Apple

iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max review: High quality for high prices

Apple’s new flagship shows the X-series iPhones have matured.

Samuel Axon – Sep 26, 2019 3:30 PM | 315

The rear cameras on the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. Credit: Samuel Axon

Last year, Apple's iPhone XR was the interesting story in the iPhone lineup, while the top-end iPhone XS was only a modest update over its predecessor the iPhone X. But this year, the roles have flipped: the iPhone 11 Pro is a notable step forward for the flagship tier, while the iPhone 11 is only a slight improvement over the iPhone XR as the company's latest entry-level new phone.

With the iPhone 11 Pro, the best smartphone display on the market just got significantly better, the fastest smartphone CPU and GPU got even faster, and Apple caught up to competitors with new camera features.

If anything, though, the past two years of new iPhones have demonstrated that many people's habits of upgrading every two years should be amended to every three or even four years. And there’s nothing here to convince you to switch to an iPhone if you already weren’t interested in Apple’s ecosystem of devices, software, and services. Apart from the fact that iOS 13 opened things up a bit for power users this year, all the strengths and weaknesses of Apple as compared to Android remain the same.

For those who know they want an iPhone, the iPhone 11 is a better deal than the flagships based on our recent time with both handsets—and we'll publish a short review of that phone in the next few days. But for those who want an iPhone and the cutting edge of smartphone tech, the iPhone 11 Pro is the best new iPhone in quite some time. It might not really be "pro," but it's as quality as it gets.

Table of Contents

Specifications

The iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max are just barely heavier and thicker than the XS and XS Max. The iPhone 11 Pro comes in at 5.67×2.81×0.32 inches (144×71.4×8.1mm) and weighs 6.38 ounces (88 grams). The iPhone 11 Pro Max measures 6.22×3.06×0.32 inches (158×77.8×8.1mm) and 7.97 ounces (26 grams).

Apple iPhone 11 Pro

Starts at $999 from Apple

Some users have criticized Apple for focusing on ever-thinning iPhones over battery life and other improvements in the past, but this continues a gradual, intermittent march up in thickness over the past few years. It’s not significantly thicker, but it definitely isn’t thinner.

Both phones come in 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB configurations, and prices range from $999 for a 64GB iPhone 11 Pro to $1,449 for the 512GB iPhone 11 Pro Max.

The heart of these new phones is Apple’s A13 system-on-a-chip, which Apple claims is up to 20% faster than last year’s A12 at CPU, GPU, and machine learning tasks. (We’ll put some of that to the test later in the review.)

New in the A13 is a new piece of silicon called the U1, an ultra wideband wireless chip intended to give the iPhones spatial awareness of other nearby devices. In iOS 13.1, Apple introduced the first use of this chip: the ability to physically point your phone at another iPhone to wirelessly share files via the existing AirDrop service. But we could see many other applications for this in the future, including iOS 13’s Find My app or multi-user augmented-reality applications. For now, though, it’s largely untapped.

Also on the subject of wireless, Apple has brought Wi-Fi 6 to the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. Wi-Fi 6 is a very new standard, but its spec has been finalized, so there’s little risk in Apple future-proofing with this even though most consumers don’t have any other Wi-Fi 6 hardware yet. As a standard, Wi-Fi 6 claims to offer up to 50% faster Wi-Fi speeds, plus lower latency in environments with many wireless devices present at once.

Both flagship iPhones claim faster LTE speeds and up to 30 LTE bands when compared to last year’s models. While we weren't able to test this consistently in this dense, LTE-troubled part of Los Angeles, others have confirmed the claim.

There was a lot of wild speculation about how much RAM the new iPhones would have, but teardowns and other investigations performed by the community over the past several days have confirmed that both of these new phones have 4GB of RAM, as does the lower-priced iPhone 11 (sans “Pro”).

Apple says the phones have an IP68 water resistance rating and that the phones can handle up to 30 minutes at four meters of depth. The company also claims the phone’s back has been made more durable compared to prior models, with stronger glass.

