A Few Days with iPhone 12

The iPhone 12 is out. Sure, plenty of people are grumbling about the lack of a high refresh rate and the smaller battery, but given that the design went back to the sharp-edged look of the iPhone 4s era, it’s still worth a look.

I picked up the iPhone 12 in green, 128G, and traded in an iPhone 8 64G for cash. When the iPhone 12 first launched you actually couldn’t reserve one — aside from the first batch of online orders, if you wanted a physical unit from a brick-and-mortar store you had to keep waiting. I went to the Apple Store at Zhengzhou MixC and found nothing but iPhone 11s inside.

I asked the sales girl — one who looked like Inori Minase — and she said there were no units in store right now, and she couldn’t say when stock would arrive.

But in the end she leaned in and whispered: “Keep an eye on the official site at 6 a.m. on the 24th.”

I asked her again: “Can I trade in my iPhone 8?”

“Yes, but first you need a reservation to buy.”

After looking into it, I found Apple would open in-store reservations at 6 a.m. on October 24, 2020, so I camped the official site and finally, right at 6, grabbed a reservation for the iPhone 12 128G in green — with pickup that same evening at 19:00 at Zhengzhou MixC.

That evening we got to the Apple Store at MixC and found a long line already — two lines, actually: one for “no reservation, just here to try the iPhone 12,” and another for “reservation holders here to buy.”

We, of course, were “VIPs” and went straight down the green buying lane. This time a busty sales girl received us and quickly brought out the iPhone 12 128G in green we were buying. It looked much better than that “hero fountain-pen ink blue.” They powered it on and activated it on the spot, and after testing we were free to go.

A few details worth summarizing here:

• Trading in an iPhone 8 64G gets you 1,000 yuan off; the exact amount depends on cosmetic condition and whether it functions normally. Scratches and such don’t seem to bother Apple — they just punch in the serial number and look up the discount amount.
• I hear parallel imports can be traded in too, but for less than mainland-China units, and if it’s been repaired it can’t be traded in at all.
• The iPhone 8 64G I traded in had a battery capacity already below 70%, and yet the busty girl at the Apple Store didn’t check at all. That’s also why I didn’t want to sell this phone on eBay — a buyer there would see the battery capacity is that low and wouldn’t offer this price anyway.
• Because of the pandemic, the Apple Store can’t provide in-store data transfer. You can back up your old phone’s data with iTunes beforehand. Apparently the Beijing Apple Store does offer this service — no idea why Zhengzhou can’t, maybe the space is too small.
• The iPhone 12’s design is nice, the screen is nice, the weight is nice — it’s just the OS that’s no good.
• With a completely flat screen, applying a screen protector is really satisfying.
• No high refresh rate, but iOS makes it look “very smooth” by slowing down the animations.
• The mainland-China iPhone 12 supports 5G, so you can hop on a 5G signal wherever there is one.
• Buying an iPhone 12 right now, every sales girl will push AppleCare+ on you as hard as she can. Maybe it’s in the training, I don’t know. I didn’t buy it anyway — I’m broke.
• iPhone 12 purchases support 24-month interest-free installments. I went with it — no interest, after all, and maxing out the installments is basically a discount.
• iPhones don’t qualify for the education discount; only iPads, MacBooks, and the like do.

All in all, the Apple Store shopping experience was pretty good. As for how the phone actually performs — it’s not me using it anyway, so I’ll leave it at that.