic processor, you can capture professional-quality cinema-style videos with background blur in the built-in Camera app using Cinematic mode.
The same hardware also enables manipulating color and contrast only in specific parts of any photo using Photographic Styles – no more needing to alter entire images.
And for candid photo moments, continuing auto focus improvements mean motion stays crisper in each shot using the redesigned main camera.
So across numerous axes like noise reduction and actions shots, the photos and videos you can capture with an iPhone 13 demonstrate noticeable quality jumps.
Faster Brains: A14 vs. A15 Performance Benchmarks
Driving these photography improvements alongside the iPhone 13’s system-wide capabilities is the cutting-edge Apple A15 Bionic processor. It builds on the strengths of the iPhone 12’s A14 chipset while ramping up speeds and feeds across the board.
As veteran semiconductor analysts, we can break down the exact component upgrades driving higher benchmarks. Let‘s contrast the key specs between these two brains:
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Chip | A14 Bionic | A15 Bionic |
| Process | 5nm | 5nm |
| CPU cores | 6 (2 perf + 4 efficiency) | 6 (2 perf + 4 efficiency) |
| GPU cores | 4 | 5 |
| Neural Engine cores | 16 | 16 |
While built using the same overall 5nm transistor process for density and efficiency, Apple has tuned the A15 chip to deliver upwards of 15% faster overall benchmark speed tests versus its A14 predecessor across both processing and graphics workloads.
Let’s see how that translates into practical numbers by application:
- Up to 50% faster graphics performance in games and creative apps thanks to the 5-core GPU
- Up to 50% higher machine learning scores driven by enhanced 16-core Neural Engine
- Faster app launch times by about 20% thanks to the dual performance cores
- More powerful computational photography via upgraded image signal processor
As you can see, these represent very solid year-on-year gains thanks to Apple’s custom engineering. Everything you do on an iPhone 13 feels snappier as a result from editing photos to complex web apps to intense 3D games.
And thanks to those extra graphics and machine learning capabilities, the iPhone 13 also stands better future-proofed to take advantage of emerging augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence capabilities in Apple’s pipeline. The A15 Bionic almost operates akin to having a mini-supercomputer in your pocket.
Storage Options: Less or More Headroom
One final differentiator between these two iPhone models comes down to built-in storage configs.
Apple doubled minimum capacity with the iPhone 13, meaning you get far more builtin headroom for apps, photos, videos and offline music compared to an iPhone 12:
| iPhone 12 | iPhone 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Base Storage | 64GB | 128GB |
| Mid Storage | 128GB | 258GB |
| Max. Storage | 256GB | 512GB |
Thanks to upgrades like ProRes video recording in up to 4K 30 fps across all cameras which consume gobs of space, having those extra baseline gigabytes matters tremendously.
Even if you don’t shoot much video, remember the 12MP photos and Live Photos from an iPhone 13 average around 3-5MB per image. Which means that entry-level 64GB on an iPhone 12 would hit capacity limits after capturing only 13,000-21,000 photos and videos.
Whereas the Quad HD 5K displays possible thanks to ProMotion on iPhone 13 Pro models require massive assets too. Apps and games ballooning above multiple gigabytes is also now common.
So by doubling minimum storage, even typical iPhone 13 users gain way more flexibility before needing to pay for cloud backups or trim their precious photo libraries. Power users also benefit from the new 512GB top capacity tier enabling over 100,000 photos!
Bottom Line: Upgrade Worthwhile Based on Usage Scenarios
As we’ve explored across over a dozen different specifications from battery capacity and cameras to displays, performance and storage configs, the iPhone 13 does deliver truly meaningful improvements across areas that matter most.
If you rely on your iPhone to capture lots of memorable photos and videos, the sensor shifts, brighter lenses, stabilized exposures and handy camera app features like Cinematic mode and Photogrpahic Styles make monumental differences in imaging and videography prowess over an iPhone 12.
For productivity power users and mobile gamers, the graphics, machine learning and efficiency gains driven by Apple’s latest A15 Bionic translate into snappier everyday experiences alongside futureproofing for AR and editing workflows.
And anyone accustomed to tethering frequently to charge will appreciate almost 2 additional hours of endurance afforded through the enhanced battery spans per cycle. Plus the boost to base 128GB storage relieves capacity anxieties.
Of course upgraded iPhones also cost extra – the iPhone 13 starts at $799 versus $699 for iPhone 12 baseline models. However, given typical 3-4 year lifespans, working out to just over $50 per year extra provides compelling value given the hundreds of hours these photography, speed and battery improvements add up to enhancing daily experiences.
So while the iPhone 12 remains a capable device given its continued speed and versatility, I generally recommend iPhone 13 upgrades for anyone focused on longevity. Durable Ceramic Shield fronts on both models mean you can’t go wrong though picking Apple’s premium pocket portable powerhouses!
I hope mapping out these intricate device differences across display quality, performance benchmarks, camera specs and other vital statistics helps inform your personal upgrade considerations. Please reach out with any other questions!
