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.

Apple 2019 iPhone Specifications
		iPhone 11 Pro	iPhone 11 Pro Max	iPhone 11
SoC		Apple A13 Bionic 2 × Lightning Performance @ 2.66GHz 8MB L2 4 × Thunder Efficiency @ 1.73GHz 4MB L2
GPU		Apple, 4 Cores
DRAM		4GB LPDDR4X 16MB System Level Cache
Display		5.8-inch OLED 2436×1125 DCI-P3/True Tone 800 cd/m² brightness 2M:1 contrast ratio 3D Touch	6.5-inch OLED 2688×1242 DCI-P3/True Tone 800 cd/m² brightness 2M:1 contrast ratio 3D Touch	6.1-inch LCD 1792×828 DCI-P3/True Tone 625 cd/m² brightness 1400:1 contrast ratio -
Size	Height	144.0 mm	158.0 mm	150.9 mm
	Width	71.4 m	77.8 mm	75.7 mm
	Depth	8.1 mm	8.1 mm	8.3 mm
Weight		188 grams	226 grams	194 grams
Battery Life		3046mAh +14.5% capacity "+4H vs XS"	3969mAh +25% capacity "+5H vs XS Max"	3110mAh +5.7% capacity "+1H vs XR"
Wireless Charging		Qi
Rear Cameras	Main	12 MP 1.4µm Dual Pixel PD f/1.8, OIS Wide Color Gamut Quad LED True Tone Flash
	Tele- Photo	12 MP f/2.0 Telephoto, OIS 2x Optical Zoom		-
	Wide	12MP f/2.4 120° Ultra-wide Angle
Front Camera		12MP f/2.2 Wide Angle
Storage		64 GB 256 GB 512 GB	64 GB 256 GB 512 GB	64 GB 128 GB 256 GB
I/O		Apple Lightning
Wireless (local)		802.11ax Wi-Fi with MIMO + Bluetooth 5.0 + NFC UWB U1 Chip for "Spatial Awareness"
Cellular		Gigabit-class LTE-A 4x4 MIMO and LAA		Gigabit-class LTE-A 2x2 MIMO and LAA
Splash, Water, Dust Resistance		IP68 up to 2 meters (Pro models = 4 meters), up to 30 minutes
Dual-SIM		nano-SIM + eSIM nano-SIM + nano-SIM (China model)
Launch Price		64 GB: $999 / £1049 / 1149€ 256 GB: $1149 / £1199 / 1319€ 512 GB: $1349 / £1399 / 1549€	64 GB: $1099 / £1149 / 1249€ 256 GB: $1249 / £1299 / 1419€ 512 GB: $1449 / £1499 / 1649€	64 GB: $699 / £729 / 799€ 128 GB: $749 / £779 / 849€ 256 GB: $849 / £879 / 969€

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.

In terms of main memory, the Pro models remain at 4GB of LPDDR4X, and this year the base iPhone 11 is now at parity as well. Unfortunately, the storage tiers this year also remain the same, at 64GB, 256GB and 512GB. I do find it extremely conservative of Apple to continue the 64GB base model given that the majority of the competition has switched over to 128GB as a minimum. Granted, Apple makes more efficient use of the storage thanks to HEIC and HEVC image and video compression storage, but it’s still a rather cheap design decision in order to get people to choose the higher tier options, which carry some pretty extreme price premiums.

Shifting gears, let's talk about what's on the outside of the new iPhones. As this isn't a year where Apple is introducing a major design change to the phones – with 2019 essentially serving as a second 'S' year – Apple has largely left well enough alone in terms of phone designs. So looking at the front of the phones, you won't find that much has changed. This also means that Apple hasn't touched the display dimensions, which continue to range from 5.8-inches to 6.5-inches, as these are almost entirely dictated by the form factors of the phones. The 11 Pro and Pro Max both continue to have OLED screens, however this year Apple has upgraded the display panels, which they have been using since the original iPhone X. Calling it their Super Retina XDR display, the new model now promises higher brightness levels of up to 800 nits in regular content, and up to 1200 nits in HDR content. The new panels are also said to be 15% more efficient, something we’ll investigate later in the review.

Meanwhile the iPhone 11 display remains the same as last year: this is again an LCD and comes at a lower resolution of 1792 x 828 pixels. I was not very impressed with the XR display’s density, and the fact that Apple chooses to retain this resolution is unfortunate, as the iPhone 11 is a device that will be used by a lot of people for many years to come. It’s a highly subjective topic and opinions will vary depending on how you use your phone – I tend to read a lot in bed in the evenings and holding up the phone close like that definitely is a compromise for the XR and iPhone 11.

Otherwise, the rear of the new phones has changed more substantially, at least as far as glass back designs can change. Accommodating Apple's newest cameras and the Pro's larger triple sensor setup, the Apple logo has been shifted down from the upper third of the body to the center, and the new camera housing and design definitely attracts your attention.

A very large and actually practical design change on the Pro models is a new frosted chemically-etched matte surface. To be sure, this isn’t the very time we’ve seen this, as OnePlus, LG and Google have already introduced it in their phones over last year. But it’s actually a bit of a revolution due to how much it changes the feel of the phone versus regular glossy glass – I wish all vendors adopt the design, as it’s a definitive plus for the phones. Apple’s take has the most granular-feeling texture of all the vendors, so it does still give off a vibe of being glass, while the finer textures found on the Pixel 3 and such might fool you into thinking it’s some kind of plastic.

The regular iPhone 11, in contrast, retains a glossy back, which is paired with a matte camera rectangle. This comes with the usual disadvantages of it being a classical finger-print magnet.

What we don’t see externally – but can definitely feel – is the increased battery capacity of the different models, with all of the phones getting larger (and often heavier) batteries. The regular iPhone 11 is the most non-eventful here as it only sees a 5.7% increase in capacity, bringing it to up to 3110mAh. Yet even with this capacity bump, Apple has held the weight of the phone to 194g, identical to the iPhone XR.

The iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max, on the other hand, have received substantial battery capacity increases. The 11 Pro gets a 14.5% increase over the XS, putting it at 3046mAh. This larger battery causes the phone's weight to increase by 11g, with the smallest of the iPhones now weighting 188g. The iPhone 11 Pro Max goes even further, receiving a massive 25% increase in battery capacity for a total of 3969mAh. This adds a further 18g to the weight of the phone, bringing it to a hefty 228g altogether.

Part of the reason why Apple has been able to increase the capacity of the 11 Pro Max's battery by so much as compared to the 11 Pro is due to a change in the layout of the battery itself. For the 11 Pro max, Apple has switched from a dual-cell battery configuration to a single-cell L-shaped battery; this effectively increases the actual battery volume inside the phone. The iPhone XS already made this transition last year, so there’s no changes for the 11 Pro in terms of battery layout. 

And regardless of whether the battery capacity changes were the cause or the effect, Apple has increased the body thickness of the Pro models by 0.4mm, bringing them to 8.1mm. The change in thickness is immediately noticeable when comparing the two generations, however it doesn’t fundamentally change the ergonomics of the new phones. Otherwise, the iPhone 11 retains the same thickness as the XR.

Speaking of the body, the back glass and camera bump are rather interesting in terms of their manufacturing – it’s all a single large piece of glass along with the raised rectangular protrusion, with a filleted bevel in the transition. The cameras modules each have their own dedicated circular raised metallic ring housing around them, but because this is now transitioned by the raised glass rectangle element, it no longer feels nearly as sharp as on Apple's earlier phones. This is despite the fact that the total Z-height of the cameras isn’t actually any different than on the iPhone XS. The camera glass is also actually the same diameter as its predecessors, however the thicker metallic ring makes it appear as if the cameras are just bigger and chunkier on the new series. We continue to see very small raised O-ring to prevent the camera glass directly touching surfaces and to prevent scratches.

