iPhone 12 Review

Everything Apple sold from 2020 to 2025 descends from this shape: flat aluminium sides, a 6.1-inch 2532 by 1170 OLED at 460 ppi replacing the iPhone 11's LCD, Ceramic Shield glass on the front, and MagSafe magnets in the back that later became the Qi2 standard everyone else adopted. The A14 Bionic was the first 5 nm chip in a phone and the fastest thing on sale in October 2020.

The dual 12-megapixel cameras added a faster f/1.6 main lens, Night mode on the ultra wide and the selfie camera, and Dolby Vision HDR video recording, which no other phone or camera could do at the time. The compromises were real. Sixty hertz, when the Galaxy S20 had 120. Sixty-four gigabytes at the base price. The 2815 mAh cell was smaller than the 11's and 5G hit it harder: about eight and a half hours of screen time in web tests where the 11 had reached eleven.

No charger or earbuds in the box, a full-price move dressed as environmentalism. Apple later opened a service programme for iPhone 12 receivers that stopped producing sound, and in 2023 the French regulator pulled it from sale over radiation limits until a software update. It shipped on iOS 14.1 and still runs iOS 26. The $799 headline needed AT&T or Verizon activation; unlocked was $829. The 13 fixed the battery and the storage a year later, which tells you what the 12 got wrong.