iPhones are one of the best smartphones on the market, the latest Apple iteration with iPhones included four of them; the iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, with so many options which one should you choose?

The iPhone 12 lineup have some neatly features, with no particular order:

MagSafe₁
A new iPhone 12 Mini version
Squared design
5G
A14 Bionic Chip
Apple ProRaw₂
LiDar₃
MagSafe Accesories₄
Sensor-shift OIS₅
Ceramic Shield front₆

Anyway, I want to help you decide which iPhone to buy so, let’s go straight to this.

Size

This is the second more important question you need to answer, you are going to have this phone for a few years, or at least one, so buying the wrong size will lead to customer dissatisfaction and a lot of regret.

To have a better understanding about what you lose/win between each version let’s see this illustration:

This illustration help you understand how much of the same picture fit on each device; for example, the smaller iPhone 12 Mini shows just a little bit of the sky and not too much of the girl body, while the bigger options will show more of the sky and the girl’s body.

One more thing that is relative to the phone size is battery, the smaller the phone the smaller the battery, same goes the other way around, the bigger the phone is the more power it needs to work and subsequently the bigger the battery.

Storage Space

By far the more important aspect of your phone; you could survive with a smaller or bigger screen, but you won’t easily go around space issues; iPhone Storage can’t be upgraded, this means that if you buy the wrong space for your use cases you will need to one. Delete things in your phone very frequently, or two. Buy a bigger storage phone later, definitely not something you would want to do with a $1000 phone.

Some considerations with the new iPhones are:

the Mini and iPhone 12 start at 64GB up-to 256GB
while the Pro start from 128GB up-to 512GB

Tip: You can have an idea of how much space you use by:

On iPhones Settings > General > iPhone Storage.

On Android phones: Settings > Device Care > Storage.

Extra tip: My golden rule is to never buy the base model, two reasons:

with media file getting bigger each day, is quite easy to max out the available free space
this is what most people buy, if you intend to resell your phone later, bigger storage space iPhones are on more demand than the base models

Additional note: Never buy the 512GB unless you really need it, or you find it on a great discount; a couple of years back I bought the 512GB iPhone 11 Pro just because it was $80 cheaper than the 256GB which was the one I was going to buy anyway.

Camera

I don’t love smartphone cameras (How terrible Smartphone Cameras are comparing to a Pro Camera?), but I can highlight that iPhone’s cameras are still, if not, the best smartphone cameras. Video is the best on a smartphone, and you will be satisfied with the camera performance of any of the iPhone 12 lineup options.

There are also a couple features you should know about:

LiDar:

This technology is great, and it helps with AR (Augmented Reality) and with Portrait Photos but for most of us is completely unnecessary.

Apple ProRAW

Unless you are a Pro or knowledgeable about photography ProRaw is not a necessity. Apple ProRaw allows you to capture more data of the picture for post-production editing, which unless you’re into Photo Editing (Professional graded) you will never use this.

Note: The Pro Max has a Sensor-shift OIS₇ which help the camera lenses to be steadier, this reduces the photos and videos noise shakiness.

MagSafe

I’ll only say that this is a non-essential and it shouldn’t have to be the reason for you to upgrade to the new iPhone 12 lineup. Anyway, this gif shows all you can do with MagSafe as of now and it’s really cool!

Let me start by saying you DON’T need the iPhone 12 Pro Max, the only reason you would want to spend this much is because your phone is a work tool for you, or you have extra money to spend.

The iPhone 12 Pro is the better balance of the four new iPhone 12’s. It has a great camera (no Sensor-shift OIS but dual digital OIS 7), and all the new features: ProRaw, Dolby Vision 60fps video recording (smoother video recording compared to the non-pro variants), more optical zoom (x4), and Night mode portraits for better selfies at night.

If you are coming from a non-pro the iPhone 12 should do the trick and lastly if you’re coming from a device older than the iPhone X like the iPhone 8 or the iPhone SE (generation 1 and 2), the iPhone Mini will be a fantastic device.

As for me, I picked the iPhone 12 Pro Max Gold 256GB; my Phone is a work device for me, additionally I change my phone more frequently than the average consumers so buying the best usually give me the upper hand to have a better resell value to buy the newer version.

Footnotes

An accessory need to be buy to user MagSafe charging
Available on the iPhone 12 Pro Max only
Available on the Pro models only
Accessories that take advantage of MagSafe technology
Available on the iPhone 12 Pro Max only
Also known as Gorilla Victus, is has better shatter resistant in case your phone meets the floor
OIS stands for Optical Image Stabilization