As for the camera modules themselves, we’re seeing new sensors for all of them. In terms of the main sensor, Apple hasn’t changed its fundamental characteristics, it’s still a 12MP unit with 1.4µm pixels; however this new generation sensor now introduces full-sensor dual-photodiodes, or full sensor PDAF. The isn’t new to smartphones in general, as we first saw it introduced on the Galaxy S7 a few years ago, but it’s good to see its use expanded among other sensors. The camera optics largely remain the same with an f/1.8 aperture lens as well as OIS.

The telephoto module should also have a new sensor, although we don’t have more information on it other than it being 12MP. The optics did see a large change, switching from an f/2.4 aperture to a larger f/2.0 in the new series, along with OIS. This module isn’t featured on the regular iPhone 11, making it exclusive to the Pro models.

Finally, the big new addition to the cameras is the introduction of an ultra-wide-angle module. This is a 12MP unit with an f/2.4 aperture. The camera’s 120° field of view is what makes it special, and is definitely a feature Apple needed to have in order to compete with other vendor’s camera systems in 2019.

Apple has also vastly improved the camera software experience, which is something we cover in more detail in the (extensive) camera testing section of this review.

Wrapping up our look at the physical design of the phones, while the back design of the iPhone 11 series has changed quite a bit, you’d be hard pressed to differentiate between the iPhone X, XS or the 11 Pro when viewing them from the front. The net result is that there are small improvements in several places across the body of the phones, but they are still very much iPhones as we've come to know them.

This aspect is probably the most boring of the new phones; Apple tends to iterate on their industrial designs for at least three generations, and consequently the iPhone 11 series represents the 3^rd year of the design that was originally introduced with the iPhone X. This does give Apple products a more “known” look and feel that is widely recognized, however given the competitive landscape – and in particular in the last year where we’ve seen a ton of design differentiation from other vendors – the new iPhone 11 series does feel a bit dated in terms of its looks, with the regular iPhone 11 in particular being well behind the curve in terms of bezel design.

The Apple A13 SoC: Lightning & Thunder

Apple’s A13 SoC is the newest iteration in the company’s silicon design efforts. The new silicon piece is manufactured on what Apple calls a “second generation 7nm manufacturing process”. The wording is a bit ambiguous, however, as it’s been repeatedly pointed out that this would mean TSMC’s N7P node, which is a performance tuned variant of last year’s N7 node, and not the N7+ node which is based on EUV production.

Update October 27^th: TechInsights has now officially released a die shot of the new Apple A13, and we can confirm a few assumptions on our side.

The new die is 98.48mm² which is 18.3% larger than the A12 of last year. Given that this year’s manufacturing node hasn’t seen any major changes in terms of process density, it’s natural for the die size to increase a bit as Apple adds more functionality to the SoC.

AnandTech modified TechInsights Apple A13 Die Shot

Die Block Comparison (mm²)
SoC Process Node	Apple A13 TSMC N7P	Apple A12 TSMC N7
Total Die	98.48	83.27
Big Core	2.61	2.07
Small Core	0.58	0.43
CPU Complex (Cores & L2)	13.47 (9.06 + 4.41)	11.16 (8.06 + 3.10)
GPU Total	15.28	14.88
GPU Core	3.25	3.23
NPU	4.64	5.79
SLC Slice (SRAM+Tag Logic)	2.09	1.23
SLC SRAM (All 4 Slices)	6.36	3.20

When breaking down the block sizes of the different IP on the SoC, we can see some notable changes: The big new Lightning cores have increased in size by ~26% compared to last year, a large increase as we expect the new cores to have new functional units. The small Thunder cores have also increase in size by a massive 34% compared to last year’s Tempest cores, pointing out to the large microarchitecture changes we'll discuss in a bit.

The L2 on the big cores looks relatively similar to that of the A12, pointing out to a maintained 8MB size. What’s interesting is that the L2 of the small cores has now seen significantly changes, and the two slices that this cluster now embeds look quite identical to the slices of the large core's L2. It’s thus very likely that we’re looking at an increased 4MB of total L2 for the small Thunder cores.

The GPU footprint has slightly increased by a more marginal 3.8% - the biggest change seems to have been a rearrangement of the ALU blocks and texture unit layout of the GPU back-end, as the front-end blocks of the new IP looks largely similar to that of the A12.

The NPU has seen a large reduction in size and is now 20% smaller than that of the A12. As the A12’s NPU was Apple’s first in-house IP it seems natural for the company to quickly iterate and optimise on the second-generation design. It’s still a notably large block coming in at 4.64mm².

By far the biggest change on the SoC level has been the new system level cache (SLC). Already last year Apple had made huge changes to this block as it had adopted a new microarchitecture and increased the size from 4MB to 8MB. This year, Apple is doubling down on the SLC and it’s very evidently using a new 16MB configuration across the four slices. A single SLC slice without the central arbitration block increases by 69% - and the actual SRAM macros seen on the die shot essentially double from a total of 3.20mm² to 6.36mm².

The amount of SRAM that Apple puts on the A13 is staggering, especially on the CPU side: We’re seeing 8MB on the big cores, 4MB on the small cores, and 16MB on the SLC which can serve all IP blocks on the chip.

CPU Frequencies

The CPU complex remains a 2+4 architecture, supporting two large performance cores and four smaller efficiency cores. In terms of the frequencies of the various cores, we can unveil the following behavior changes to the A13:

Maximum Frequency vs Loaded Threads Per-Core Maximum MHz
Apple A12	1	2	3	4	5	6
Performance 1	2514	2380	2380	2380	2380	2380
Performance 2		2380	2380	2380	2380	2380
Efficiency 1			1587	1562	1562	1538
Efficiency 2				1562	1562	1538
Efficiency 3					1562	1538
Efficiency 4						1538
Apple A13	1	2	3	4	5	6
Performance 1	2666	2590	2590	2590	2590	2590
Performance 2		2590	2590	2590	2590	2590
Efficiency 1			1728	1728	1728	1728
Efficiency 2				1728	1728	1728
Efficiency 3					1728	1728
Efficiency 4						1728

The large performance cores this year see a roughly 6% increase in clockspeeds, bringing them up to around 2666MHz. Last year we estimated the A12 large cores to clock in at around 2500MHz, but the more exact figure as measured by performance counters seems to be 2514MHz. Similarly, the A13’s big core clock should be a few MHz above our estimated 2666MHz clock. Apple continues to quickly ramp down in frequency depending on how many large cores are active, and as such will max out at 2590MHz even on the lightest threads. I also noted that frequency will quickly ramp up and down depending on instruction mix and the load complexity on the core.

The small efficiency cores have seen a larger 8.8 – 12.3% clock boost, bringing them to up to ~1728MHz. This is a good boost, but what’s also important is that the small cores now don’t clock down when there’s more of them active.

The Lightning Performance CPU Cores: Minor Upgrades, Mystery of AMX

The large cores for this generation are called “Lightning” and are direct successors to last year’s Vortex microarchitecture. In terms of the core design, at least in regards to the usual execution units, we don’t see too much divergence from last year’s core. The microarchitecture at its heart is still a 7-wide decode front-end, paired with a very wide execution back-end that features 6 ALUs and three FP/vector pipelines.

