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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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