Lightning and headphones: Yep, still frustrating

As has been the case for a few years now, these phones have only one port each: Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector. Sorry, USB-C advocates! The phones include Apple’s EarPods Lightning headphones out of the box, but unlike some earlier phones, they do not include 3.5mm headphone jack adapters for use with other headphones.

Apple co-markets the iPhone and AirPods, and it hands over a review unit of AirPods alongside any iPhone review units to any press reviewing the phone, indicating the company really expects users to shell out for AirPods instead of relying on wired headphones for an optimal experience.

As I’ve written before, AirPods work wonderfully, and once I got used to them it was hard to imagine going back to wired headphones. But it is still a (too) big ask to expect users to spend nearly $200 on top of the already high prices of these phones for an elegant personal audio solution.

Batteries and power

Apple doesn’t typically disclose battery capacity in its spec sheets to reviewers or the public, but regulatory findings have indicated that the iPhone 11 Pro has a 3,046 mAh battery, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max sports 3,969 mAh. That’s up from 2,658 mAh and 3,174 mAh for 2018’s XS and XS Max, respectively.

Apple claims that significant efficiency improvements in the A13 will result in up to four hours' longer battery life than the iPhone XS for the iPhone 11 Pro, and up to five hours longer than the iPhone XS Max for the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

If true, this means the biggest single-year leap in battery life ever for iPhones—something consumers have been demanding for a long, long time.

Also exciting is the inclusion of an 18-watt charger, dramatically up from 5 watts in every iPhone for ages before these. As we got closer to these huge battery capacities over the past couple of years, it became very clear that the 5-watt charger wasn’t cutting it.

This new one is similar to those that ship with iPads, and it has a USB-C connector, so now you’re using a Lightning-to-USB-C cable instead of Lightning-to-USB-A.

Display

When the iPhone X hit in 2017, I called it the best display ever in a smartphone. The true blacks and outstanding contrast of OLED, combined with Apple’s impeccable tuning and color accuracy, made an incredible impact. More than Face ID or other touted features, I consider the display to be the main reason to buy an iPhone X, XS, or 11 Pro over one of Apple’s cheaper phones.

The iPhone XS made some small improvements, but the iPhone 11 Pro takes an outstanding screen and turns it up to 1,200—1,200 nits of brightness, that is. That’s the theoretical maximum that you might see in some HDR content, anyway. Apple says 800 nits maximum brightness is typical when you crank it up under sunlight.

That’s a vast improvement over 670 nits in the iPhone XS. When I reviewed that phone, I wrote that, as good as the display was, it couldn’t really do HDR movies and the like the way today’s best TVs can because those TVs frequently hit 1,000 nits of brightness.

Maximum brightness is critically important for rich content like movies, photos, and games because it increases the potential contrast ratio, allowing for more granular detail not just between black and white but in colors as well. It’s the heart of what HDR is all about.

I watched snippets of Blade Runner 2049 and the new Godzilla movie—both outstanding showcases for HDR—and felt that the iPhone 11 Pro’s display matched a $2,500 LG OLED television in quality. It’s quite an achievement.

And there’s the added and more practical benefit that the phone should be easier to read under sunlight when the brightness is maxed out. (I found this to be true in my time with the phones.)

Even though flagship phones from Samsung offer similar or even a little higher peak brightness levels, the iPhone displays have more accurate color and other optimizations that make them superior regardless. Although once you get to this level, it might only be the real display tech geeks who notice.

Apple uses the eye-roll-inducing term “Super Retina Display XDR” to describe this display. And while I think the phrase is ridiculous, confusing, and unhelpful in that it sounds hyped but has no connection to any industry standard, it nevertheless is assigned to a remarkable, best-in-class panel.

Apple has a penchant for giving features or specs weird proprietary names, contributing to an industry problem of confused consumers being unable to tell which made-up marketing terms refer to real benefits versus those that are nonsense. In this case, there’s proof in this pudding. But between you and me, let’s just call it HDR, even though Apple confirmed to me that this is still an 8-bit, not a 10-bit, panel.

If I were Apple, I’d be singing HDR from the rooftops, because this is the first phone the company has made with the contrast and brightness capabilities to really earn the label. Apple's specs page for the phone does say HDR, but the proprietary branding has the potential to confuse.

