Intro:
This is the Xiaomi 13 Ultra; it has the most sophisticated, most ludicrously specked-out camera system on any phone ever, so I thought, does it beat the most popular flagship phone on the planet, the iPhone? I mean, it definitely wins a point in the unboxing department, not even because this is some sort of extraordinary presentation.
But because at least it does come with everything you need. You get an insert on top, which has the SIM ejector, a couple of manuals, and a hard case—this is kind of a weird shape. Then right at the very bottom, a 90-watt charger, which is surprisingly compact for what's still quite a high wattage, the USB-C cable, and then, of course, the 13 Ultra itself.
The iPhone packaging, as you know, is nice, it's satisfying, but basic. There's no charger here, and certainly no case. It's not even really a competition, and honestly, the differences only get bigger when you start looking at the design of these phones. The iPhone is much less polarizing. It kind of has to be if Apple wants this to be the phone that 30 million people are going to buy.
They've got no room to be edgy with any of the style choices; they’ve got to keep it simple, clean, elegant, and this does that. Xiaomi doesn’t have that same concern. I think this company knows full well that they won’t be selling 30 million units of these; they’re going to sell two, maybe three million, and those three million are going to be Pro users who are actively seeking something that feels unique, and this achieves that goal.
I wouldn't say it's the neatest, prettiest phone; it's got like a speed bump halfway up the back of it, and besides, the phone blending into the rear, which is again just a bit weird, kind of makes this strip going up the back look like a carpet that's not fitted properly. The phone rattles quite a bit thanks to lots of large camera lenses moving around, and the screen borders are still not completely even all the way around, which at this point is just bordering on painful. But technically, it's really impressive.
The only reason that you can even see the sides blending into the back is that the sides and the back are actually all one continuous piece here, which, you know, I've had a pretty good play at trying to bend or creak or crack, and nothing. By using an unibody design like this, they've massively reduced the number of points of vulnerability around the phone.
It reminds me of how reassuring the unibody MacBook feels, how resistant it is to any kind of flexing compared to a lot of these even technically more expensive laptops that are just made of more parts. Well, that did not sound good. And then this rug on top is actually specially treated silicon, which is made for grip, is completely resistant to smudges and fingerprints, made to be anti-yellowing, which is not a given for silicone finishes, and even inhibits the growth of 99% of bacteria.
Features:
Plus, I know I bang on about this, but having your camera in the middle of your phone's body is actually just really helpful because it means that when you put it on a table, it's quite usable without wobble. So, effectively, I think the iPhone is a little more form, I think the Xiaomi is a little more function. Both matter, but I just think it's up to you which one matters more. But then you notice something on the Xiaomi that is just undeniably peak smartphone: the screen.
Because putting aside for a minute my nitpicky gripes about the bottom chin being thicker or the top corners looking a little bit off just because of the way the screen slopes around the edges, the panel itself is dazzling. You might have heard of a few phones in the last few years cropping up with 1500-nit peak brightness levels. The iPhone's actually well-regarded for...
Going even beyond that at 2,000 nits, and now this pushes that all the way to 2,600. That's so high that it's a difference you don't even notice in most scenarios, but it means that should you be in direct sunlight, this phone is not just visible from all angles but actually bright from all angles. Plus, the fact that it is slightly curved at the sides is, I think, a perk too.
It feels a little rough when you have the pre-installed screen protector on because your thumb is effectively grazing over the edge of it. But as long as you possess the risk appetite to take it off it makes gestures feel way more fluid than they do on the sharp edges of the iPhone.
And the crown jewel is that while both phones have superfast 120Hz refresh rates, the Xiaomi's using more up-to-date refresh rate tech that can scale the refresh rate up and down faster and more battery-efficiently than the iPhone can. It is also the higher-resolution screen, but I just hesitate to call that a benefit. Because it's one of those strange situations where they're giving you the option to use the screen in super high-res mode. Then subtly telling you that they don't actually recommend it for the majority of users for battery reasons.
Because by default, the phone actually runs at 1080p, which is lower than the resolution on the iPhone. Okay, so given the Xiaomi takes this super energy-saving ideology and the fact that you've got this super energy-efficient panel, how good actually is the 13 Ultra's battery? So I've got a new version of both phones, I've charged them up to 100, we'll unplug, and I'll spare you the pain of actually having to watch smartphones die one percentage point at a time.
Let's just fast-forward all the way to the moment where the Xiaomi calls it quits because, sure enough, yes, even though it has a 5,000mAh battery, which is quite significantly bigger than Apple's 4,300mAh one, even with the low resolution and the more advanced screen technology, it is still the first one to go. It ends up...
Basic:
10 hours and 8 minutes in this particular run, and the iPhone only very marginally longer at 10 hours 18. As for where that puts these phones in real-world usage, I'm using a 14 Pro Max every single day since launch. It's one of those phones with good battery life, but not so good that you can just completely forget about it, and Xiaomi sits in that same ballpark. But what makes me actually slightly prefer it is the new hibernation mode.
