The iPhone 14 Pro is here, quite literally: I bought mine at the weekend and it's sitting in front of me alongside the iPhone 13 Pro I'm trading in. That phone was our pick of the iPhone 13 range, and I think the 14 Pro deserves the same accolade here: it's significantly better than the standard iPhone 14 in terms of processing power, camera power and battery power too. But here are five things I wish I'd known before buying it.
1. Apple Stores are often better than online ordering
By the time I got onto the Apple Store online to place a pre-order, the delivery timescales had moved to roughly the eleventeenth of never – so I didn't bother with a pre-order and waited for launch day instead in the hope that the Apple Stores near me would have better stock availability. And they did, which is why I was able to pick up my iPhone on Saturday afternoon instead of waiting weeks and weeks. But that did involve a compromise because...
2. Some colours sell better
I wanted the purple one, but so did everybody else: online it appeared to have the longest lead times, and it was also the hardest to find in physical stores unless you wanted to buy one of the ones with more storage, which I didn't. But thinking sensibly about it, I keep my iPhone in a case and that means I can see approximately 0.01% of the stainless steel bits; by going for the gold model instead of the purple one I was able to get the spec I wanted without having to wait.
3. Your old case won't fit
The new camera bump is in a slightly different place and has slightly different dimensions compared to the iPhone 13 Pro, so you can't just pop the case off your old one and stick it on the new one. Boo.
4. Gift cards come back if you're trading in
If you have an Apple Store gift card, which I did, then you can of course use it towards the cost of your new iPhone – and in my case that meant I wasn't stretching quite so much to afford the iPhone 14 Pro, as it's more expensive in the UK this year. But if you're trading your old phone in with Apple, which I am, then the value of your gift card will come back to you as part of your trade-in money – so if your trade-in is £500 and you've used a £100 gift card too, you'll get £400 back and a new £100 gift card.
5. Early adopters get the gremlins
This isn't unique to the iPhone 14, I know, but this year seems to have been an unusually buggy year for the iPhone 14 Pro: there's a serious bug that makes the camera shake alarmingly in some third-party apps (a fix is coming next week) and I've encountered various weirdness in iOS 16 too. As nice is it is to have a brand new iPhone within hours of it going on sale, it does mean putting up with various teething troubles.