In any case, this is a fantastic screen, and it remains one of the main reasons to buy this phone over the more affordable iPhone 11.

Audio

That’s not the end for media-consumption-related improvements. The iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max have a feature called spatial audio. Essentially, that means simulated surround sound from stereo speakers, with Dolby Atmos support.

Dolby Atmos’ benefits for stereo speakers are limited—it really shines in theater surround sound systems with five or more speakers—but it’s nice to have. While the audio does not have presence like what you would get from the aurally strong 2018 iPad Pro, I noticed a marked improvement over the iPhone XS.

You’ll still probably want headphones most of the time, but if you have to watch a video or listen to a song on the phone’s speakers for some reason, it’s a better experience than before.

Design

When it comes to aesthetics and design, it’s business as usual apart from two things: the camera array and the finish and tactile feeling on the back of the phone.

If you’ve held an iPhone X or XS phone (or their Max versions), the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max will look and feel very similar to your eyes and hands. The edges are the same, the basic form hasn’t changed, the front looks identical, and while the thickness and weight have increased very slightly, you wouldn’t notice unless you held the old and new phones side by side.

More noticeable is the new finish on the glass back, which both looks and feels different. It has a matte look, so it’s less glossy, and this has the positive effect of reducing the fingerprints problem. It hasn’t eliminated that problem at all, but it’s a little less bad.

I rather like the new feel. I find it more pleasant to touch than before. It’s the main thing I notice when I switch back and forth between my own XS and the 11 Pro review unit. Some folks I’ve talked to who have held the iPhone 11 Pro complain that it makes the phone feel less secure and easier to drop, but I feel the opposite.

The new finish even impacts the impression the different colors give. The gold version’s back now looks less almost-plain-white and more… white-ish gold, I suppose. It looks nice! And on that subject, all the same colors that were offered in the XS line last year are back, but Apple has added a new, muted green option that looks attractive. The PVD conditioning on the stainless-steel edges is still striking—but again, these things are subjective.

Of course, everyone is talking about the wildly different-looking camera array on the back. As we’ll get into in more detail soon, the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max now have three rear-facing cameras instead of two.

Where before the cameras were vertically aligned on an oval camera bump, there is now a square-shaped (with rounded corners) camera bump that is more than twice the width and a little taller than that on the iPhone X or XS. The three cameras are arranged in a triangular formation within that square.

Apple is keen to brag about the fact that this very smooth, fine, glossy bump is fully integrated with the rest of the back and that it was all precision milled down from one piece of glass. You have to look closely to appreciate it, but it is neat.

More pressing, though, is the fact that a lot of people really, really don’t seem to like the three-camera look on this giant block on the back of the phone. When I first saw a picture, it made me a little uneasy—the product of a not-uncommon fear called trypophobia, “an aversion to the sight of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes, or bumps.” My wife called it "diseased-looking," which seems to succinctly summarize that reaction.

Some people have more visceral reactions than others. Mine was mild, and it was mostly to the pictures. Once I saw it in person, it bothered me a lot less than I thought it would. To me, it’s mostly just kind of weird-looking, because it’s unlike anything I’ve seen in a phone before. There’s also something odd about the lack of symmetry, since there are two lenses on the left and one on the right, instead of two on the bottom and one on the top.

Basically, it draws attention to itself—at least at first. I have a feeling that as was the case with the much-reviled-when-first-revealed notch on the iPhone X (which is still present on these phones, of course), it will stand out for a little while until most owners forget about it.

If you hate it, you’ll have to ask if you can get used to it, I’m afraid. Apple might change the arrangement slightly in the future, but I doubt the company will soon axe that third camera in the name of aesthetics—especially since it really does provide some compelling functionality.

Goodbye 3D Touch

While virtually every change in the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max is a step up over the iPhone XS and XS Max, there’s one shift that will be divisive for some users.

Apple has axed 3D Touch, which was introduced in the iPhone 6S back in 2015. It still works on older phones that had it, but it’s not present at all in the iPhone 11 Pro. Apple likely did this for two main reasons. First, because it freed up space for more battery capacity. Second, because it does not seem that it was widely used compared to other major hardware features added to the iPhone over the years.

