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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Henk Poley - Saturday, October 19, 2019 - link
Does the A13 have more security features, such as the pointer encryption that was added with the A12 (essentially binding pointers to their origin (e.g. processes)) ? It was kinda interesting that the recent mass exploitation of iPhones uncovered, didn't touch any of the A12 iDevices (and neither does jailbreaks).techsorz - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
I'm sorry Anandtech, but your GPU review is absolutely horrendous. You are using 3Dmark on iOS, which hasn't recieved an update since IOS 10 and then compare it to the Android version which was updated June 2019. There is a reason you are getting conflicted results when you switch over to GFXbench, which was updated on iOS in 2018. How this didn't make you wonder, is amazing.Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
The 3D workloads do not get updated between the update versions, so your whole logic is moot.techsorz - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
Are you kidding me? The load won't change, but the score sure will. It makes it look like the iPhone throttles much more than it does in reality. That the score is 50% less due to unoptimized garbage does not mean that the chipset actually throttled with 50%.I can't believe that I have to explain this to you, 3Dmark supports an operative system that is 3 years old, for all we know it is running in compatibility mode and is emulated.
Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
Explain to me how the score will change if the workload doesn't change? That makes absolutely zero sense.You're just spouting gibberish with stuff as compatibility mode or emulation as those things don't even exist - the workload is running on Metal and the iOS version is irrelevant in that regard.
techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
In computing you have what is called a low-level 3D API. This is what Metal and DirectX is. This is what controls how efficiently you use the hardware you have available. If you have a new version of this API in say, IOS 13, and you run an iOS 10 application, you will run into compatibility issues. These issues can degrade performance without it being proportional to the actual throttling taking place. On android however, it is compatible with the latest low-level API's as well as various performance modes.The hillarious thing is that Anandtech even contradict themselves, using an "only" 1 year outdated benchmark, where the iPhone suddenly throttles less at full load. This entire article is just a box full of fail, if you want to educate yourself, I suggest you watch Speedtest G on Youtube. Or Gary Explains. He has a video on both 'REAL' iOS and Android throttling, done using the latest version of their respective API
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
> If you have a new version of this API in say, IOS 13, and you run an iOS 10 application, you will run into compatibility issues. These issues can degrade performance without it being proportional to the actual throttling taking place. On android however, it is compatible with the latest low-level API's as well as various performance modes.Complete and utter nonsense. You literally have no idea what you're talking about.
techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
How about you provide a proper response instead of saying it's nonsense. How can the throttling be different at full load on 2 different benchmarks otherwhise? There is clearly no connection between actual throttling and the score itself. You are literally contradicting yourself in your own review.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
A proper response to what exactly? Until now all you managed to do is complain is that the test is somehow broken and wrong and I need to educate myself.The whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with software versions or OS version or whatever other thing. The peak and sustained scores are performed with the same workloads and nothing other than the phone's temperature has changed - the % throttling is a physical attribute of the phone, the benchmark doesn't decide to suddenly throttle more on one benchmark more than the other simply because it's somehow been released a few years ago.
The throttling is different on the different tests *because they are different workloads*. 3DMark and Aztec High will put very high stress the ALUs on the GPU, more than the other tests and create more heat on and hotspot temperatures the GPU, resulting into more throttling in and reduced frequencies those tests. T-Rex for example will be less taxing on the GPU in terms of its computation blocks have more load spread out to the CPU and DRAM, also spreading out temperature, and that's why it throttles the least amount.
techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Thank you for your informative reply. Then, is it crazy to assume that 3-year-old 3Dmark benchmark is not providing the same workload as the 2019 version on Android? Maybe you could run an outdated buggy benchmark on a rog 2 as well and it would stress the ALU even more? Possibly, the rog 2 is getting a much more sensible workload while the iPhone is getting unrealistic loads that don't utilize the archiecture at all. In which case, it is pretty unfair and misleading. It's like taking a car and only testing 1 wheel and the other cars get to use all 4.