iPhone 12: Apple's new smartphone launches with limited brightness

If you rushed out to buy Apple's new mobile phone, or have thoroughly researched the new features and capabilities of the iPhone 12, you'll no doubt have noticed that it has a lower maximum brightness than the iPhone 12 Pro. If you're not quite that observant, we can confirm it for you! This is despite the 2 smartphones using exactly the same Super Retina XDR OLED panel.

Even more surprising is that there is no logical explanation for why the maximum HDR brightness for both models was exactly the same, at 1200 nits, but the “typical” maximum brightness was capped at 625 nits for the iPhone 12 compared with 800 nits for the iPhone 12 Pro.

Several YouTubers tried to shed light on this mystery, confirming that the maximum brightness of the iPhone 12 has nothing to do with the display technology, but is an artificial limit imposed by the logic board or something within iOS itself. Some other «curious» types, after taking the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro apart, found that many of the parts appeared to be interchangeable, but concluded that the Super Retina XDR OLED display from an iPhone 12 cannot be used in an iPhone 12 Pro, but will reach 800 nits of maximum brightness on the iPhone 12 Pro. Similarly, a display from the iPhone 12 Pro fitted to the iPhone 12 exceeds the 625 nits of its original display.

When attempting to swap displays between the two models, given that the display assemblies also include the TrueDepth camera and the display controller hardware, they were unable to get Face ID and True Tone to work.

The above «experiment» also showed that most of the replacement parts for the two devices were compatible and interchangeable, with no significant differences. This even applies to the Taptic Engine, the battery and the Lightning connector assembly. At first glance, the differences between the two displays could be attributed to the different display manufacturers Apple uses to meet its ever-growing needs. Cynics, of course, put the differences down purely to the company's marketing, arguing that it needed a strong selling point for its more expensive model.