In case you’re not familiar with it: 3D Touch allows the phone’s multi-touch display to read not just that a touch is occurring when you place your finger on the screen, but how hard you’re pressing. It was used to bring up pop-up menus and preview peeks at content, primarily, but it was also key for other features, like the ability to press down on the system-wide keyboard to quickly move the text selection tool around.

Apple has replaced it with Haptic Touch, a software solution introduced in the iPhone XR last year and brought to prior iPhones, too, with the new iOS 13 software. Haptic Touch achieves a similar effect with a long, sustained press, regardless of pressure.

Haptic Touch is used throughout the new iOS 13 operating system to bring up more useful contextual menus, among other things. You can also get that old keyboard trick going by using Haptic Touch on the keyboard’s space bar. You don’t have to hold down very long to activate Haptic Touch—just barely long enough to prevent most accidental activations. And you’re given convincing tactile feedback for your press, thanks to what Apple calls the Taptic Engine.

If 3D Touch really was removed to enable improved battery life thanks to a larger battery, most people will feel it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

Nevertheless, I much preferred 3D Touch to Haptic Touch, as it was a little faster, if somewhat less intuitive. I’m going to be just a little sad to eventually leave behind my XS for a future iPhone that will almost certainly not have 3D Touch.

I use that keyboard trick and a few other 3D Touch interactions many times a day, and the Haptic Touch alternatives aren’t always as efficient. It’s a small difference, but a few of us will still be displeased to see this change.

An important note on durability and repairs

Look, this is an expensive phone. And it’s made of glass. And it’s packed so densely that it is all but impossible for most users to perform almost any repair themselves.

If you drop and break this phone, or if almost any hardware component fails, the repair costs might be substantial if they’re not covered by the warranty.

Most people don’t want to repair things themselves, and they likely can’t anyway, so Apple provides a service called AppleCare+. It used to be a one-time purchase of $199 for two years of free repairs for failures and a limited number of accidental damage incidents.

Now Apple still offers that option, but it also offers a monthly charge of $9.99 for indefinite coverage until the user cancels it—if you can afford that, it’s actually a very attractive service. In most cases, it means your phone is guaranteed to last until it stops getting software support at least four years after you buy it.

I haven’t bought an iPhone without AppleCare+ for years, and I would be disinclined to recommend buying a phone this expensive without also recommending AppleCare+ to most people unless they are extremely technically proficient and confident. These devices are too expensive and vital to most of our day-to-day lives to take chances with, and the way Apple makes them, AppleCare+ is one of the only really safe options.

I’ve always found AppleCare+ service to be strong, with the company generously making hugely expensive repairs very quickly with no questions asked. But other people have less positive stories, and it can also vary a lot by where you live—it might be a total nonstarter if you live in a rural area far from an official Apple repair provider or Apple Store. And that’s a lot of additional money on an already expensive phone. Just know this going in.

The fact that these phones are so difficult to service is also not great for the environment. To be fair, these criticisms are also true of most other flagship smartphones, and Apple does deserve credit not only for the quality of the AppleCare+ service in most cases, but also for its aggressive and well-thought-out trade-in and recycling program and its efforts to change its materials and manufacturing process with sustainability in mind. But it’s ultimately not as good as making devices that don’t contribute to waste going to landfills with each repair to begin with.

This remains, and likely will long be, my chief criticism of Apple’s products. Just keep that in mind if you make this purchase.

Camera

For the first time in the product line, the iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro Max each have a triple-camera system on the back, up from two last year. Returning are the wide and telephoto lenses, though Apple says the telephoto lens has a wider aperture to let in as much as 40% more light. The new third lens is an ultra-wide one. All three are still 12-megapixel cameras.

The apertures for each lens are as follows: ƒ/2.4 for the ultra-wide, ƒ/1.8 for the wide, and ƒ/2.0 for the telephoto. And of course, Apple is doing all sorts of computational photography stuff on the A13 (which includes an ISP, but a lot of it is also done on the Neural Engine) to touch up photos as, and after, they're taken. It all helps make images come across more like photos taken with professional DSLR cameras.

