iPhone 14 Pro and Dynamic Island

Apple announced the iPhone 14 range on 7 September 2022. Pre-orders for all four models opened on Friday 9 September, and the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max went on sale on Friday 16 September. The iPhone 14 Plus alone followed on Friday 7 October, three weeks later. Japan was in the first wave on both dates; Apple's Pro release lists it alongside Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India and others.

Two phones under one name

The key to this generation is that "iPhone 14" covered what were effectively two different phones.

The standard models used the A15 Bionic, the chip name that had appeared in the previous year's iPhone 13 range, here in a five-core-GPU configuration; the new A16 Bionic went only into the Pros. The split that had started with ProMotion on the iPhone 13 Pros now ran through chip, screen and camera, and the gap between Pro and standard was the widest it had been.

From hiding the notch to using it

Since the iPhone X, the top of the screen had carried a notch housing the TrueDepth camera. On the iPhone 14 Pro it became a cut-out inside the display.

Apple did not try to hide it. It filled the area around it with black and had the OS stretch and shrink that black shape to show information. This is the Dynamic Island. Apple's release described it as "a design that blends the line between hardware and software, adapting in real time to show important alerts, notifications, and activities".

In Apple's words, "ongoing background activities like Maps, Music, or a timer remain visible and interactive", and a tap-and-hold gives easier access to controls. A hardware constraint — the camera and sensors had to puncture the screen somewhere — was recast as a place to put live information.

The iPhone 14 and 14 Plus did not get it. The Dynamic Island reached the standard models with the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus in 2023.

Always-on, and 48 megapixels

Two other headline features were also Pro-only.

The first was the screen. Apple said a new 1 Hz refresh rate and several power-efficiency technologies enabled the first always-on display on an iPhone. ProMotion on the 13 Pro had bottomed out at 10 Hz; dropping to 1 Hz let the Lock Screen keep "the time, widgets, and Live Activities available at a glance".

The second was the camera: the first 48MP Main camera on an iPhone, with a quad-pixel sensor. Apple explained that "for most photos, the quad-pixel sensor combines every four pixels into one large quad pixel equivalent to 2.44 µm", keeping photos at 12MP for low-light quality, while the middle 12 megapixels of the sensor gave a 2x Telephoto option "with no digital zoom". Apple credited a new image pipeline, the Photonic Engine, with up to 2x better low-light performance on the Pro's Main camera; for the standard models it claimed up to 2.5x.

What all four got: safety features

While Pro and standard drifted apart, every model shared two new features, both about what happens after something goes wrong.

Crash Detection can "detect a severe car crash and automatically dial emergency services when a user is unconscious or unable to reach their iPhone".

Emergency SOS via satellite lets a user message emergency services from places with no mobile signal or Wi-Fi. It was not available on launch day. Apple switched it on on 15 November 2022 in the US and Canada, and said in the same announcement that France, Germany, Ireland and the UK would follow in December. Apple made the service free for two years.

Apple was not alone. Huawei unveiled its Mate 50 series the day before Apple's event, with the ability to send text messages via China's BeiDou satellite system. According to TechNode, the feature could send but not receive, and worked only in mainland China. In the same week of September 2022, two major phone makers put "off-grid to satellite" into a flagship.

What went away: the SIM tray and the mini

Two things disappeared in this generation.

One was the SIM tray — in the US. Apple said the iPhone 14 models "remove the SIM tray for US models", making them eSIM-only. The press release states this for US models specifically.

The other was the mini. After the 13 mini, the 5.4-inch model left the lineup and the 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Plus took its slot. Apple claimed the 14 Plus had "the best battery life ever in an iPhone". It was also the model whose release slipped to 7 October.

For the full product line see iPhone; for the company, Apple.