Apple hasn’t made any substantial changes to the execution back-end, as both Lightning and Vortex are largely similar to each other. The notable exception to this is the complex integer pipelines, where we do see improvements. Here the two multiplier units are able to shave off one cycle of latency, dropping from 4 cycles to 3. Integer division has also seen a large upgrade as the throughput has now been doubled and latency/minimum number of cycles has been reduced from 8 to 7 cycles.

Another change in the integer units has been a 50% increase in the number of ALU units which can set condition flags; now 3 of the ALUs can do this, which is up from 2 in A12's Vortex.

As for the floating point and vector/SIMD pipelines, we haven't noticed any changes there.

In terms of caches, Apple seems to have kept the cache structures as they were in the Vortex cores of the A12. This means we have 8-way associative 128KB L1 instruction and data caches. The data cache remains very fast with a 3-cycle load-to-use latency. The shared L2 cache between the cores continues to be 8MB in size, however Apple has reduced the latency from 16 to 14 cycles, something we’ll be looking at in more detail on the next page when looking at the memory subsystem changes.

A big change to the CPU cores which we don’t have very much information on is Apple’s integration of “machine learning accelerators” into the microarchitecture. At heart these seem to be matrix-multiply units with DSP-like instructions, and Apple puts their performance at up to 1 Tera Operations (TOPs) of throughput, claiming an up-to 6x increase over the regular vector pipelines. This AMX instruction set is seemingly a superset of the ARM ISA that is running on the CPU cores.

There’s been a lot of confusion as to what this means, as until now it hadn’t been widely known that Arm architecture licensees were allowed to extend their ISA with custom instructions. We weren’t able to get any confirmation from either Apple or Arm on the matter, but one thing that is clear is that Apple isn’t publicly exposing these new instructions to developers, and they’re not included in Apple’s public compilers. We do know, however, that Apple internally does have compilers available for it, and libraries such as the Acclerate.framework seem to be able to take advantage of AMX. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time or experience to investigate this further for this article.

Arm’s recent reveal of making custom instructions available for vendors to implement and integrate into Arm’s cores certainly seems evidence enough that architecture licensees would be free to do what they’d like – Apple’s choice of hiding away AMX instructions at least resolves the concern about possible ISA fragmentation on the software side.

Apple's iPhone 11 Pro Max Motherboard with the A13 SoC (Image Courtesy iFixit)

The Thunder Efficiency CPU Cores: Major Upgrades

Apple’s small efficiency cores are extremely interesting because they’re not all that small when compared to the typical little cores from Arm, such as the Cortex-A55. Last year’s Tempest efficiency cores in the A12 were based on a 3-wide out-of-order microarchitecture with two main execution pipelines, working alongside L/S units and what we assume is a dedicated division unit.

This year’s Thunder microarchitecture seems to have made major changes to the efficiency CPU core, as we’re seeing substantial upgrades in the execution capabilities of the new cores. In terms of the integer ALUs we’re seemingly still looking at two units here, however Apple has doubled the number of units capable of flag set operations from 1 to 2. MUL throughput remains at 1 instruction per cycle, while the division unit is also seemingly unchanged.

What’s actually more impressive is that the floating point and vector pipelines were essentially doubled: FP addition throughput has gone from 1 to 2, while the latency has been reduced from 4 to 3. This is mirrored by vector addition capabilities, with a TP of 2 and a latency of 2. This doubling of throughput is extended throughout almost all instructions executed in the FP/SIMD pipelines, with the exceptions being some operations such as multiplications and division.

The FP division unit has seen a massive overhaul, as it’s seemingly now a totally new unit that’s now optimized for 64-bit operations, no longer halving its throughput when operating on double-precision numbers. DP latencies have been reduced from 19 to 10 cycles, while SP latency has gone down from 12 to 9 cycles. Vector DP division operations have even seen silly improvements such as 4x increase in throughput and 1/3^rd the latency.

The Thunder cores are now served by a 48KB L1 data cache, which is an increase over the 32KB we’ve seen in previous generations of Apple’s efficiency cores. We haven’t been able to confirm the L1 instruction cache. There also seems to have been changes to the L2 cache of the efficiency cores, which we'll discuss on the following page.

Looking at the performance of the new A13 Thunder cores, we’re seeing that the new microarchitecture has increased its IPC significantly, with gains ranging from 19% in 403.gcc to 38% in 400.perlbench in SPECint, while floating point performance has also improved by an equally impressive 34-38% in non-memory bound SPECfp workloads.

In other areas we're seeing some performance regressions, and this is because Apple has changed the DVFS policies of the memory subsystem, leading to the efficiency cores being unable to trigger some of the memory controller's higher frequency performance states. This results in some of the odd results we are seeing, such as 470.lbm.

This causes a bit of an issue for our dedicated measurements of the cores in isolation: given a more realistic workload such as a 3D game where the GPU would have the memory run at faster speed, the performance of the Thunder cores should be higher than what we see showcased here. I’ll attempt to measure the peak performance of the cores when they’re not limited by memory in a future update as I think it should be very interesting.

The power efficiency of the new cores is also significantly better. Granted, some of these improvements will be due to the system memory not running as fast, but given that the cores still deliver 10-23% higher average performance in the SPEC suites, it’s still massively impressive that energy consumption has gone down by 25% on average as well – pointing to major efficiency gains.

In the face of the relatively conservative changes of the Lightning cores (other than AMX), the new Thunder cores seem like an outright massive change for the A13 and a major divergence from Apple’s past efficiency core microarchitectures. In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy.

The A13's Memory Subsystem: Faster L2, More SLC BW

The memory subsystem of a chip is an essential backbone for the performance of not only the CPU cores, but also the whole rest of the system. In this case we’re taking a closer look at how the memory subsystem behaves on the CPU side of things.

Last year we saw Apple make significant changes to the SoC’s memory subsystem with the inclusion of a new architecture system level cache (SLC), which serves as the last level cache for not only the CPU, but also a lot of other SoC components like the GPU.

Looking first at the linear graphed memory latencies, we see that the A13’s structural DRAM latency falls in at ~104ns, a very slight regression to the 102.8ns of the A12. Apple in this regard isn’t the best among mobile SoCs, HiSilicon’s newest Kirin 990 now falls in at ~96ns and the Exynos 9820 should also fall into a similar range, however this doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things given Apple’s massive cache hierarchy. Patterns such as full random pointer chasing is significantly more performant on Apple’s cores and this should be tightly linked to the strong TLBs as well as iOS’s system configuration choice of using 16KB pages.

Moving to a logarithmic chart we better see the transitions between the cache hierarchies. We can clearly see Apple’s 128KB L1D cache here. The L2 cache is also relatively straightforward till 4MB as the latencies are relatively flat. From here on things become quite complicated and things differ a bit compared to the A12. Last year we determined that the L2 cache structure physically must be around 8MB in size, however we saw that it only looks as if the big cores only have access to around 6MB. Apple employs an “L2E” cache – this is seemingly a region of the big core L2 cache that serves as an L3 to the smaller efficiency cores (which themselves have their own shared L2 underneath in their CPU group).

In this region the new A13 behaves slightly different as there’s an additional “step” in the latency ladder till about 6MB. Frankly I don’t have any proper explanation as to what the microarchitecture is doing here till the 8MB mark. It does look however that the physical structure has remained at 8MB.

