The Apple iPhone 11, 11 Pro & 11 Pro Max Review: Performance, Battery, & Camera Eleva

[harlan4096]

It’s been a little over a year since our review of the iPhone XS and XS Max, and it’s that time of the year to investigate Apple’s latest and greatest: the iPhone 11 family. This time around Apple was able to launch all three phones, the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max simultaneously, and we’ve gotten our hands on all of them. We’ll be running them through our extensive testing marathon, again hopefully revealing more about how Apple’s newest hardware improvements change the product experience.

This year we’re not seeing major changes how Apple is slicing up their market segments among the phone models, though we are seeing bit of a name change for the new phones. The iPhone 11 is the direct successor to the iPhone XR: The new phone largely remains similar to its predecessor in terms of externals, although we’re seeing the newest internal hardware as well as adoption of two of the three new cameras in the series.

The iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro Max succeed the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. Here again, we’re not seeing too major of changes in the design, although the backs of the phones differ more significantly to the regular iPhone 11. These are also the first devices that employ Apple’s new full triple-camera system, utilizing a new generation main camera sensor, the well-known telephoto module, and Apple’s first ultra-wide-angle module, matching a significant feature set that’s been prevalent in many 2019 flagship smartphones.

Alongside the usual yearly SoC upgrade and the new generation A13, a big area Apple has improved the hardware design this year is in terms of battery capacities and screen efficiency, with the 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max particularly benefiting from some remarkable changes here.

Starting off with the hardware internals, the new generation of phones now come with Apple’s latest A13 SoC. We’ll be going into far more detail about the changes later on in this article, but the high-level overview is that this year we’re seeing two new CPU microarchitectures from Apple: two big performance “Lightning” cores at 2.66GHz, and four small efficiency “Thunder” efficiency cores at 1.73GHz. On the GPU side the design remains a four-core processing block, employing a newer iteration of Apple’s custom GPU microarchitecture which promises to once again bring large performance and efficiency gains.

Apple's microarchitecture improvements, in turn, will have to do most of the heavy lifting as far as A13's processing performance goes. This year we aren't seeing too great of an improvement on the chip manufacturing side of matters, as Apple is employing TSMC's relatively iterative N7P manufacturing process for the A13. N7P offers some improvements over last year's N7 process, but it's far from a full (or even half) generational update.

Cellular connectivity is provided by Intel’s “PMB9960” modem, which is likely to be the XMM7660. This modem offers LTE Category 19 connectivity with download speeds of up to 1.6Gbps. Though it should be noted that in order to reach the full potential of the modem you'll need a Pro model phone, as Apple holds back the regular iPhone 11 a bit, and as a result that model only goes up to 1Gbps. Another big upgrade in connectivity is the introduction of WiFi 6 (802.11ax) support via a new Broadcom combo module, likely based on the BCM4375 chipset. This makes Apple only the second vendor (next to Samsung’s Galaxy S10 and Note10 series) to actually offer the new WiFi standard in a phone this year.
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