Apple has also updated Smart HDR, a feature that uses machine learning to analyze and composite multiple photos taken in rapid succession each time you snap, thus reducing the frequency of unnatural highlights on human skin, among other things.

This is one of the best smartphone camera systems on the market. A couple of the very best Android phones rival it, so this means that if you want a killer camera system, you have options regardless of which platform you prefer—as long as you're willing to shell out a thousand bucks, anyway. The key new iPhone features are worth exploring one by one.

Night Mode

Low-light photos have long been the bane of smartphone cameras. A lot of detail is usually lost, and, as recently as a couple of years ago, low-light pictures often look muddy or grainy when taken on even the best smartphones. Google made this a focus in its Pixel line recently with a feature called Night Sight. Now Apple has followed with its own solution called Night Mode.

Taking a photo with this method requires you to hold the camera still for a short period of time—usually three seconds—while it actually takes several photos in a row. The below photos were taken in a large room with only a bowl of low-powered Christmas lights acting as a lamp on the other side of the room—just the sort of lighting situation that can look bad in a smartphone photo.

Night Mode brings out a lot of lost detail and reduces graininess, even if the resulting image has a sort of unreal glow to it. You can turn it on or off at will or adjust the intensity of the effect by setting how long it should run when you take a photo.

The new wide-angle camera

The flagship feature of these flagship phones is the ultra wide-angle lens, which is intended to help you capture more of a scene—for example, more people's faces in a close-up group photo when you don't have a lot of space in the room or in a crowd.

In the Camera app in iOS 13, you can switch between the three cameras and zoom levels at will while you take a photo. In fact, looking at the viewport while in 1x, original wide-angle zoom mode shows you the field of view from the ultra-wide, 0.5x camera in an underlay behind the UI elements around the frame. Apple reps are really proud of this when they talk about this phone, and I get why—it's seamless most of the time, and it requires some computational magic that's pretty neat. That said, it's more style than substance, as you don't really need it to have a good experience with the different lenses.

Anyway, the interface for this is simple: you just tap a small UI element representing 0.5x, 1x, or 2x, depending on which lens you want to use. The phone is using some more computational trickery to make it look like it's seamlessly zooming between these modes rather than jarringly flicking between them, even though they're three different lenses. But you can tell it's an illusion because there are sometimes artifacts during the transition.

I don't believe this is a must-have feature for most people, but I could see using it with some frequency if I have it. Most people who buy these phones are going to appreciate it. In fact, depending on what sorts of things you photograph every day, I can imagine using it more than the telephoto lens.

This feature is well-implemented and useful, so it's a clear "pro" in the pros/cons list for buying these, uh, Pro phones.

Video and the front-facing camera

Apple has also made some improvements to video capture on the iPhone 11 Pro. Extended dynamic range video can now be captured at 4K60, not just 4K30. The cinematic video stabilization feature is available at 4K on these phones, too. There's also a new feature called QuickTake, which lets you simply hold down on the photo shutter button to record a video until you lift up your finger. If you want to actually switch over to recording a video normally, you can just swipe your finger to the right to set it on cruise control, so to speak.

The front-facing selfie camera has been bumped up from 7 megapixels to 12 megapixels—still at an ƒ/2.2 aperture. While the front-facing camera on the iPhone XS could record 1080p video at 1080p and 30 or 60fps, the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max can also do 4K video at 24, 30, or 60fps. There's also a new slow-motion selfie feature on this camera that captures video at 1080p and 240fps.

Finally, Apple says Face ID should operate up to 30% faster and recognize users at a wider angle thanks to a software update that is also available to other recent TrueDepth-equipped iPhones. While I did not time this down to the millisecond, anecdotally I found it to be true.

Other camera notes

Other than some tweaks to Smart HDR, you shouldn't expect radically different picture quality with the normal wide-angle lens on the iPhone 11 Pro over the iPhone XS. Here are some comparison shots anyway:

Most of Apple's improvements that don't fit into the buckets in the above paragraphs of this iPhone 11 Pro camera review are software updates.

