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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The Garden Variety - Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - link
Ever stop to think it's you who is the outsider, and the thinks you think are important, not literally everyone else? Does that ever stop to cross your mind as you vent your spleen in these disconnected, slipshot rants across a growing number of Anadtech articles? Does it ever feel like to you that technology is slipping away from you, and the things that you and an ever shrinking minority think are important?Yeah, I didn't think so.
s.yu - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
Your ignorance and arrogance is hard to look at.I set animation speed in my 2 year old Android phone to 0.5 and most operations are now much faster.
My 1st gen iPP is also much faster across the board with the upgrade to iPadOS, that obviously didn't upgrade the hardware.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
The video transcode tests in your linked videos don't even use the CPU, it's merely a hardware decoder/encoder block thing.d8e8fca - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link
The difference in SPECfp2006 scores between the A13 and the 9900k is actually a lot closer since the former includes the subscore for the 447.dealII test and the latter does not. Removing the test from the A13's score yields a value of 70.28, which is 6.5% slower.SirKronan - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Why do we still not have the reviews on the Samsung Note 10/10+ phones? These iPhones are still fairly hot off the press and Anand already has their very thorough review complete. I always prefer Anand's reviews of top tier phones to most other sites. This is a major letdown (that seems to indicate possible Apple bias?) to top tier phone enthusiasts. The Note 10+ isn't even on the battery comparison graph, despite representing a major battery size upgrade to Samsung's lineup.Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - link
We do not have the Note10's to review ; Samsung doesn't sample us.Given that the phones just aren't that much different to the S10's, we're unlikely to spend several thousand on purchasing the units for a review that won't have all that much new interesting information on the devices. As a note, we had to buy the S10s for that review earlier in the year.
willis936 - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
Why is there not a single word on the storage subsystem?Lestat1886 - Friday, December 27, 2019 - link
« the competition in 2019 was able to push out a ton of different designs that certainly look a lot more modern than the iPhone 11 family »I don’t really agree, unless a pop up camera is a counted as good design innovation... and those phones don’t have any face recognition sensors... i still find the iPhone design to be among the best out there and more than competitive
LaDiva - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
Can anyone give me some feedback about the sound recording quality for iPhone11? I'm looking for something to do audition video recordings of classical singers - so acoustic quality is vitally important. I'd be very grateful for any suggestions/feedback.Lucas2999 - Wednesday, February 19, 2020 - link
I want to know how to get the MLP data of A13/A12 and other Android Platform? Simple test code writen by yourself or standard benchmark test?