Going further out into the cache hierarchy we’re hitting the SLC, which would act as an L3 to the large performance cores, but should be shared with other IP blocks in the SoC. Here we see a significant change in behavior to the A12. If one had to guess as to what happening you’d think that the SLC has grown in size beyond the 8MB we estimated to have been used in the A12. Short of analyzing the die shot and see if the structure indeed has doubled, I’m a bit skeptical and I feel it’s more likely that Apple is using a partitioning system and has possibly enabled the CPU complex to access more of the SLC. What is evident here, is the doubling of the SLC cache from 8MB to 16MB.

We mentioned that the Lightning cores L2 is faster now: Converting the measured latencies from nanoseconds to core cycles, we see the structural speed changes to the caches. The L1 remains at 3 cycles which is massively impressive given its 128KB size. The L2 cache has been reduced from 16 cycles down to 14 cycles, which is again extremely impressive given its purported 8MB physical size. Accounting for the core’s frequency increase, we do more noticeably see that the structural memory latency has increased a bit on the A13, adding about 21-22 cycles. It’s possible that the microarchitectural changes that made the SLC so much faster this generation had a knock-on effect in adding more total latency to DRAM.

Looking at the new Thunder cores versus last year’s Tempest microarchitecture, we see the new cache hierarchy differences. The L1D has grown from 32KB to 48KB – straightforward until now.

The L2 cache size also has evidently increased. Last year we estimated that the small core cluster had 2MB of shared L2, but was partitioned in such as way that a given core only has access to about 1.5MB, and this depth depended on the power management policy and DVFS state of the cores, appearing to only have access to 512KB when at the lowest performance states.

This year, this 1.5MB access size has seemingly increased to 2.5MB. I thus estimate the shared L2 of the small cores has increased from a physical 2MB to 3MB. Past this we’re seeing a step-wise behavior in latency up to 4MB – it’s possible this would be part of the L2E cache of the CPU complex, so in other words we’d possibly be accessing a special partition of the big core’s L2.

Update October 27th: The die shot reveals that the L2 of the Thunder cluster is half the size of the Lightning cluster L2, thus we estimate it's 4MB large in total.

In this graph we continue to see the behavior change of the A13’s SLC. At first glance it appears bigger, which still can be the case, but I rather think the CPU complex has much better access to the 4 (or more) cache slices of the SLC in this generation.

Another change of the new Thunder cores here is that we’re obviously seeing an increase in the L2 TLB capacity of the core. While the L1 TLB seems to have remained unchanged at 128 pages / 2MB, the L2 TLB has increased from 512 pages to 1024 pages – covering up to 16MB, a quite ideal size as it’s covering the depth of the SLC.

Finally, we see that the efficiency cores in the A13 this time around don’t have access to faster DRAM on their own – the memory controller remains very slow and DRAM latencies are in excess of 340ns while on the A12 the Tempest cores were able to enjoy latencies of 140-150ns. This explains some of the performance regressions of the new Thunder cores we measured earlier.

Bandwidth between the A13 and A12 doesn’t majorly differ in the L1 and DRAM regions beyond minor clock speed changes. In the L2, we notice there’s been a more noticeable increase in performance for read+writes into the same cache line, increasing performance by 25%.

It’s again in the SLC region where we see major changes – while on the A12 the bandwidth here slowly fell off in depth, the A13 is able to sustain the same bandwidth over the 16MB of system cache. It’s impressive that the bandwidth here is essentially equal to the L2 – albeit of course quite notably worse latency as we noted earlier. The smaller dips at the 8MB region is an artifact of the cache behavior between the big L2 and the SLC.

Finally, the MLP graphs showcase the memory level parallelism capacity of the CPU cores and the memory subsystem. MLP is the ability for the CPU to “park” memory requests missing the caches and to continue executing in out-of-order fashion other requests. High MLP ability is extremely important to be able to extract the most from out-of-order execution of code, which has higher memory pressure and more complex memory access patterns.

The A13 here again remains quite unique in its behavior, which is vastly more complex that what we see in any other microarchitecture. The non-linearity of the MLP speedup versus access count is something I can’t find a viable explanation for. We do see that the new A13 is a little bit better and more “even” than the A12, although what this practically means is something only Apple’s architects know. In general, Apple’s MLP ability is only second to AMD’s Zen processors, and clearly trounces anything else in the mobile space.

The overall conclusion for the A13’s memory subsystem is that Apple has evidently made very large changes to the system level cache, which is now significantly faster than what we’ve seen in the A12. The L2 cache of the big cores benefit from a 2-cycle latency reduction, but otherwise remain the same. Finally, the new Thunder efficiency cores have seen large changes with increased L1D, L2 and TLB capacity increases.

SPEC2006 Perf: Desktop Levels, New Mobile Power Heights

Given that the we didn’t see too many major changes in the microarchitecture of the large Lighting CPU cores, we wouldn’t expect a particularly large performance increase over the A12. However, the 6% clock increase alongside with a few percent improvement in IPC – thanks to improvements in the memory subsystems and core front-end – could, should, and does end up delivering around a 20% performance boost, which is consistent with what Apple is advertising.

I’m still falling back to SPEC2006 for the time being as I hadn’t had time to port and test 2017 for mobile devices yet – it’s something that’s in the pipeline for the near future.

In SPECint2006, the improvements in performance are relatively evenly distributed. On average we’re seeing a 17% increase in performance. The biggest gains were had in 471.omnetpp which is latency bound, and 403.gcc which puts more pressure onto the caches; these tests saw respective increases of 25 and 24%, which is quite significant.

The 456.hmmer score increases are the lowest at 9%. That workload is highly execution backend-bound, and, given that the Lightning cores didn’t see much changes in that regard, we’re mostly seeing minor IPC increases here along with the 6% increase in clock.

While the performance figures are quite straightforward and not revealing anything surprising, the power and efficiency figures on the other hand are extremely unexpected. In virtually all of the SPECint2006 tests, Apple has gone and increased the peak power draw of the A13 SoC; and so in many cases we’re almost 1W above the A12. Here at peak performance it seems the power increase was greater than the performance increase, and that’s why in almost all workloads the A13 ends up as less efficient than the A12.

In the SPECfp2006 workloads, we’re seeing a similar story. The performance increases by the A13 are respectable and average at 19% for the suite, with individual increases between 14 and 25%.

The total power use is quite alarming here, as we’re exceeding 5W for many workloads. In 470.lbm the chip went even higher, averaging 6.27W. If I had not been actively cooling the phone and purposefully attempting it not to throttle, it would be impossible for the chip to maintain this performance for prolonged periods.

Here we saw a few workloads that were more kind in terms of efficiency, so while power consumption is still notably increased, it’s more linear with performance. However in others, we’re still seeing an efficiency regression.

Above is a more detailed historical overview of performance across the SPEC workloads and our past tested SoCs. We’ve now included the latest high-end desktop CPUs as well to give context as to where the mobile is at in terms of absolute performance.

Overall, in terms of performance, the A13 and the Lightning cores are extremely fast. In the mobile space, there’s really no competition as the A13 posts almost double the performance of the next best non-Apple SoC. The difference is a little bit less in the floating-point suite, but again we’re not expecting any proper competition for at least another 2-3 years, and Apple isn’t standing still either.

Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind.

In terms of power and efficiency, the A13 seemingly wasn’t a very successful iteration for Apple, at least when it comes to the efficiency at the chip’s peak performance state. The higher power draw should mean that the SoC and phone will be more prone to throttling and sensitive to temperatures.

This is the A12, not A13

One possible explanation for the quite shocking power figures is that for the A13, Apple is riding the far end of the frequency/voltage curve at the peak frequencies of the new Lightning cores. In the above graph we have an estimated power curve for last year’s A12 – here we can see that Apple is very conservative with voltage up until to the last few hundred MHz. It’s possible that for the A13 Apple was even more aggressive in the later frequency states.

