iPhone 12 & 12 Pro Hidden Features! New Apple Secrets

Hey, what's up guys? Sam here. I just got my iPhone 12 today, and per usual, I know you've seen like every possible benchmark by this point. The unboxing, what's new inside, the big features, but I want to show you something a little bit different. The fun stuff, the hidden features, and other secrets that Apple has included with the iPhone 12. Because just like last year with the iPhone 11, there are a lot. So I guarantee you're going to learn at least one thing new. Drop a like if you're excited for the video. Hit subscribe for more. Let's go ahead and get started with number one. First up is an exclusive feature to the standard iPhone at 12 that actually began last year with the iPhone 11, and it's really neat. So the way that the lens is frosted and coated on the iPhone 11, it's sort of inverse what it is on the iPhone 12 Pro series. You can actually turn on the flash, and while the flash is super bright on these new phones, just like last year, it actually glows around the edges. This is something you don't get on the Pros because Apple did the engineering different. It's really slick. If you cover up the flash, you get a way more subtle flashlight. It's cool to see the light sort of escape out of the sides of the lens housing, and it's pretty sweet. I mean, this is a hardware design, unsure if it's intentional, but definitely sure that it's cool. The iPhone 12's new design is great. It feels cool in your hand. It's way more boxy. It kind of looks similar to an iPad Pro, but this also allows us, for the first time since 2013, to do something with the iPhone we have not been able to do, which is stand it up on its own. I cannot tell you how many times with iPhones in the past couple of years when I just want to watch a YouTube video for a little bit, I just want to, you know, have it sort of sitting up. You always have to lean it. It slides. It's slippery. That's not the case with the iPhone 12 series. Both the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro don't fall over. You can set them up, and they actually have enough weight to hold themselves still. And you know, I was outside. It was a little windy earlier, and it even seemed to survive okay outside. So this is pretty sweet, and I just can't tell you how many times I've already used this. Maybe what you've heard the most about the iPhone 12, other than the new design and the camera upgrades, is actually about the box and the lack of things included this year. It is just your quick start little, like, papers, one Apple sticker, a lightning to USB-C cable, and the iPhone. That is it. The box is, like, nearly 50% thinner. It's super tiny, and you get that impression as soon as you touch it. However, you can actually get free AirPods if you purchase the iPhone in just one single country. In fact, if you live in the country of France, you legally get AirPods included. Now, what would Apple do here? They're going to redesign the entire box just for one country? Of course not. They devised this really cool new, like, box over or within a box where earpods sneakily sit underneath. So you pull your iPhone out, and there are earpods underneath in this special packaging. Now, again, you can't get this in the US, but if there's any French viewers out there that are still getting the free AirPods, I mean, that sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Not that I ever use them, but, you know, you do get those in France. But over on the other side of the pond in the United States, if you live there, you're also getting an exclusive feature with the iPhone 12 this year. On both the 12 and the 12 Pro, there's a special design element that is not present on any other iPhone, and that's this on the side of the phone right below the power button. What is this? Is it touch ID? Is it a new camera? Is it a scanner? No, it's actually just a transparent window for the faster millimeter wave 5G frequency. If you go to Europe or Asia or anywhere else, you're not getting this design tweak, nor are you getting support for millimeter wave 5G. That's just in the United States. Honestly, like visually, it doesn't look that good, but it does enable such incredibly fast speeds. Here's a clip you've been looking at from a speed test I tried, and when you are on millimeter wave 5G, 5G is worth it, but that doesn't happen often at all right now. And because all the new iPhone 12 support 5G, there are some exclusive software features that just aren't available on any other iPhone. You can actually enable 5G all of the time, but I wouldn't recommend it in a lot of cases right now. 5G is actually really slow when compared to LTE, at least if you're on Verizon like I am, and it drains your battery. If you have 5G and you're always pulling from that, there is very little that Apple can do to optimize, so your battery just runs down really fast. I'd recommend leaving it on the auto select option. However, generally with 5G, you can now, for the first time ever on the iPhone, update software over cellular. I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but like iOS 14 would come out, or another big iOS update, and you couldn't update because you weren't on Wi-Fi. Your iPhone said you must be on Wi-Fi to download and connect. That restriction is no longer present when you buy one of the new iPhone 12s. So many parts of these iPhones look the same. In fact, they have the same battery on the inside, which fun fact, the battery capacity on the iPhone 12 series is smaller than on the iPhone 11 series. In initial testing, in a video from MrWhoTheBoss, the iPhone 11 Pro lasts roughly an hour longer than both