The Apple iPhone 11, 11 Pro & 11 Pro Max Review: Performance, Battery, & Camera Elevated
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 16, 2019 8:30 AM ESTBattery Life - A Magnitude Shift
By now many will have heard positive things about the new iPhone 11s' battery life. As we have covered in the introduction, possibly the biggest changes to Apple’s line-up this year is the device’s vastly increased battery capacities. The Pro models in particular have seen significant increases: the 11 Pro gets a 3046mAh battery which represents a 14.5% increase compared to the XS, and the 11 Pro Max gets a 3969mAh battery which represents a very large 25% increase. The Pro Max is now the first Apple device which has a battery capacity comparable to Android phones out there, some of which have offered similar large capacities for a few years now.
iPhone XS Max vs. iPhone 11 Pro Max Batteries (Image Courtesy iFixit)
The regular iPhone 11 sees only a 5.7% bump to up to 3110mAh, which isn’t all that big upgrade compared to the XR. But it also doesn’t increase its weight nearly as much as the Pro models.
The battery results in our web test are outstanding. Apple in this generation has gone from being average in battery life to showcasing some of the best results we’ve seen in the market.
What is very interesting here is how our absolute test runtimes end up compared to Apple’s marketing claims. Apple has promised +1H, +4H and +5H of battery life for the 11, 11 Pro and the 11 Pro Max compared to their predecessors, and what we measured is 1.08H, 3.9H and 5.27H, which is pretty damn near Apple’s promoted figures, pointing out to some very similar testing conditions between our test and Apple’s internal metrics.
If we break this down a bit and theorize a bit, if we take the XS Max 10.31H result, multiply by 1.25x for the increased battery capacity (12.88H), multiply again naively by 1.15x for the more efficient screen (14.82H), we’re left with a ~5% margin which would account for the more efficient SoC. Give or take margin of error here or there, the results we’re seeing shouldn’t be all too surprising. The math would also check out for the iPhone 11 without a newer display: 5% increased battery capacity and an on average ~3% more efficient SoC.
There’s not much to say about the new iPhone 11 series' battery life other than it's exemplary. More importantly, Apple has managed to finally catch up and exceed the battery life of the LCD iPhone 8 and Plus models from 2 years ago.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
242 Comments
View All Comments
lmcd - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Dunno what this is supposed to mean. Given how well Qualcomm chips do with Windows and the superior performance of Apple vs Qualcomm, you're really just spouting nonsense.joms_us - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Where is superiority you say? These apps does what Spec or GB does and yet iPhone A11 is not showing desktop-level performance here versus OP7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic8q1kPseVE
It is even laughable that this iPhone 11 is not faster than the older iPhone XS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-P0KRlbH1M
If A13 is truly superior than some desktop processors, why are we not seeing/hearing anything it replacing processors inside MBP? I am sure Apple can port it easily to Windows or Linux if they wanted to.
lmcd - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Did you actually just link GUI/responsiveness hand-testing videos? Why do you think those add anything to the conversation? Arguing about the performance of a given GUI library tells us nothing about the SoCs involved.A13 is truly superior to some binnings of laptop-class processors running at nearly 10x its power consumption. That's why it or a larger version of it (a future A13X) will run in a future iPad Pro that should perform in the same class as the Surface Pro 7 and Surface Pro X.
Yea, it won't win versus the top models. But it'll certainly beat the lower-end Pro 7, with an anemic i3. And that includes single-core performance.
So yea, it wouldn't be the top desktop processor, but it certainly can and will scale up to "desktop-class performance." It doesn't scale up to a premium experience at a desktop level yet, so there's no place for it yet in the Apple desktop product stack.
Diogene7 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
On a personal basis, I am much more interested by 1. fanless computers and 2. responsiveness (latency) over raw peak performance for a future laptop or even desktop computer as I am mostly using my computer to surf the web / watch videos.That is the reason I really, really like the idea of Qualcomm 8cx processor as in the Samsung Galaxy book S : Quiet laptop (no fan), thin, light, excellent battery life... The unknow is responsiveness : will the performance be good enough that lag won’t be felt more than a standard Intel / AMD laptop ?
If the responsiveness of a Qualcomm 8cx / future Apple A14 is good enough, then a fanless laptop, but also a fanless desktop has much, much appeal to myself !!!
If I was Apple, I would try to introduce ARM mac computers with both an Apple A14 / Apple A15 in combination with Storage Class Memory (SCM) to get never seen before low latency (excellent responsiveness) fanless mac computers : sure it would maybe take more time to do some intensive tasks on those computers (ex: video editing), but basic day to day task (launching Safari,...) would feel soooo much faster (like using a SSD everything faster compare to a mechanical HDD).
WinterCharm - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
ARM macs are coming in 2020.You will see these chips in a mac. With active cooling they are going to DESTROY anything Intel and AMD have to offer.
Alistair - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
These tests we are looking at are occurring at 2.6Ghz for the A13. And it is basically equal to the 4Ghz+ 9900k. Imagine the A13 running at 3.5Ghz, I think it already surpasses Intel easily enough.joms_us - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Nonsense, show us proof or it did not happen. Even a mere 2Ghz Ryzen is faster than any smartphone today.Alistair - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
The iPhone uses 2 fast cores. Yes, it is equal to a dual core Ryzen or a dual core Intel CPU. I want Intel to be faster, but that would have required them to do ANYTHING meaningful since the i7-2700k came out instead of just repackaging the same CPU over and over.WinterCharm - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
The proof is right on page 4 of this article, or did you not read it?joms_us - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Crossing my fingers, I will be happy even if I can just drag and file my files here and there or perhaps compile my x86 apps. =D