For example, this isn't unique to these phones, but Apple introduced a new Portrait Lighting mode in iOS 13 called Key Light Mono. Remember the existing Portrait Lighting mode called Stage Light Mono that turns everything behind the human subject into a dramatic black backdrop? This is the same thing, but it's a white backdrop, with lighting qualities meant to match that. Here's a picture:

A photo of a woman — Key Light Mono Portrait Lighting, taken on the iPhone 11 Pro. Credit: Samuel Axon

It's fine. I've said it in every iPhone review for the past couple of years, but I just don't think Portrait Lighting is that useful. It usually has weird artifacts, is too soft looking, or has other downsides that I think make it look too fake to be worth using. Look at the image in full size and observe the edges around the hair—it's so distractingly wrong-looking. But since Apple keeps investing in this, I guess other users must disagree, so there you go. Maybe you don't notice the flaws as much in a low-resolution Instagram photo with a bunch of filters on it that already give the photo an unreal quality.

It's because of this camera array and these image processing features that Apple says this is the first iPhone that deserves the moniker "Pro." I feel Apple has gotten a bit too liberal with the word “pro” here, though. Yes, computational photography and clever new hardware and software allows users to emulate professional photography in some ways. But unless it’s part of a marketing gimmick, professional photographers are still going to use professional cameras for a while. It might have been more accurate to call it the "iPhone 11 Premium" or the "iPhone 11 Advanced," or something else that's not very catchy.

And the thing is, pro users want one thing more than anything else: control of the image. Yes, Apple has greatly expanded the tools in the Camera app, as well as their granularity. Yes, there's some wild stuff you can do here with removing or adding effects and other tweaks well after you've taken a photo. It's cool. It's useful. It's impressive. It's not "pro," because the A13 and the software running on it are making a lot of decisions on your behalf.

I think Apple's behind-the-scenes doctoring is generally more natural than what you see in a lot of (but not all) competing Android phones. But it's still making creative decisions for you. Pros want control.

For someone like me who's frankly not very good at the skill of photography, these features still help bridge the gap between me and a pro. So maybe it should be the "iPhone 11 Prosumer." Still doesn't sound right, does it? Either way, I think it's accurate.

The takeaway is that even though it's not professional-ready, if the goal of Apple's new camera system is to make amateurs feel like pro photographers by taking photos that look better than what unskilled users would expect to be taking, then it's a big success. And despite the name, I think that's the real goal here.

("iPhone 11 Aspirational Pro"? OK, OK, I'll stop.)

Software

Both of these new phones run Apple’s new iOS 13 operating system out of the box—in fact, they will likely be running iOS 13.1 quite soon. We published an extensive and thorough review of iOS 13 last week.

iOS was already a very strong operating system, with powerful features, a mostly elegant user interface, arguably one of the world’s best app ecosystems, and an unrivaled-in-the-mainstream-mobile-space focus on privacy and security.

iOS 13 improves on that in many ways, most notably by adding new power-user features for things like file management, along with some visual overhauls and a new Dark Mode. Its initial launch was somewhat buggy, though, with iOS 13.1 fixing some of those bugs and others still yet to be addressed.

You can read our full review for all the details, but if you’d rather not, just know that iOS is one of the main reasons people buy iPhones, because it is excellent mobile software for the majority of use cases.

Performance

Performance isn't the biggest story this year, but Apple claims the A13 is a good 20% or so faster than the A12 at CPU and GPU tasks. Usually in these iPhone reviews, we find our tests don't give results too far off from what Apple has claimed, and in this case, the story varied depending on whether we were running CPU or GPU synthetic benchmarks.

We actually found that the iPhone 11 Pro usually outperformed the iPhone XS by something in the ballpark of 15% in CPU tests, but that GPU performance is a substantial step up, up to 30% to 40% in some cases.

This makes sense; many of the most demanding tasks that an iPhone does are related to either graphics or machine learning, which are the realms of the A13's GPU and Neural Engine. Of course, it varies quite a lot by use case and user. The focus of this update to Apple's A-series SoC wasn't on performance, though—Apple was already leading by a sizable margin there—but on efficiency.

Battery life

With the iPhone 11 Pro, there's no question that gains have been made in terms of power efficiency and battery life. Part of that is due to the above-mentioned larger-capacity batteries, but the improvements we saw in our battery testing can't be explained by just that, so the greater efficiency of the A13 is likely a factor.

