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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ksec - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Well At least one article got it right on Anandtech. Last time Anton refers Apple A13 as 7nm EUV, along with an TSMC update mentioning it as well. Now we can finally settle Apple is using N7P.I think one of the reason for the higher power usage is the A13 was designed with 7nm EUV in mind, and was only later changed to N7P as 7nm EUV may not provide enough capacity for Apple.
I do wonder if we are going to see 5nm Apple SoC next year.
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Anton didn't realise 'N7P' and 'N7+ with EUV' were different processes - and that people were using P instead of + for some unknown reason. Up until a while ago, any time someone said 'second generation N7', it was always thought of as N7+. Now we're making them clarify.FreckledTrout - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
It's TSMC's alphabet soup so who can blame him. They could make the node names a bit easier for people whom are not CPU process nerds.dennphill - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Apple! They just give you what THEY want to! Pretty disappointed in all their products. I finally gave in and got rid of my Goggle thinggie (worthless, really) and got a reconditioned iPhone 8+ a coouple of months ago. It is really (so here's my technical user review: "It's just...") OK. My wife, OTOH, has an SE - her second - and she really doesn't want anything bigger. EVER! (Listen to that, Apple!) Even the reported new 'tiny' 2020 5.4" iPhone is what she calls HUGE. Weekend project is replacing her iPhone 5 SE battery that's begun not to keep a charge.peevee - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Make your bets: will Apple switch to A13X in their MacBooks... Seems would be very prudent with an 8-core implementation.solipsism - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
I have no doubt Apple will replace Intel with an ARM SoC, but I do not expect it to be beefed up A-series chip found in an iPhone. Just like all their in-house designed chips, I would expect it to be its own letter designation with considerably more memory bandwidth, access to PCIe, and other features that work well in a lower-end portables and desktops.Diogene7 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
I hope Apple intend to keep their future laptop ARM CPU low power enough to not require any active cooling : a fanless ARM mac laptop is well executed could have a lot of appeal to me !!!That the reason why at the moment, I am keeping an eye on Samsung Galaxy Book S / Microsoft Surface Pro X that are the 2 first fanless computers with ARM Qualcomm 8cx : if responsiveness is good enough (especially for web browsing, watching video, Microsoft office,...) then it would prove it is possible.
From there, I would be very happy that Apple do an always connected fanless Macbook Air with an ARM CPU, as otherwise I am considering buying a Qualcomm 8cx fanless laptop (if the reviews confirms that the performance are reasonable enough)
joms_us - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
I like to have this as well, approx. 1 day battery able to do media consumption/productivity. At least the comparison so far is that it is better if not than Intel Core i5-8250UQuantumz0d - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
This mentality shift that Apple caused in consumers is the reason why Laptops got rolled over into thin anf light disposable garbage.All Intel BGA / AMD (both PGA and BGA) all have castrated TDP limits which forces throttling. And Apple shoved an 6C/8T into which they cant cool because they tried to cheat physics. And still after VRM fiasco they still put the 8C/16T into that anemic chassis people who are buying them deserve to be robbed off th e 60% drop in performance.
Dell shoved XPS with same i9 and it got rekted down. Surface ARM cannot run 64bit x86 code and iy can run the UWP garbage only.
Next the BGA hellhole that Apple dragged everyone into. First x86 macs had BGA processors. Seeing that Intel stopped PGA and started Ultrabook BS and killed off all MX and XM PGA from Haswell making BGA with cTDP mandatory and bins locked down. My Haswell CPU in Notebook maintains consistent 700 in CB R15. Not even 7700HQ does it when put in a TDP locked JUNK.
And next Soldered SSD in Macs paired with T2 chip. Anything goes bad Go to Apple. Battery soldered to Chassis. KB inherent design flaw. This stupid corporate only knows how to fleece and put junk and forced all companies passively into this thin and light garbage.
Forget PCIE NVME SSDs in RAID rhat chassis will melt and GPUs don't exist in Apple lala land because Muh AR ML Kit and all.
ARM cannot do Transcoding work. Period. And Image Processing like Autodesk won't run on garbage ARM GPUs need Nvidia chips with High BW GDDR6 or G5X. Apple cannot cool them in that chassis. They can't escape Physics. End of Story of this A series competing with x86 ISA and Intel/AMD.
Diogene7 - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
@joms_us : Yes, for applications compiled to work natively on ARM64, the performance of the app running a Windows computer with Qualcomm 8cx should be similar as the same x86-32bits app running on a Windows computer with Intel Core i5-8250U, but with the advantage of having much better battery life which is appealing to me as well :).Really looking forward to read reviews on Samsung Galaxy Book S and Microsoft Surface Pro X to see if they hold to the hype...