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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Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Just to add context to the active cooling of the phone rationale;SPEC takes around an hour to complete: you can't expect a phone to sustain that, and we want to be able to see the full peak scores of all the subtests in order to have a proper µarch analysis.
This peak performance still exists in real workloads, however you'd be hard to find a hard use-case which stresses the CPUs for the same amount of time.
WaltFrench - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
I'd appreciate your expanding on this.Your graph shows watts of power, not watt-hours of energy. If Y performs a test 50% faster than X while using 20% more watts, Y uses about 30% less battery for the same work.
That's certainly not the implication I get from looking at the tests but it seems the obvious conclusion.
WinterCharm - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
It's happening at WWDC 2020. Just wait and see.You're wrong and you're stupid to think these chips are not incredibly good.
joms_us - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
LOL, if they can make these chips run at 4GHz, then I will believe you they are incredibly good. At best they will probably reach desktop i3 level.Wilco1 - Saturday, October 19, 2019 - link
They already match the fastest 5GHz i9 while running at half the frequency...joms_us - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
Match with what, where? Primitive Spec2006 and bloated GB score? LOLApple SoC is skyrocketting in HTML and ML scores yet pathetic in realworld result.
Keep the comparison within the same OS period and then you can say it beat the fastest desktop chip out there otherwise you will look like retarded and brainwashed.
Galdutro@$ - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
This didn’t aged very well...rantao333@hotmail.com - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
some users in china found out that Huawei phones have forced the Gpu to render the graphic in lower resolution/ off anti-aliasing, to improve the battery life and FPS, this happened even u have set max details in game setting, of turn off any save battery function. Huawei software kind of override everything and there is no way to turn it off.. Some maps-app and most game has been affected, and this behaviors tend to be trigger by whitelist of huawei . the degradation in details are subtle and most user dint notice it unless u compare it side by side to another phoneI hope AnandTech can investigate this issue in their review of kirin 990 , whether it is true or not, or this had been on going since the introduction of GT- turbo of Huawei.
Anand2019 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
They have to cheat. Seems like all of the phone manufacturers from asia are cheating. Apples lead is too big!airdrifting - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Your comment is like all white people are mass murderers and rapers. iPhone is also manufacturered in Asia btw.