The iPhone XS & XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 5, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Apple
- Smartphones
- iPhone XS
- iPhone XS Max
Battery Life
The iPhone XS comes with a 2658mAh/10.13Wh battery, while the XS Max has a capacity of 3174mAh/12.08Wh. Again, it’s to be noted that although both phones are quite large form-factor devices by now, Apple’s battery density still largely lags behind the competition. While yes, it’s true that the XS Max’ battery is the biggest that Apple has ever used, it still pales in comparison to the 3500 to 4000mAh that other vendors now employ in the same form-factor.
As we saw in the SPEC analysis, the one advantage that Apple has is an enormous lead in terms of power efficiency of its SoC, which largely makes up for any gap in the battery capacity deficit.
Our web browsing test is a mixed-to-heavy workload that iterates through a set of popular webpages that are hosted on our server. The test loads a web page, pauses, scrolls through it, pauses, and then continues to the next in the set, repeating all over when done. Brightness is fixed at 200cd/m².
The iPhone XS saw a very slight degradation compared to the iPhone X in our test. The 19 minute deficit isn’t terrible, but it does come at a surprise given that Apple had promised improved battery life for the new model. What’s happening is that likely our test is a tad heavier in its workload than what Apple and many other vendors internally test to advertise as the daily battery life of their devices.
The iPhone XS Max came in at 10.3h. Again while this is still good, it’s a degradation over the 11.83h of the iPhone 8 Plus. Here it’s easier to rationalise the difference; the OLED screen of the XS Max is just more power hungry and also has a larger area than the iPhone 8 Plus. Here the increased battery capacity isn’t enough to counteract the panel’s increased needs.
As to why the iPhone XS saw a degradation over the X, I’m not too sure. I did rerun the test on the iPhone X to make sure iOS12 hadn’t impacted the devices – and I got a runtime just 10 minutes lower than what I had tested on the iPhone X back around in January, so the iOS upgrade certainly doesn’t seem to have affected the battery life.
It should be relatively safe to assume that the new A12 should be more efficient in its workloads, even with the increased performance that it brings. One thing that we can’t really verify is the power efficiency at intermediate performance states, as that’s also where CPUs perform a lot of their work at.
We also have to keep in mind the connectivity factor: the new iPhone’s seems to sport a new Broadcom BCM4377 WiFi combo chip which we don’t know much about. Most importantly the new XS have also switched over from a Qualcomm baseband (in our test unit of the iPhone X) to a new Intel XMM7560 baseband.
I’ve generally given up on LTE testing after a few years ago I had run into some serious issues regarding a misconfiguration of my mobile carriers’ baseband stations as they did not have CDRX enabled. This caused an almost 20-30% battery life degradation on Huawei’s devices – and if I hadn’t debugged the issue with HiSilicon I’d probably be none the wiser. Fact is, cellular battery life testing is a lot harder than one would think, and without having a controlled environment, I’m very hesitant to resume cellular battery life testing.
That being said, I will revisit the iPhone X vs iPhone XS battery life topic while on LTE over the weekend and post an update to the review.
Overall, the battery life of the iPhone XS and XS Max are good – they don’t quite reach Apple’s claimed improvements, but that also just might be something that will vary from use-case to use-case.
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FreckledTrout - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Pretty typical with any high end products. The top 10% pave the way for the rest to have these products at a reasonable price a few years later. You can get an iPhone 7 pretty cheap now.MonkeyPaw - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
It’s still cheaper than my first PC, a 486sx2 running at 50mhz. RAM and hard drives were still measured in megabytes, and the internet made noise before connecting and it tied up your phone line when you used it. There has also been about 20 years of inflation. Flagship smartphones are expensive, but they sure do a lot. That doesn’t mean I’m buying one, but we’ve come a long way in my hopefully-less-than-half-a-lifetime.keith3000 - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
OMG! Exactly what I was thinking as I read this review on my $225 T-Mobile Rev VL Plus. I may not be able to afford such a technological marvel as the iPhone XS MAX, but I bet I get anywhere from 80-to-90% of the overall functionality for one-fifth the price. I've bought many premium smart phones over the years, starting with the HTC EVO 4G LTE many years ago, followed by Samsung Galaxy S3, then the S4, and even the gigantic Asus Zenfone 3 Ultra. Each phone was better than the one before, and yet each were major disappointments to me for various reasons which I won't go into here. Suffice to say that the ever increasing cost of each phone raised my expectations about what they should be able to do, and thus contributed to my sense of disappointment when they failed to live up to the hype. So when the Zenphone 3 crapped out on me after less than a year of use and I saw this cheap Rev VL Plus, I decided to stop wasting so much money on these overpriced devices and buy something that wouldn't leave me feeling robbed or cheated it it didn't turn out to be the "next best thing". Now, after almost a year of use, I feel like it was a good decision. And if something better comes along in a few months at a similar price point, I can buy it without feeling remorse for having wasted so much money on a phone that didn't last very long. So all you 10-percenters - go ahead and throw away $1,200 on a phone. I'm quite content to have a 2nd rate phone and save a thousand dollars.ws3 - Sunday, October 7, 2018 - link
You say you spent $225 on your phone less than (but almost) a year ago and then say that you would be willing to replace it immediately if some other phone interested you. So you are apparently willing to spend around $225 for one year of ownership of a phone.By this metric you should be willing to spend $1000 on a phone provided you keep it for 4 years or more.
Now it may the the case that you don’t want to keep any phone for four years, and so the iPhone X[S] is not for you. But here I am with an four year old iPhone 6+, that still works great (thanks to iOS 12). I similarly expect the iPhone X[S] to be good for four years at least, so, although I am not a “10%er”, I am seriously considering purchasing one.
It’s simply a fallacy to assert that only the wealthy would be interested in the latest iPhone models.
FunBunny2 - Sunday, October 7, 2018 - link
"Now it may the the case that you don’t want to keep any phone for four years, and so the iPhone X[S] is not for you. But here I am with an four year old iPhone 6+, that still works great (thanks to iOS 12). "ergo, Apple's problem. unfulfilled TAM for iPhones is disappearing faster than kegs at a Georgetown Prep gathering. keeping one longer than a cycle is a real problem for them. they will figure out a way to stop such disloyalty.
ex2bot - Sunday, October 7, 2018 - link
They’ll find a way, like supporting the 5S and later with iOS 12. /sicalic - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Hi Andrei Frumusanu,Thanks for extraordinary review of iPhone Xs!
in page one you said A12 GPU 4-core "G11P" @ >~1.1GHz, i have several question.
1. how do you estimate that clockspeed?
2. if you know that clockspeed can you estimate how many GFLOPs FP32 and FP16 on A12 GPU?
syxbit - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Great review of the SoC.Please, when you review the Pixel 3, or (in 2019), updated Snapdragons, hold them to this bar.
I get really frustrated when I see your (or other) reviews complimenting the latest Snapdragon even though they're miles behind the Ax.
As an Android user, I find it very unfortunate that to get my OS of choice I must get inferior hardware.
edzieba - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Phone reviews are a review of the phone, not just the SoC.syxbit - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
I know that, but the SoC is the area where Apple are completely dominant.