The good news about such a hypothesis is that the A13, on average and in daily workloads, should be operating at significantly more efficient operating points. Apple’s marketing materials describe the A13 as being 20% faster along with also stating that it uses 30% less power than the A12, which unfortunately is phrased in a deceiving (or at least unclear) manner. While we suspect that a lot of people will interpret it to mean that A13 is 20% faster while simultaneously using 30% less power, it’s actually either one or the other. In effect what this means is that at the performance point equivalent to the peak performance of the A12, the A13 would use 30% less power. Given the steepness of Apple’s power curves, I can easily imagine this to be accurate.

Nevertheless, I do question why Apple decided to be so aggressive in terms of power this generation. The N7P process node used in this generation didn’t bring any major improvements, so it’s possible they were in a tough spot of deciding between increasing power or making due with more meager performance increases. Whatever the reason, in the end it doesn’t cause any practical issues for the iPhone 11’s as the chip’s thermal management is top notch.

System & ML Performance

Having investigated the new A13’s CPU performance, it’s time to look at how it performs in some system-level tests. Unfortunately there’s still a frustrating lack of proper system tests for iOS, particularly when it comes to tests like PCMark that would more accurately represent application use-cases. In lieu of that, we have to fall back to browser-based benchmarks. Browser performance is still an important aspect of device performance, as it remains one of the main workloads that put large amounts of stress on the CPU while exhibiting performance characteristics such as performance latency (essentially, responsiveness).

As always, the following benchmarks aren’t just a representation of the hardware capabilities, but also the software optimizations of a phone. iOS13 has again increased browser-based benchmarks performance by roughly 10% in our testing. We’ve gone ahead and updated the performance figures of previous generation iPhones with new scores on iOS13 to have proper Apple-to-Apple comparisons for the new iPhone 11’s.

In Speedometer 2.0 we see the new A13 based phones exhibit a 19-20% performance increase compared to the previous generation iPhone XS and the A12. The increase is in-line with Apple’s performance claims. The increase this year is a bit smaller than what we saw last year with the A12, as it seems the main boost to the scores last year was the upgrade to a 128KB L1I cache.

JetStream 2 is a newer browser benchmark that was released earlier this year. The test is longer and possibly more complex than Speedometer 2.0 – although we still have to do proper profiling of the workload. The A13’s increases here are about 13%. Apple’s chipsets, CPUs, and custom Javascript engine continue to dominate the mobile benchmarks, posting double the performance we see from the next-best competition.

Finally WebXPRT represents more of a “scaling” workload that isn’t as steady-state as the previous benchmarks. Still, even here the new iPhones showcase a 18-19% performance increase.

Last year Apple made big changes to the kernel scheduler in iOS12, and vastly shortened the ramp-up time of the CPU DVFS algorithm, decreasing the time the system takes to transition from lower idle frequencies and small cores idle to full performance of the large cores. This resulted in significantly improved device responsiveness across a wide range of past iPhone generations.

Compared to the A12, the A13 doesn’t change all that much in terms of the time it takes to reach the maximum clock-speed of the large Lightning cores, with the CPU core reaching its peak in a little over 100ms.

What does change a lot is the time the workload resides on the smaller Thunder efficiency cores. On the A13 the small cores are ramping up significantly faster than on the A12. There’s also a major change in the scheduler behavior and when the workload migrates from the small cores to the large cores. On the A13 this now happens after around 30ms, while on the A12 this would take up to 54ms. Due to the small cores no longer being able to request higher memory controller performance states on their own, it likely makes sense to migrate to the large cores sooner now in the case of a more demanding workload.

The A13’s Lightning cores are start off at a base frequency of around 910MHz, which is a bit lower than the A12 and its base frequency of 1180MHz. What this means is that Apple has extended the dynamic range of the large cores in the A13 both towards higher performance as well as towards the lower, more efficient frequencies.

Machine Learning Inference Performance

Apple has also claimed to have increased the performance of their neural processor IP block in the A13. To use this unit, you have to make use of the CoreML framework. Unfortunately we don’t have a custom tool for testing this as of yet, so we have to fall back to one of the rare external applications out there which does provide a benchmark for this, and that’s Master Lu’s AIMark.

Like the web-browser workloads, iOS13 has brought performance improvements for past devices, so we’ve rerun the iPhone X and XS scores for proper comparisons to the new iPhone 11.

The improvements for the iPhone 11 and the new A13 vary depending on the model and workload. For the classical models such as InceptionV3 and ResNet34, we’re seeing 23-29% improvements in the inference rate. MobileNet-SSD sees are more limited 17% increase, while DeepLabV3 sees a major increase of 48%.

Generally, the issue of running machine learning benchmarks is that it’s running through an abstraction layer, in this case which is CoreML. We don’t have guarantees on how much of the model is actually being run on the NPU versus the CPU and GPU, as things can differ a lot depending on the ML drivers of the device.

Nevertheless, the A13 and iPhone 11 here are very competitive and provide good iterative performance boosts for this generation.

Performance Conclusion

Overall, performance on the iPhone 11s is excellent, as we've come to expect time and time again from Apple. With that said, however, I can’t really say that I notice too much of a difference to the iPhone XS in daily usage. So while the A13 delivers class leading performance, it's probably not going to be very compelling for users coming from last year's A12 devices; the bigger impact will be felt coming from older devices. Otherwise, with this much horsepower I feel like the user experience would benefit significantly more from an option to accelerate application and system animations, or rather even just turn them off completely, in order to really feel the proper snappiness of the hardware.

GPU Performance & Power

We covered the CPUs of the A13 in detail, but there’s also the GPU we have to consider. Apple’s performance improvement claims for this year have been a little more conservative, with the company promising a 20% performance increase or a 40% decrease in power at the same performance as the A12. Last year’s jump was a rather large one, and we don’t expect Apple (or any vendor for that matter) to repeat it any time soon, especially as we saw both major microarchitectural changes as well as the adoption of the new 7nm manufacturing node at the same time.

Beyond the raw performance of the chipset and the GPU, what’s important for gaming is the actual device’s thermal characteristics and how it’s able to dissipate and sustain the high heat generation of the SoC. For the A12 I did criticize Apple in terms of being extremely aggressive on the peak power that the phones were allowed to start off with in 3D workloads. This resulted in the phones not really able to sustain these performance levels more than 2-3 minutes before having to throttle down.

This year beyond the promised efficiency gains, Apple has said they’ve improved the device’s SoC cooling capabilities, being able to better spread the heat from the SoC to the body of the phone and as such allow the silicon to retain higher performance states.

Starting off with the physics test in 3DMark, this is actually more of a CPU workload when power constrained during a GPU workload. In this scenario, the iPhone 11’s fare a bit better in terms of peak performance compared to last year’s iPhones, however they weren’t quite able to maintain the same sustained performance as we saw on the A12 iPhones.

The iPhone 11 Pro Max showcased the better scores than its siblings, and that’s not too much of a surprise given that the phone has the biggest form-factor and thermal envelope to be able to dissipate larger amounts of heat.

Switching over to the graphics workload which puts a maximum amount of stress on the GPU, we here now see major changes in the scores and rankings. First of all, the new iPhone 11s and the A13 now showcase significant performance increases compared to the A12 devices last year. I’ve noted that Apple was oddly weak in 3DMark when we analyzed the chip, and it looks like Apple was able to resolve whatever the bottleneck was this generation, showcasing a 38% increase in performance. I’ve actually gone back and quickly retested the iPhone XS on iOS13 and did see a 20% increase in performance compared to what we see in the graphs here; I’ll be updating those device’s scores as soon as I have more time.

