Apple iPhone 14

An iterative update that adds little from last year's model, but it's still a great phone

Like clockwork, Apple launches a plethora of new iPhones every September and, you guessed it, they are the best iPhones yet. The latest, 2022’s iPhone 14 is of course a solid smartphone, but it is also practically identical to its predecessor. Same chassis, same screen, same processor; so is this just an iPhone 13S, or an unenthusiastic placeholder for Apple while it gives its bigger, better specified 14 Pro time to live in the limelight?

Pricing for the iPhone 14 starts at £849 – an increase of £70 on the iPhone 13. The latter is staying in the iPhone range, and Apple has in fact given it a new, lower price of £749. Now, whether or not you consider the iPhone 14 worth the extra £100 rather depends on how important the camera is to you.

More sophisticated cooling

Despite the iPhone 14’s inflated price, it has the exact same A15 Bionic processor found in the iPhone 13 and also the same 128GB base storage configuration. This is backed by an extra 2GB of RAM, which should keep daily use and multitasking running smoothly, and the 14 apparently has more sophisticated cooling to ensure the processor doesn’t overheat; but it is hard to ignore the fact that the guts of the 14 are almost identical to those of the 13.

The similarities between the 14 and 13 don’t end there either. The iPhone 14 is a lookalike when it comes to the outer shell too, to the extent that most people would be hard pressed to differentiate between the two models in a line up. The same flat aluminium frame sandwiched between two sheets of glass remains, with the same 6.1in OLED Super Retina display up front. The 14 does come in some new colours, however, with Midnight (black/navy), Starlight (silver), and Product Red being joined by two soft pastel shades of Blue or Purple.