The Apple iPhone 11, 11 Pro & 11 Pro Max Review: Performance, Battery, & Camera Elevated
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 16, 2019 8:30 AM ESTVideo Recording
Video recording on the iPhone is known to be extraordinarily good in terms of quality. The iPhone 11 series is said to improve in this regard thanks to an improved HDR with more dynamic range (though Apple still stores video in SDR format). Naturally of course what’s also exciting is that we’re now able to capture video with a wide-angle lens, and seeing a lot more content of a given scene.
Apple has improved the EIS this generation, and it now results in a much smoother video capture experience than the past iterations. When you have with a lot of detail in a scene though, you can sometimes see the jitter caused by the OIS and EIS interacting with each other.
In the wide-angle recording, the EIS was a bit haphazard. In the first part of the video walking down the path it doesn’t look to be stabilizing much at all, when I turn left to the second path suddenly the EIS kicked in and things were a lot less shaky, and it then again loses the stabilization for few steps until it finally resumes again. This happened all three recordings with the wide-angle camera, and I don’t know it was me holding the phone any different between those two paths.
The quality and detail of the videos are all great. The one thing noticed though is that there’s the occasional exposure flicker in some areas. In effect Apple here is doing two exposures per frame and combining them together like Smart HDR – we can notice that in parts of the scene, and most visible the sky is flickering or pulsing in brightness.
The handling between the three camera sensors is very good, it’s particularly fast and seamless to switch between the main and wide-angle modules, while there’s a small delay to switch to the telephoto module. Switching between the three modules is only possible in 30fps recording modes; it’s still possible to record 60fps in any of the three modules but you have to start out the video with the camera that you want to use, and you’ll be limited to digital zooming only while recording.
Speaker Evaluation
In terms of audio for the iPhone 11 series, Apple’s big addition is the inclusion of Dolby Atmos. Naturally you have to watch multi-channel audio content to be able to take advantage of the feature. For regular stereo audio playback, we investigate if Apple has done any changes to the speaker setup and if it differs to that of the XS.
In terms of audio volume, the iPhone 11 Pro is ever so slightly quieter when being held in portrait mode. The bigger difference that’s definitely more audible is when holding the phone in landscape mode with both hands and the palms cupped – the usual way one would hold a phone in landscape. Here it’s 3dB quieter than the iPhone XS, which is a noticeable amount.
Investigating the phone’s stereo bias thanks to a binaural microphone setup, we see that that things have notably regressed for the iPhone 11 Pro when compared to the XS. It’s relatively normal for the main speaker (Right side) to appear louder, however it’s extremely weird that it’s now 1.6dB more biased than on the iPhone XS. Indeed when comparing the 11 Pro and XS side-by-side, and muting the main speaker by holding a finger on it, volume being equal and otherwise calibrated between the two phones, it’s immediately audible that the 11 Pro earpiece speaker is much quieter compared to what we experience on the XS.
This has a rather large knock-on effect on the spatial sound reproduction of the 11 Pro as it just isn’t able to fill up the surrounding area quite as well as on the XS.
Looking at the frequency response between the 11 Pro and the XS, we see that things are extremely similar up to the high mid-ranges, with a more noticeable peak at 95Hz for the 11 Pro. Towards the treble we see some more deviations, it’s here that the 11 Pro is a bit quieter and I think that’s due to the weaker earpiece speaker.
Overall, the sound signature of the iPhone 11 Pro hasn’t changed all too much, and it is actually more of a downgrade in audio playback due to the weaker earpiece speaker calibration. The Galaxy S10’s notably stronger lower mid-range and mid-range still make for a much superior audio playback and is in my experience the device to beat in terms of speaker quality.
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Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
The ROG2 is in the charts. It's getting good scores because it's the only S855+ phone in the charts, because the Adreno 640 has extremely high ALU performance, and because the phone itself is allowed to reach much higher temperatures than the iPhones.The benchmark *tests* are the exact same other than being run on different APIs. What's being rendered is identical between iOS and Android is the exact same.
techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Very nice, I think you should write that in your review. Although taking an iPhone review and then starting off with exploiting its apparent weakness on the first graph, which is the only thing most people will read, isn't very objective in my opinion. I also generally think it's better craftmanship to run benchmarks that have received updates on both devices, regardless.I mean, opening 3Dmark on the new iPhone literally starts it up in an iPhone 8 compatibiltiy mode. You can tell by how the UI doesn't even border the entire display. I just don't see a single compelling argument as to why you would ever pick this tool.
techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Hi Andrei, I see that you updated the review. I apologise for my harsh tone, thank you for this discussion, I learned a lot of new info.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
I updated absolutely nothing ...............techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Oh so you are here, why are you not addressing my point ?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
What point? The UI is irrelevant, the test is offscreen.techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Okay, i'll just have to quote yourself then:" I’ve actually gone back and quickly retested the iPhone XS on iOS13 and did see a 20% increase in performance compared to what we see in the graphs here; " - Andrei Frumusanu
And here is the knockout:
" the workload is running on Metal and the iOS version is irrelevant in that regard." - Andrei Frumusanu
Jesus christ, pull yourself together and fix your god damn review.
People reading, you can make your own conclusion here.
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
There is nothing to fix and there is nothing wrong with the benchmark, you went from the test being old and broken, to talking about it throttling differently because it's older, to the UI being an issue when it's completely irrelevant. The scores are what they are because that's the performance of the chip.The physics test sucks on Apple because it's one weakness in their microarchitecture: https://benchmarks.ul.com/news/understanding-3dmar...
techsorz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Are you literally quoting an article from 2013 to prove something? I didn't go from anywhere, it IS old and broken. The score does NOT represent the throttling you would expect on updated software and certainly can NOT be graphed and compared with the Android version. It is BS that the app renders the same thing, you have literally 0 way of knowing since you didn't write the code.And I didn't go "herp derp, the UI is small" - I said that the app is so ancient that it literally boots in compatibility mode for the iPhone 8. And it is a real thing, go ahead and check the developer forums.
"The scores are what they are because that's the performance of the chip." ...
" I’ve actually gone back and quickly retested the iPhone XS on iOS13 and did see a 20% increase in performance compared to what we see in the graphs here; "
Comeone dude, stop it.
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
The THROTTLING has nothing to do with the software version or and GPU driver updates that Apple makes to improve performance. The improved drivers on the A12 in iOS13 do NOT change the throttling % between peak performance and sustained, which is a PHYSICAL characteristic of the phone.The workloads renders the SAME SCENE both on Android and iOS. We work closely with Futuremark, the developer of the benchmark, along with the developers of GFXBench. If you cannot accept this you have no place reading AT as I can not do anything more to convince you of basic facts regarding the testing.
The compatibility mode you blarb about is related to the UI resolution. It DOES NOT matter in any way for the test as it's been rendered off-screen in our suite. The performance results DO NOT CHANGE.
I am completely done with this topic.