The iPhone 11 Pros are doing much better than the regular iPhone 11 when it comes to the sustained performance results. I’m actually a bit surprised here given that these are the phones which have the SoC sandwiched between two stacked PCBs, but it seems Apple is able to cool off that whole assembly decently enough. The iPhone 11's scores here are a bit disappointing as it represents an almost 50% degradation in performance.

The new iPhones don’t score quite as well as some Snapdragon 855(+) devices, but this is rather because Apple does not allow the iPhones to get nearly as hot as some of these other devices. I wasn’t able to measure skin temperatures above 41°C on any of the new iPhones.

In the GFXBench Aztec High test, Apple’s microarchitecture is better able to flex its muscles and more clearly takes the lead in terms of both peak and sustained performance. Comparing the iPhone 11 Pro to the iPhone XS, we see a 23% increase in peak performance, and most importantly a much more impressive 50% increase in sustained performance.

GFXBench Aztec High Offscreen Power Efficiency (System Active Power)
	Mfc. Process	FPS	Avg. Power (W)	Perf/W Efficiency
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Warm	7FFP	26.14	3.83	6.82 fps/W
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Cold / Peak	7FFP	34.00	6.21	5.47 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Warm	7FF	19.32	3.81	5.07 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Cold / Peak	7FF	26.59	5.56	4.78 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Snapdragon 855)	7FF	16.17	4.69	3.44 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Exynos 9820)	8LPP	15.59	4.80	3.24 fps/W

Measuring the power consumption, we again see that the A13 devices are extremely aggressive in their peak power, exceeding 6.2W. What is interesting here is even at this peak power-hungry performance state, the A13 is more efficient than the A12, and massively more efficient than the competition.

As usual, running a workload for a few minutes until the phone gets lukewarm (not to be mistaken with the longer sustained performance states in the benchmark graphs) will lower the performance and power to more reasonable levels. We’re able to make almost apples-to-apples comparisons here between the A13 and A12 iPhones: at roughly the same 3.8W power usage, the new A13 based device is able to showcase a 35% increase in performance. This performance state of the A13 actually corresponds to the peak performance of the A12, so that’s really nice as we’re able to do the same comparison but for the performance axis: At the same performance of the A12, the A13 is able to use 32% lower power. Not quite the 40% that Apple promised, but that could vary depending on workloads (Or it could be that Apple is quoting GPU power only, while we’re measuring whole system active power here).

GFXBench Aztec Normal Offscreen Power Efficiency (System Active Power)
	Mfc. Process	FPS	Avg. Power (W)	Perf/W Efficiency
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Warm	7FFP	73.27	4.07	18.00 fps/W
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Cold / Peak	7FFP	91.62	6.08	15.06 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Warm	7FF	55.70	3.88	14.35 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Cold / Peak	7FF	76.00	5.59	13.59 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Snapdragon 855)	7FF	40.63	4.14	9.81 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Exynos 9820)	8LPP	40.18	4.62	8.69 fps/W

The “Normal” Aztec benchmark, which uses a lower resolution and has less workload complexity, actually fares even better for the iPhone 11s. Peak performance has improved by 21%. At roughly the same power, the A13 is 31% faster, while at almost the same performance, it’s again 32% more efficient.

GFXBench Manhattan 3.1 Offscreen Power Efficiency (System Active Power)
	Mfc. Process	FPS	Avg. Power (W)	Perf/W Efficiency
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Warm	7FFP	100.58	4.21	23.89 fps/W
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Cold / Peak	7FFP	123.54	6.04	20.45 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Warm	7FF	76.51	3.79	20.18 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Cold / Peak	7FF	103.83	5.98	17.36 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Snapdragon 855)	7FF	70.67	4.88	14.46 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Exynos 9820)	8LPP	68.87	5.10	13.48 fps/W
Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon 845)	10LPP	61.16	5.01	11.99 fps/W
Huawei Mate 20 Pro (Kirin 980)	7FF	54.54	4.57	11.93 fps/W
Galaxy S9 (Exynos 9810)	10LPP	46.04	4.08	11.28 fps/W
Galaxy S8 (Snapdragon 835)	10LPE	38.90	3.79	10.26 fps/W
Galaxy S8 (Exynos 8895)	10LPE	42.49	7.35	5.78 fps/W

Manhattan 3.1 largely showcases similar results to the Aztec Normal scores.

Finally, the older T-Rex benchmark has the new iPhone 11’s showcase significant improvements in terms of the sustained performance scores around 59% compared to last year’s XS devices.

GFXBench T-Rex Offscreen Power Efficiency (System Active Power)
	Mfc. Process	FPS	Avg. Power (W)	Perf/W Efficiency
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Warm	7FFP	289.03	4.78	60.46 fps/W
iPhone 11 Pro (A13) Cold / Peak	7FFP	328.90	5.93	55.46 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Warm	7FF	197.80	3.95	50.07 fps/W
iPhone XS (A12) Cold / Peak	7FF	271.86	6.10	44.56 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Snapdragon 855)	7FF	167.16	4.10	40.70 fps/W
Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon 845)	10LPP	150.40	4.42	34.00 fps/W
Galaxy 10+ (Exynos 9820)	8LPP	166.00	4.96	33.40fps/W
Galaxy S9 (Exynos 9810)	10LPP	141.91	4.34	32.67 fps/W
Galaxy S8 (Snapdragon 835)	10LPE	108.20	3.45	31.31 fps/W
Huawei Mate 20 Pro (Kirin 980)	7FF	135.75	4.64	29.25 fps/W
Galaxy S8 (Exynos 8895)	10LPE	121.00	5.86	20.65 fps/W

We see the warmed up power draw for the phone here as being quite a bit higher than the other tests. It’s possible that the difference in here is the more CPU load due to the very high FPS figures we’re running the test at nowadays.

GPU Performance: Best In Class

Last year the A12 had some extremely impressive GPU improvements and it was the first time that Apple had been able to very clearly jump ahead of Qualcomm in terms of performance and efficiency. I didn't have as large expectations for the A13 this year as a follow-up, but Apple was very much able to impress and improve by greater margins than their marketing materials led me to believe.

First of all, the peak performance of the of the A13 is indeed improved by roughly ~20%. However this is not the metric that people should be paying most attention to. Apple’s sustained performance score improvements are a lot more significant and reach 50 to 60% when compared to last year’s iPhones. As things would seem, Apple’s claims to have improved thermal dissipation for the SoC have worked out extremely well.

The regular iPhone 11 does lag a bit behind the Pro models, as it seems it hasn’t been able to profit from the same design changes. Sustained performance here takes a little hit, but given the phone’s very low resolution I have to wonder if that really even matters in real workloads.

Most of all, Apple’s new GPU microarchitecture on the A13 is extremely impressive. Given the meager process node advancements, I had not expected the company to be able to push for such large performance and power efficiency gains. We’ll need to see some major paradigm shifts from the competition in order for them to be able to catch up in the next generation of devices.

Last year I did complain about the phones getting quite hot during the initial load periods at peak performance, and it looks like Apple has resolved this as I wasn’t able to measure skin temperatures above 41°C on any of the new phones. While I still question Apple’s need to drive the power draw near the limits of the power delivery of the phone, at least this time around it doesn’t create any negative drawback for the user experience.

