I was a bit bored with this one. Seems like too much sacrifice for cost and other features just for 5G, apparently they chose it as easier to market than ProMotion this year with the given battery budget. But the 12 costing 130 more than the 11, having cut the cost of the box, a carrier subsidy included in the marketing price, and the big camera updates being for the Max...Eh. Imo they chose wrong, if not for marketing to most people then to me.
Even with the usual interest in the chips they're quite obviously avoiding comparison with the A13 directly as it's not a big jump apart from the ML engine. They are getting tricky with those performance claims. First with the iPad Air they compared it against the A12, which fair enough, it was the last thing in an iPad Air. This year they said "A14 is the fastest chip in any smartphone, in fact, it's up to 50% faster"...Leaving it to on screen text to clarify that this was against some way behind Qualcomm chip, with only a modest gain vs A13 on the CPU and GPU.
First place is first place, but it does seem to confirm those seemingly small performance gain numbers vs A13 if you worked it out.
Maybe the iPhone 13 will be all that, smaller notch, ProMotion, one of these downsampling 64MP sensors, and not to mention 5G that doesn't zonk your battery to the point where they try to keep you on the previous network until you really need the speed.