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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Narg - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Very poor review. Seems this reviewer has a complex, and one that doesn't bode well for an average consumer.WuMing2 - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Could anybody point out a -professional- use case for a $1k smartphone? Because I call, text, surf, recognize, edit, share and snap perfectly useless pictures with iOS 13...on iPhone 6s.I believe few years back the peak of refinement for common functions has been reached for 99% of users. And all smartphone vendors are burning insane amounts of resources to solve non-existing problems. While some very obvious ones - as system-wide annotations of info and objects to personalize and learn as we commonly do in the real world - are still missing. To their credit Apple employees achieve that with the most tasteful and responsible of products.
hlovatt - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Great review. Really enjoyed the in-depth analysis of the CPU.It is interesting that the wide angle camera is treated so differently than the other two in low light.
On the subject of the Camera, does any one know the:
1. Bust frame rate?
2. The live photo frame rate?
primet - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
not sure why anandtech insist of calling the ultra wide as wide angle.The_Assimilator - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
While I may loathe Apple as a company for its rubbish products, overhyped designs, predatory repair practices, eocsystem lock-in, and ridiculous price-gouging...I cannot help but give kudos to Apple's CPU design team. Sure, Arm is not x86 in terms of complexity, but the fact that Apple has a chip that is both far faster and far more power-efficient than their Android competition, that is using the same underlying architecture, is incredibly impressive. Equally impressive is that they have managed to maintain this dominance over multiple generations, and that the competition still seems as far away from catching up as ever.
joms_us - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
If you haven't seen speed tests for the last 2-3 years, iPhone is lagging vs competition. Even the iPhone 11 is slower than iPhone XS.Oyeve - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
Yet in the real world some other phones open and/or maintain speed faster than IP11.varase - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
Chart: The iPhone 11's IP68 is only good for 2 meters for 30 minutes.darwiniandude - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
Thanks for the awesomely detailed review and comparison. Well done, I appreciate the effort!mef - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
Needless to say, outstanding analysis as usual!Kudos for the ton of painstaking work done to gather and compare all the numbers, images, etc. It's not very precise for a reviewer nor interesting for a savvy reader to just say that one device "feels fast enough”. Instead, taking the analysis to such a highly scientific level is really why I look forward to reading Anandtech’s insightful reviews ;-).