Display Measurement

When it comes to displays, last year's iPhone XS didn’t showcase any major display changes compared to the original iPhone X, as the two phones seemingly shared the same display panel. In contrast to that situation, for the new iPhone 11 Pros, Apple is advertising using a newer generation panel which brings notable improvements with it.

In terms of dimensions or resolution, there’s no visible changes on the new panels, and you’d have to look under the hood to see what has actually changed. The most notable improvement this year is a switch in the OLED emitter material that’s been used by Samsung in producing the new screen. The new generation emitter was first introduced in the display panel of the Galaxy S10, and to my knowledge it has subsequently only been used in the Note10 series as well as the new OnePlus 7T (regular version only). The iPhone 11 Pro phones now join this limited group of devices, and the biggest improvements to the user experience will be higher maximum brightness levels as well as improved power efficiency.

The regular iPhone 11, on the other hand does not seem to have changed much from the iPhone XR. It remains a relatively lower resolution LCD screen, although its display characteristics remain excellent.

We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the iPhone 11 screens. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using SpectraCal's CalMAN software.

 

In terms of maximum brightness, Apple has advertised that the new iPhone 11 Pro’s can reach up to 800nits of brightness displaying regular content. We’re able to verify this, as our 11 Pro Max sample reached 807 nits while the 11 pro reached 790 nits. Consequently, it’s quite odd to see that the LCD-based iPhone 11 is now the lowest brightness device in the line-up. As always, Apple doesn’t make use of any brightness boost mechanism and thus allows its peak brightness to be achieved in any scenario.

Apple also advertises that the screen does go up to 1200 peak brightness in HDR content, however I haven’t been able to go ahead to verify this in our current test suite.

 
SpectraCal CalMAN
               iPhone 11: 
        iPhone 11 Pro: 
iPhone 11 Pro Max: 

In the greyscale tests, all the iPhones perform extremely well, as expected. The Pro models do showcase a tendency to have slightly too strong red levels, so their color temperature is ever so slightly too warm. This characteristic diminishes the higher in brightness we go on the Pro models. The iPhone 11 has a weakness in the greens, so its color temperature is a above the 6500K white point target.

Gamma levels are excellent and target levels of 2.2. The Pro models are veering off towards higher gamma at higher picture levels, something that isnt as prominently exhibited by the iPhone 11. I’m not sure if this is due to a non-linear APL compensation of the phone screen during our measurement patterns, or if there’s an actual issue of the calibration.

iPhone 11 / SpectraCal CalMAN
iPhone 11 Pro / SpectraCal CalMAN
iPhone 11 Pro Max / SpectraCal CalMAN

The dE2000 deviation scores for the Pro models this year are slightly worse than what we saw in last year’s XS devices, however it’s still firmly among the best in class devices out there in the market, and you’d be hard pressed to perceive the small deviations. The iPhone 11 oddly enough does fare a bit worse off than the iPhone XR due to the larger deviations in color balance.

iPhone 11 / SpectraCal CalMAN

In the sRGB color space (default device content), the iPhone 11 performs extremely well with only minor shifts in hue in the greens.

iPhone 11 Pro / SpectraCal CalMAN

iPhone 11 Pro Max / SpectraCal CalMAN

In the same test, both the Pro models are showcasing exemplary accuracy.

The Pro models are just a bit worse off than the XS models of last year, but again these are among the most accurate displays you’ll find out there – mobile devices or not. The iPhone 11 is still excellent, although showing a bit larger deviation compared to the XR.

iPhone 11 / SpectraCal CalMAN

iPhone 11 Pro / SpectraCal CalMAN

iPhone 11 Pro Max / SpectraCal CalMAN

For Display P3 content, the iPhone 11 Pro models showcase the best saturation accuracies we’ve ever measured on any display. This time around, the iPhone 11 is in line with the XR.

iPhone 11 / SpectraCal CalMAN

In the Gretag-MacBeth test of common tones, the only real issue of the iPhone 11 is the whites which had showcased a weakness of greens. Notice how the luminosity of the tones are essentially absolutely perfect.

iPhone 11 Pro / SpectraCal CalMAN

iPhone 11 Max Pro / SpectraCal CalMAN

Overall in terms of the color calibration and screen quality, the iPhones are the very best in the industry. There’s really nothing I can say about them as they’re class-leading in every regard.

The iPhone 11’s LCD screen isn’t for my taste due to the lower resolution, which frankly does bother me, and it certainly doesn’t have the same contrast characteristics as the Pro models. So while colors are still extremely good, it remains a compromise in 2019 when essentially every manufacturer has moved on to adopt OLED screens.

Display Power Measurements - Generational Improvements

Naturally, we didn’t want to finish the display evaluation section without verifying Apple’s claims about the new improved power efficiency of the iPhone 11 Pro panels.

Comparing the three generations of identical format iPhones, we again see that the display power consumption between the original iPhone X and the XS didn’t differ much at all. Plotting the new iPhone 11 Pro in the chart however we immediately see the difference in the new generation.

At equal brightness levels, Apple has indeed been able to improve the power efficiency of the panel by 15% - just as Apple’s marketing described it. We also see how the new panel expands past the brightness limits of the X and XS, reaching 800nits. This does come at a cost however, as the improved power efficiency isn’t able to completely make up for the larger brightness increase, so the maximum power consumption of the screen displaying full white does rise from 2.6W to 3.1W.

Battery 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.

Camera - Daylight Evaluation: Triple Cameras

Thus far we’ve covered the iPhone 11 series' new A13 SoC, the new display and the phones' excellent battery life. But it’s very evident that above all that, Apple puts the new cameras at the forefront of the new device generation.

The new main camera on the iPhone 11s employ a new generation sensor with full dual-pixel phase-detection autofocus (PDAF) coverage. While the pixels themselves remain the same at 1.4µm in width, Apple will have likely improved the deep trench isolation (DTI) implementation, allowing for the sensor to achieve better detail and less noise.

The wide-angle camera will be the most interesting aspect of the new cameras: the 120° field-of-view of the new module will allow for a completely new perspective on photography for iPhone users, and should be a big new addition to the shooting experience of the phones.

As a note, I had started off the daylight comparison photos on the initial iOS13.0 launch version. By the time I got to the night time shots iOS13.1 was released so those photos were captured on that version. Finally, I added a quick comparison with the newest iOS13.2 and the new Deep Fusion feature towards the end of the daylight pages.

[ iPhone 11Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

Starting off with the main camera, we’re seeing a relatively similar exposure between the XS and the 11 in this shot. I feel like the 11’s color reproduction has improved slightly. Another big difference is in the HDR handling as the sunlit areas in the street as well as the top of the building are significantly better defined on the new 11. Detail-wise I can’t say there’s been too much of a change between the two phones in this shot.

On the telephoto camera, which is only available on the Pro models, we’re seeing a slightly brighter picture on the 11. It looks like the 11 has increased noise on the textures here, and we’re seeing a bit less detail in the details further back in the scene.

The wide-angle is a fantastic new addition to the 11 series as it’s able to capture a lot more of the scene in front of you. Apple does very well in terms of maintaining a good consistency between the different cameras and thus exposure and colors are extremely similar.

Comparing the quality of the wide-angle shots to that of other phones however we see that the dynamic range is a bit lacking, and the camera is having trouble in terms of defining the foreground shadows of the trees and the flowers on the lamp-post. The module does well with textures, but is a bit lacking in finer detail.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

In the next shot again, we see very similar exposures between the XS and the new 11. A definitive win for the 11 is the more accurate color temperature, as the XS had the tendency of being a bit warm. It’s very hard to make out any major differences in detail between the phones, but I do notice that the 11 has somewhat less detail in the texture of the ground.