We were able to successfully run our WebGL test enough times in the lead-up to this review to give final results, and they're impressive.

Anecdotally, I found that these phones lasted much longer in normal usage than the iPhone XS or XS Max. The step up over an older, smaller iPhone like the iPhone 7 would surely be a big one.

There's another thing I'd like to test in the future, too: battery life in Dark Mode versus Light Mode (the above tests were done in Light Mode). Since the two iPhone 11 Pro models have OLED screens, an emissive display technology by which individual pixels may be toggled on or off independently of one another, many pixels on the display being black could theoretically lead to noticeably improved battery life when the phone is running in Dark Mode.

Battery tests take time, though (especially with battery life like this), so that will have to wait for a potential future article if readers are interested. For now, just know that Apple's claims about improved battery life hold up with these phones, at least in this benchmark—and that's a good thing, because we've been asking for this for years.

Quality over affordability

If you're willing to pay a lot of money for your smartphone, the iPhone 11 Pro (and of course the iPhone 11 Pro Max) is one of the strongest iterations of the iPhone Apple has produced so far. Its feature set and impressive performance make it feel like the grown-up culmination of an ambitious experiment that started with the iPhone X.

I can't say enough good about the display, and performance is still as good as it gets for a handset today. And while I could (and did) quibble with the name "Pro" and the way image processing takes some control away from users, there's no denying that this camera system produces appealing results that would have been difficult to imagine from a smartphone only a few years ago.

True, a couple of the very best Android phones give this phone a run for its money on that front, but I'm always happy to see users able to choose between two competitors confident in the knowledge that they won't have to sacrifice photo quality in a switch, one way or the other. Android and iOS serve different users with different priorities and values, and a camera arms race to improve the user experience is better for both camps.

What we look for from our phones has changed over the past few years. iOS 13, the software update that went out alongside these phones, brings power-user features to the iPhone that seemed like no-go options three years ago. Media consumption on mobile devices has risen, so screen quality is important, and Apple has delivered on that front. And as digital cameras go the way of rotary phones for the vast majority of people, smartphone cameras are king. The iPhone 11 Pro is very different from iPhones of the past, but it's undeniably an iPhone for modern use cases.

With two critically important caveats, the iPhone lineup is stronger than it has been in a few years. The two caveats: Apple does not offer more durable options in its lineup, and there's still a hole left by the iPhone SE for an entry-level, mass-market iPhone that is suitable for one-handed use. The iPhone 8 seems to try to fill that niche, but I know a lot of people want to go even more compact.

If those concerns aren't priorities for you, then the iPhone 11 Pro is the best iPhone yet released. Of course, not everyone needs the best phone, and the lineup includes more attractively priced options than last year. Apple still offers an iPhone SE-cheap iPhone 8 and the good-enough-for-almost-anybody iPhone XR and iPhone 11.

In the event that money is no concern, though, buy the iPhone 11 Pro or iPhone 11 Pro Max—it's an outstanding handset, and you absolutely get what you pay for. Just, maybe get AppleCare+, too. And you might want some AirPods as well. This is adding up quickly, isn't it? That's probably by design—and Apple remains a leader in design.

The good

You’ll get greatly improved battery life over your current iPhone
Its camera system is among the best in the smartphone marketplace, and a big step up over prior iPhones
The best display on any smartphone today
Unrivaled, likely multi-year future-proof performance across the board
A greater emphasis on user privacy and security than most competing phones
iOS is more powerful and useful than ever with iOS 13 (provided a few bugs get worked out)

The bad

Even with improvements to the glass, it’s still awfully fragile for something so expensive
LTE speeds still lag behind some of the competition
3D Touch is no more
No modern, smaller, one-handed phone option exists in the iPhone lineup
Low user serviceability means many consumers will have to consider dropping even more money on AppleCare+

The ugly

Very, very expensive; most people would be better off picking up the iPhone 11 or iPhone 8 for substantially less money

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Samuel Axon Senior Editor

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica, where he is the editorial director for tech and gaming coverage. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

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