Apple introduces iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini

  • World
  • Business
PUBLISHED 15 September 2021

Apple introduces iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini, the next generation of the world’s best smartphone, featuring a beautiful design with sleek flat edges in five gorgeous new colors.


Both models feature major innovations, including the most advanced dual-camera system ever on iPhone — with a new Wide camera with bigger pixels and sensor-shift optical image stabilization (OIS) offering improvements in low-light photos and videos, a new way to personalize the camera with Photographic Styles, and Cinematic mode, which brings a new dimension to video storytelling. iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini also boast super-fast performance and power efficiency with A15 Bionic, longer battery life, a brighter Super Retina XDR display that brings content to life, incredible durability with the Ceramic Shield front cover, double the entry-level storage at 128GB, an industry-leading IP68 rating for water resistance, and an advanced 5G experience.


iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini will be available in pink, blue, midnight, starlight, and (PRODUCT)RED,1 with pre-orders beginning Friday, September 17, and availability beginning Friday, September 24.



Beautiful and Durable Design with Amazing Battery Life


iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini have been redesigned on the inside and out, and come in five gorgeous colors featuring a durable flat-edge design and an elegant aluminum frame. The 6.1-inch and 5.4-inch displays2 feature Ceramic Shield on the front, exclusive to iPhone and tougher than any smartphone glass. Both models have an industry-leading IP68 rating for water resistance,3, and are designed to protect against spills from common liquids. A redesigned rear camera layout with diagonally arranged lenses enables the advanced dual-camera system, and a redesigned TrueDepth camera system is smaller while still packing in the same breakthrough technologies, including Face ID, the most secure facial authentication in a smartphone, but offering more display area. 


The improved Super Retina XDR OLED displays deliver an incredible contrast ratio for true blacks and a 28 percent increase in max outdoor brightness at 800 nits, with higher peak brightness for HDR content like photos and videos at 1200 nits, all while being more power-efficient.


Major battery life improvements come to both iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini, made possible by A15 Bionic, more efficient components, a larger battery, and power optimizations from a deep integration of hardware and software. iPhone 13 delivers incredible all-day battery life, offerings up to two and a half more hours in a day than iPhone 12, and iPhone 13 mini provides up to an hour and a half more in a day than iPhone 12 mini.


The Most Advanced Dual-Camera System in iPhone


iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini represent a massive leap in camera design with advancements in hardware and computational photography that deliver stunning photos and videos. The new Wide camera, with 1.7 µm pixels, comes with the biggest sensor ever in an iPhone dual-camera system and is capable of gathering 47 percent more light for less noise and brighter results. Sensor-shift OIS — a technology introduced in iPhone 12 Pro Max and not found in any other smartphone — also comes to the Wide camera, even in the more compact iPhone 13 mini. It stabilizes the sensor instead of the lens so shots are more steady, while the custom-designed Ultra-Wide camera with a new sensor captures images with more detail in the dark areas of photos and videos with less noise.


Following an extensive study of cinematography and the powerful use of rack focus, Cinematic mode on iPhone records videos of people, pets, and objects with a beautiful depth effect with automatic focus changes, so anyone can capture cinema-style moments, even if they aren’t a professional filmmaker. For creative control, the focus can be changed during and after capture, and users can also adjust the level of bokeh in the Photos app and iMovie for iOS, and coming soon to iMovie for macOS and Final Cut Pro, making the iPhone 13 lineup the only devices able to edit the depth-of-field effect in the video even after recording. Enabled by A15 Bionic and advanced machine learning algorithms, Cinematic mode records in Dolby Vision HDR. Both models also offer HDR video recording with Dolby Vision — from capture to editing and sharing — now supported for 4K up to 60 fps on all cameras.


A faster Neural Engine in A15 Bionic, a new image signal processor (ISP), and advancements in computational photography power all-new features on iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini. Photographic Styles allows users to bring their personal photo preferences to every image while still benefitting from Apple’s multi-frame image processing. Preset and customized preferences work across scenes and subjects, and unlike a simple filter, intelligently apply the right adjustments to different parts of the photo to ensure the important elements, like skin tones, are preserved. The dual-camera system and power of computational photography support Smart HDR 4, now with improved color, contrast, and lighting for each subject in a group photo, including in challenging conditions, making images more true to life, as well as improved Night mode. And the TrueDepth camera supports all the amazing new camera features, including Cinematic mode, Photographic Styles, Smart HDR 4, and more.



A15 Bionic: The Engine of iPhone 13


A15 Bionic is much faster than the competition, delivering more performance and better power efficiency, making everything even more fluid in the iPhone 13 lineup. It uses 5-nanometer technology and has nearly 15 billion transistors to tackle the most demanding tasks, including the latest computational photography features. A new 6-core CPU with two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores is up to 50 percent faster than the competition, the fastest in any smartphone, and handles demanding tasks smoothly and efficiently, while the new 4-core GPU is up to 30 percent faster than the competition and enables more lifelike visuals and lighting effects in graphics-intensive games. The new 16-core Neural Engine is capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second, enabling even faster machine learning computations for third-party app experiences, as well as features like Live Text in Camera with iOS 15. Major advancements to the next-generation ISP, paired with computational photography and powerful camera hardware, combine to create the new dual-camera system.


5G Experiences in More Places


The world is quickly moving to 5G, and iPhone offers an advanced 5G experience, transforming the way users connect, share, and enjoy the content. The customized hardware design in the iPhone 13 lineup features more 5G bands, allowing it to work in more places on 5G for greater coverage and performance. By the end of 2021, support for 5G on iPhone will double around the globe, with over 200 carriers worldwide in 60 countries and regions. Users can experience higher-quality video streaming on their favorite platforms, more competitive gameplay in multiplayer games, faster download and upload speeds, and so much more. With iOS 15, SharePlay on 5G will unlock powerful shared experiences such as watching HDR movies or TV shows in sync with friends while on a FaceTime call. And Smart Data mode will intelligently conserve battery life by automatically shifting the iPhone to LTE when 5G speeds aren’t needed.