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.
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Alistair - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
mwah ha ha ha... hahahaha. .. .. . hahahah hahaha.... sorry while I break down laughing incoherently. You criticize using SPEC to compare a mobile vs a desktop CPU, then you post links to garbage "look how fast the iPhone is at opening apps over and over again for minutes at a time" as if that is anything but the worst click bait "benching" you could possible find on the internet.joms_us - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
If you are into software engineering, you know running a website or games does those nonsense calculations that SPEC of GB does right? So I'd rather see realworld results than cherry-picked bloated score from SPEC or GB.Alistair - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Since you think those youtube videos indicate anything at all, your judgement has been called into question. I don't think your opinion of SPEC is worth repeating.joms_us - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
An SoC is useless without the other components, so you are testing the whole phone because that is what you are going to use. Sadly, in this regard, the cherrypicked modules in benchmark both in SPEC and GB does not translate to realworld for Apple.WinterCharm - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
App opening on a phone doesn't test anything, except disk read/write speeds and animation speeds. You're an idiot if you think these tests show anything.joms_us - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Idiot? Looks who is talking? How can an app display those UI, information, graphics l, sound etc if it is not using the cpu? The runtime/compiler does everything (read/write/mem copy/cut/compress/decompress/sort/math etc. ) for you so you see them otherwise they are just a bunch of worthless text or numbers like what these SPEC and GB are showing.Irish910 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Actually, if you looked at the graph comparing the A9-A13, it’s pretty clear that this chip can hang with the Skylake. All in a packaged phone design with no fans or active cooling. They’re all compiled the same way when run on Spec. So stop being salty.WinterCharm - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
You speak as though Spec2006 is a bad benchmark, lol.joms_us - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Yep, 2006? Seriously?Run iPhone in Windows or Linux then comeback with the results.
These nonsense crossplatform comparison of GB and SPEC are nothing if they are not running on the same OS.
tipoo - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
>Run iPhone in Windows or Linux tSo you're setting your standard at results that are impossible to show you. You don't really think that comes off as a win on your end of the argument, do you?