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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Irish910 - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
Why so salty? If you hate Apple so much why are you here reading this article? Sounds like you’re insecure with your android phone which basically gets mopped up with by the new iPhones in every area where it counts. Shoo shoo now.shompa - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Desktop performance. Do you understand the difference between CPU performance and App performance? X86 has never had the fastest CPUs. They had windows and was good enough / cheaper than RISC stuff. The reason why for example Adobe is "faster" in X86 is that Intel adds more and more specific instructions AVX/AVX512 to halt competition. Adobe/MSFT are lazy companies and don't recompile stuff for other architectures.For example when DVD encoding was invented in 2001 by Pioneer/Apple DVD-R. I bought a 10K PC with the fastest CPU there was. Graphics, SCSI disks and so on. Doing a MPEG 2 encoding took 15 hours. My first mac was a 667mhz PowerBook. The same encoding took 90 minutes. No. G4 was not 10 times faster, it was ALTIVEC that intel introduced as AVX when Apple switched to Intel. X86 dont even have real 64bit and therefore the 32bit parts in the CPU cant be removed. X86 is the only computer system where 64bit code runs slower than 32bit (about 3%). All other real 64bit systems gained 30-50% in speed. And its not about memory like PC clickers belive. Intel/ARM and others had 38bit memory addressing. That is 64gig / with a 4gig limit per app. Still, today: how many apps use more than 4gig memory? RISC went 64bit in 1990. Sun went 64bit / with 64bit OS in 1997. Apple went 64bit in 2002. Windows went 64bit after Playstation4/XboxOne started to release 64bit games.
By controlling the OS and hardware companies can optimize OS and software. That is why Apple/Google and MSFT are starting to use own SoCs. And its better for customers. There are no reason a better X86 chip cost 400 dollars + motherboard tax 100 dollars. Intel 4 core CPUs 14nm cost less than 6 dollars to produce. The problem is customers: they are prepared to pay more for IntelInside and its based on the wrong notion "its faster". The faster MSFT moves to ARM / RISCV. The better. And if the rumors are right, Samsung is moving to RISCV. That would shake up the mobile market.
Quantumz0d - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Samsung just killed Texas team funding. And you don't want to pay for a socketed board and industry standard but rather have a surfacw which runs on an off the shelf processor and has small workload target in a PC ?Also dude from where you are pulling this $6 of Intel CPUs and I presume you already know how the R&D works right in Lithography ? ROI pays off once the momentum has began. So you are frustrated of 4C8T Intel monopoly amd want some magical unicorn out of thin air which is as fast that and is cheap and is portable a.k.a Soldered. Intel stagnated because of no competition. Now AMD came with better pricing and more bang for buck.
Next from Bigroom Mainframes to pocket PC (unfortunate with iOS its not because of no Filesystem anf Google following same path of Scoped Storage) microsoft put computers in homes and now they recently started moving away into SaaS and DaaS bs. And now with thin client dream of yours Itll be detrimental to the Computer HW owners or who want to own.
We do not want a Propreitary own walled gardens with orwellian drama like iOS. We need more Linux and more powerful and robust OS like Windows which handles customization despite getting sandbagged by M$ on removing control panel slowly and migrating away from Win32. Nobody wants that.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3444606/with...
jv007 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
The lighting big cores are not very impressive this time.From 4 Watt to 5 Watt a 25% increase in power for 17% more performance.
Good for benchmarks (and the phone was actively cooled here), but not good for throttling.
7nm and no EUV, maybe next year with 5nm and EUV will improve seriously.
I wonder if we will see a A13X.
name99 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
"The lighting big cores are not very impressive this time"A PHONE core that matches the best Intel has to offer is "not impressive"?
OK then...
Total Meltdowner - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Comparing this CPU to intel is silly. They run completely different instructions.Quantumz0d - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
It has been overblown. The Spec score is all the A series chips have. They can't replace x86 chips even Apple uses x86 cores with Linux RHEL or Free OS Linux distribution to run their services. Whole world runs on the same ISA. These people just whiteknight it like a breakthrough while the whole iOS lacks basic Filesystem access and the latest Catalina cannot run non notarized apps.Also to note the Apple First party premium optimization, that Apple pays for companies like Adobe. If you run MacOS / Trashbook Pro BGA / iOS on any non optimized SW it will be held back both on power consumption and all. It's just a glorified Nix OS and with the first party support it keeps floating. They missed out on the mass scale deployment like Windows or Linux and that's going to be their Achilles heel along with the more transformation of MacOS into iOS rather than opposite.
It's really funny when you look how 60% of the performance is max that one can get from MacOS based HW/Intel machines due to severe thinning on chassis for that sweet BGA appeal and non user serviceable HW while claiming all recycled parts and all. I'm glad that Apple can't escape Physics. VRM throttling, low quality BGA engineering with cTDP garbage etc. Also people just blatantly forget how the DRAM of those x86 processors scales with more than 4000MHz of DDR4 and the PCIe lanes it pushes out with massive I/O while the anemic trash on Apple Macs is a USB C with Dongle world, ARM replicating the same esp the Wide A series with all the Uncore and PCIe I/O support ? Nope. It's not going to happen. Apple needs to invest Billions again and they are very conservative when it comes to this massive scale.
Finally to note, ARM cannot replace x86. Period. The HPC/ DC market of the Chipzilla Intel and AMD, they won't allow for this BS, Also the ISA of x86 is so mature plus how the LGA and other sockets happen along. While ARM is stuck with BGA BS and thus they can never replace these in the Consumer market.
Let the fanboys live in their dream utopia.
tipoo - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Being that the little cores are more efficient, and the battery is significantly larger, maybe they allowed a one time regresion in peak performance per watt to gain that extra performance, without a node shrink this year.zeeBomb - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
the time has come.joms_us - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Show us that A13 can beat even the first gen Ryzen or Intel Skylake , run PCMark, Cinebench or any modern games otherwise this nonsense desktop level claim should go to the bin. You are using a primitive Spec app to demonstrate the IPC?I can't wait for Apple to ditch the Intel processor inside their MBP and replace with this SoC. Oh wait no, it won't happen in a decade because this cannot run a full pledge OS with real multi-tasking. =D