See, plot twist—the Xiaomi's not actually dead. It's programmed to hibernate when it hits one percentage point of battery; it closes all apps, disables almost everything to give you one more solid hour of still being reachable. So overall, we'll call the battery a draw, but that's a cool feature. Can we just have every phone do that from now on?
And if you're curious how long each one then takes to charge up, well, I plugged both back in, I went down to make myself an iced tea. By the time I was back, which was probably four minutes later, Xiaomi was already at. 15%.
It's not astounding—I mean, 90-watt charging is significantly more powerful than Apple's 27 watts—but it is kind of interesting that even though this is Xiaomi's highest-end smartphone ever, it's far from their fastest charging phone. You can get Xiaomi phones with over 200 watts of charging power nowadays that charge in like nine minutes, but I guess because superfast charging comes with its own set of compromises, like usually having a smaller battery capacity. Their marketing for this one is almost definitely going to focus on the cameras.,
they decided to keep the charging a little more typical, which is not to say slow, because it's still fully charged within 45 minutes, while the iPhone is lingering at 66%. Xiaomi is way ahead of Apple, but uh, we're not yet. I think it'd be absolutely hilarious if me and my tiny team of seven people could actually overtake the single largest tech company on the entire platform,
and hey, if we do, I will personally build the largest, most powerful iPhone on the planet myself, so a sub to the channel would be me, Tigris. So that's five points to two points right now. But what about the audio quality? I actually have a very exciting new microphone that we're going to be able to test this with, so for a moment, try to imagine that these are your ears.
This is what the iPhone sounds like: it's very clean sound with a little kicker bass, but it's not one of those phones, at the same time, that like defies its dimensions in audio or anything. So now let's switch over to the Xiaomi, and this phone does something a little differently.
Instead of one downward-firing speaker and then the earpiece on the front doubling as the second, this has one bottom-firing and then one top-firing. And I like the fact that Xiaomi gives you more symmetrical sound, but to be honest, for me, the fact that Apple's earpiece fires directly towards you makes the vocals feel more direct, and it's also a little bit louder, so I'll go with the iPhone here. The software is subjective, of course, but I will say one thing: Xiaomi is not shying away from being clearly inspired by Apple.
You know, it's similar when you're finding that the muscle memory that you've developed with your iPhone still works to control this phone. Now, that doesn't make it bad. I mean, on the contrary, this new MINI 14 can let you open up more apps at once, although who actually uses more than two on a phone, as a wider selection of more colorful widgets.
I'm finding it better organized in terms of finding what you need from the settings. Plus, this is the smoothest a Xiaomi phone has ever been in my eyes, and actually, just before we get to the cameras, this is something that we do need to test: how fast is it? A few weeks ago, I compared the speed of the iPhone to a super top gaming Android, which had an external cooler attached to it,
Conclusion:
Arguably, the even more interesting question is how does a more traditional Android flagship, one that's more focused on photography, stack up to Apple in performance? So, I've run a whole suite of benchmarks, and the results are pretty clear:
Apple is far ahead when it comes to the CPU performance, anywhere from 15 to 25%, depending on how you measure it. But Xiaomi leads when it comes to the graphics, and just to see how well each phone handles temperature, because Xiaomi does go on about how this phone has the first aerospace-grade toroidal vapor-liquid-separated powered cooling system, called the marketing these days—kill me now.
I ran an extreme stress test for 20 minutes straight, and actually, yeah, you'll notice that Xiaomi not only starts at a higher score because its graphics are better, but also that this score falls slower over the course of the test. It has a higher stability of 80.8% as opposed to 65.8%, which basically means that whatever gobbledygook they've actually called this internal cooling system, it does work. When you push both phones to their limits, this does feel hotter on the outside, but that's because the cooling system is doing a better job of getting heat out from the inside, and internal heat is generally where more of the problems occur, which makes overall performance about a draw depending on what specifically you're trying to do on your phone.
Time to see what this phone was made for—cameras. Because, I mean, you don't have to look at the specs for long to see that on paper, Xiaomi absolutely murders the iPhone. We're talking a 32-megapixel selfie camera, four 50-megapixel cameras on the rear—yes, four—with all four having high-end sensors, and the main camera having the largest sensor currently available on a phone.
This is why the crowd basically erupted when the price of this phone was announced; we've never seen a phone camera like this. But before we get to the rear cameras, which to be honest actually do deliver on that hype, we need to talk about the front camera because it does not. It just looks so washed out.
I actually look a bit like a ghost, and it's a far cry from what phones like the Google Pixel have done with their super deep, natural skin tones. And while this is somewhat rescued by the powerful image processing when you're snapping photos, honestly, the video is pretty trash. I mean, look at this room over here—it's just a white look. Plus, it's limited to 1080p, which I just don't understand. Like, genuinely, if there's anyone at Xiaomi watching this video, please tell me why this phone, your 2023 Pinnacle Flagship Ultra phone, cannot record 4K on its front camera. It's not a tech limitation; phones have been able to do this for years now, surely.
