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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FunBunny2 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
" also future phone reviews:. Please test the call quality and reception "such a Luddite!!!! you actually expect a mobile phone to actually make land-line quality calls????? where have you been for the last decade???? :):) don't worry, though. real 5G will require a receiver on your house's roof and a super-duper wifi thingee to get it to work. real 5G won't work anywhere else, of course. wait... doesn't that sound like a land-line????
FreckledTrout - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Shh, adults are talking.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
What can I say? I'm old-fashioned that way: for me, a smartPHONE has to work as a phone to justify its name. As I wrote, I tried out some otherwise capable mobiles, great screen and all, but they really tanked on call quality and reception.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Forgot to add: And, I'm not even expecting landline quality, just a bit better than Armstrong's voice from the moon 50 years ago. Plus, his call to Earth wasn't dropped. Not too much to ask, is it?Drumsticks - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
My guess is this is too hard to measure repeatably and precisely. I wouldn't mind some anecdotal opinions, but at that point you might as well get those from a different website anyways.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
An anecdotal or purely qualitative statement would suffice. No fancy analysis. "Loud and clear" vs. "hard to understand", spotty, dropped words etc is plenty to go on, and takes only a few minutes of testing.Pro-competition - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
Internet calls such as Whatsapp / FB calls for me have mostly been inferior to "normal calls" which use the Public Switched Telephone Network. For this reason, I still pay telcos an additional fee to make such "normal calls".PS: This is from someone who lives in a country where 1Gbps home fibre and 4G+ has been prevalent for many years now, and is about to roll-out 5G next year.
shompa - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Signal strength? The only situation that is plausible is in the woods. Otherwise: just enable WiFi calling. Signal strength is no issue then.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
For performance with low signal strength, my building's basement is another, reproducible example (1-2 bars of 5 max), so no walk in the forest required. I believe that Andrei could find a convenient location where his carrier of choice has low signal, and just test it there. I am not looking for dB levels, just a qualitative statement.Someguyperson - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Your iPhone 11 Pro GPU efficiency numbers are off. The "warm" values aren't even on the chart. You need to take the sustained values from the chart and redo the calculations in the tables.