the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro. So it seems like battery life is actually a little bit weaker this year, even though Apple claims it's about the same. But one model of the iPhone 12, specifically the Pro line, is not like the others, and it's the new gold color. The more I've looked at this phone, the more I'm like, wow, Pacific Blue, the one that I got is nice, but damn, damn that gold. And as it turns out, there's actually something to that. There's a reason it looks exceptionally good this year. Unlike the other iPhone 12 Pro colors, we're talking about graphite, white and silver, and Pacific Blue, Apple used a special high power impulse magnetron sputtering process to color the stainless steel edges on the gold iPhone 12. That is why they look so bright and so nice. And as it turns out, that special process applied just to the gold, according to TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino, it turns out that could actually lead to durability benefits over time. Now, obviously that time period doesn't exist yet. We haven't had these phones for more than really a few hours or maybe even a few days. But if you buy the gold iPhone 12 Pro, it may actually hold up better over time than any other color. One of the weirdest and off the beaten path parts of this iPhone is this new feature called MagSafe. You probably have seen people talk about it. It's like this little charger that just snaps back to the phones. And there's special MagSafe cases that can also, you know, work with this functionality. And Apple's baked in a couple of treats for you if you actually opt for the MagSafe functionality. The first is when you just connect a case. You get this cool animation that shows you are connected to a MagSafe case for the first time. It's pretty sweet to see. The other animation happens every single time you plug in your phone. And this is an exclusive to MagSafe. No other Qi-enabled wireless charger will show you this unless, you know, you mod your phone or something. This is the nice animation you get maybe every night before bed when you put your iPhone on the charger. But MagSafe is not completely scot-free here because Apple has recently published a new support document that outlines some info about MagSafe. And something that they bring up is that, well, on leather cases and even on some silicon cases that are made by Apple, there can be an imprint that gets left over time. Here's an image courtesy of macromousse that a reader sent in on even a silicon case. But it's apparently more intense on the leather cases. And, you know, that doesn't look good. That looks real bad. So I don't know if Apple thought this one out. This is going to be like the big controversy for the iPhone this year. But just a friendly and warm heads up to anybody using one of the leather or silicon cases, maybe MagSafe isn't the way to go. Maybe it's not a big deal and widespread. We're not entirely sure. That and the fact that, you know, MagSafe will totally screw up a credit card if you like keep rubbing it around there just unprotected. But perhaps out of everything on this list, there's one feature for the iPhone 12 that is hidden until the point that you're going to remember that this is a feature. And that is four times better drop performance on the new ceramic shield display. This does not improve quality or the way it looks or give you like QLED. It's nothing like that. It's just drop performance is four times better generation over generation. I mean, the iPhone 11 was already out of this world. Good. I dropped mine a few times and it was all right. And Apple has made it even crazier on the iPhone 12 series. I've seen videos of people dropping it from six, seven feet in the air and the screen is completely unscathed. As it turns out, though, it's not four times on every portion of the device. That's 4X just on the display. An iPhone exec on a podcast the other day actually revealed that it's two times better on the back glass. So the back glass sees a 2X upgrade, but the front glass sees a 4X. Obviously, I think Apple made the right call there. You know, the front glass matters a little bit more, but interesting that Apple has improved a couple parts of this iPhone and even the new structure they say is way better for if you accidentally drop this. It might even scratch a little bit less easily as well. And rounding out this list, one final feature similar to the better drop performance. This phone is significantly more waterproof and this applies to all of the new iPhone 12s. They are up to six meters water resistant. Apple says for up to 30 minutes, it's likely a lot longer than that. The iPhone 11s last year, the pros were up to four meters. So now all of them get six. So I mean, technically, if you drop your phone in the bottom of like kind of the deep end of a pool, it can chill there for a long time and you're more likely to not have excessive and severe and grotesque water damage. Way to end on a happy note there. No, we can't end it like that. One more tidbit that is really interesting in iFixit's teardown. They discovered that there is actually room on the iPhone 12 for Apple to put internally the LiDAR sensor and the third lens that the pros gets. There's a physical plastic spacer that Apple put in there on the iPhone 12s. So like technically, you know, they could have added this to both, but then there would be no way that the pro is worth $200 extra. Fun fact. All right. Hope you guys enjoyed this. Let me know down below in the comment section, which new hidden feature and secret was your favorite, what you learned. And I'll drop a like if you guys enjoyed it. Hit subscribe for more and I'll catch you in my next video.