On the zoom lens there’s very little difference again between the phones, however I feel that the 11 has less detail here and it’s as if it’s applying a sharpening filter. The trees particularly look more in focus on the XS – this might be a side-effect of the wider f/2.0 aperture lens on the new 11 module.

The wide-angle here makes it more visible that the color temperature is still a bit warm, as the concrete and stone had a greyer look to them in reality, something more similar to what the S10s are able to produce.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

On the main camera the improvements on of the HDR can be noticed again here as the 11 is better able to handle the highlights such as the leaves of the trees as well as the white tent – accurately depicting its details while the XS was clipping to white. There’s very little other difference in the details between the shots.

On the telephoto camera, here we’re definitely seeing some much increased noise on the iPhone 11 Pro's module compared to what the XS was able to deliver.

In terms of the wide-angle, I think it’s a matter of preference which phone you like most. What’s important for the iPhone 11 is that the composition between a crop of the wide-angle and the regular main camera looks almost identical and that’s a much appreciated degree of consistency.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

In this shot the statue in direct sunlight, we see the iPhone 11 Pro is able to resolve more details and remain sharper compared to the XS. This time around, we can also say the same about the telephoto module as the new unit is able to clearly outperform its predecessor.

On the wide-angle, while the iPhone 11 Pro did very well in composition, when we compare the details of the ground against the S10s, we see that it appears very washed out and blurry.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

In this shot you’d have an extremely hard time telling the iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone XS apart. The 11 is able to render the tree leaves a little bit livelier, and I can see just a little bit less detail in the pavements, but other than that the shots are almost identical.

The telephoto here again seems to be as finely defined as on the XS – again not sure if this is due to optics or due to processing.

The wide-angle shot is excellent and I think a lot more natural than the Galaxy phones, really only falling second to the P30 Pro’s wide angle unit.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

The iPhone 11 Pro is able to better extract the saturation of the sunlit foliage in this shot and I think it looks a lot livelier than the XS. Detail between the two generations are even.

In the telephoto modules we see the same saturation change for the better, and this is one instance where the 11 does better in terms of detail as it’s able to have better definition of the roof tiles.

Apple’s wide-angle here is the most natural, even though it’s lacking Samsung’s much wider dynamic range – the latter here went a bit wacko in terms of the luminosity/saturation processing.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

Apple’s main improvements here again are color balance and better HDR retaining more details in the highlights of the sun-lit parts.

The telephoto keeps flip-flopping between being an improvement and being a degradation. Here the 11 has again more noise in it and appears less sharp than the XS. Also notice the reds of the traffic signs is a lot more muted on the 11, something also present on the main camera.

Composition of the wide-angle is good although it’s lacking in dynamic range compared to the S10. It’s also noticeably lacking in detail.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

In the next scene we’re seeing quite a large difference between the 11 Pro and the XS: The 11 is quite a lot brighter but at the same time the sky is also a lot more blown out. The brighter picture does end up more representative of the scene at the time.

On the telephoto the 11 Pro has more contrast, but it’s again noisier. The foreground parts we can see a bit of blur caused by the camera’s shallower depth of field due to the larger aperture.

The wide-angle did very well in terms of exposure here as some phones tended to be too dark.

Camera - Daylight Evaluation Continued

We continue on with more HDR heavy shots as well as going into indoor shots.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

The first scene on this page showcases similar changes for the new iPhone 11: the new HDR is able to extract better detail and tone down the overexposed areas compared to the XS. Also very evident is the presence of more saturation in the trees, more accurately depicting their color.

The telephoto showcases the same SmartHDR changes as it’s able to better handle the highlights.

A very good showcase by the wide-angle camera in this scene – it’s among the best renditions.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

I’ve noticed a lot of phones have issues with this shot in terms of their color balance, as sometimes they tend to veer off too much in the grey. The new iPhone 11 Pro here improves in comparison to the XS as it’s able to more properly maintain the greens of the leaves.

The telephoto module takes advantage of a better color accuracy, but here’s extremely evident that it’s a downgrade in terms of detail compared to the XS.

The wide-angle is excellent in term of exposure, however detail is drastically lacking throughout the whole scene, as it’s quite a blurry mess, and very much lagging behind the S10, particularly the Exynos variant.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

Moving indoors with still quite good lighting, it’s again hard to tell apart the iPhone 11 from the XS. The 11 is a bit brighter but other than that they’re pretty much equal. The telephoto shots are also too close to clearly determine which one is better.

The wide-angle is good, but lacks the same sharpness as showcased on the S10. Apple here both on the main and wide-angle seems to have a limited dynamic range compared to the Samsung, as evidenced by the blown out outdoors part of the shot.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

The local tone mapping of the HDR of the iPhone 11 improved a bit on the XS, however it’s still not handling some elements correctly, and blowing out the stained glass as well as the orange commercial sign on the left, both which certainly weren’t that bright.

The telephoto on the 11 is a lot better in this shot and the legibility of the signage is definitely better.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

In indoor shoots again for the main camera it’s a wash between the 11 and the XS. In some areas the 11 fares better while on other textures the XS seems sharper. Both the phones however had issues with color temperature as it’s too warm.

Portrait Mode

[ iPhone 11 Pro ]
[ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ Galaxy S10+ (E) ] - [ Galaxy S10+ (S) ]

For portrait pictures, the big new addition for the iPhone 11 series is that you can now capture with the main camera sensor while the wide-angle serves as the depth sensor. It’s still possible and sometimes maybe preferable to use the telephoto lens for portrait shots.

The problem is that it seems that Apple hasn’t really improved the segmentation algorithm on the new iPhones and things can be relatively imperfect. This is particularly visible in the wider-angle shots with the “whiteout” effect, and the results just aren’t very good.

The fun thing about this scene with the swing is we can see the gradual effects of the bokeh on the ropes – that is, we can see that it’s not very gradual on the iPhones as we can clearly delineate where different levels of bokeh blur are applied. This is also partly visible on the Exynos S10, but the Snapdragon S10 has excellent segmentation as well as a smooth and gradual 3D depth blur.

iOS 13.2 Deep Fusion

I had started off the review with iOS 13 including most the daylight pictures, after which I switched over to iOS 13.1 for most testing. Finally, Apple had released a beta for iOS 13.2 and I had to take a look at the new Deep Fusion feature and how it behaves.

[ iPhone 11 Pro iOS 13.2 ]
[ iPhone 11 Pro iOS 13.1.2 ]
[ Galaxy S10+ (E) ]

I was rather shocked to see the difference in detail that the new Deep Fusion feature can make, and you definitely don’t even have to view the pictures at full resolution to notice a difference in sharpness as well as increased detail.

Essentially Deep Fusion should work similarly to Google’s super resolution zoom technology, just Apple is using it to increase the amount of details captured at the full frame resolution. With the feature enabled the camera is able to bring out finer textures in textiles or rougher materials with fine-grained details that otherwise were blurred out by the camera.

I tried a few shots outdoors, however as Apple mentioned it doesn’t seem to work in coordination with Smart HDR and the last comparison shot doesn’t really show any major difference in detail between iOS 13.1 and 13.2.

Daylight Camera Capture Conclusion – Wait for Deep Fusion retake?

The main selling point of the new iPhones was the addition of the ultra-wide-angle camera module. Indeed, this opens up a totally new capture experience for users and I do think it makes a lot of sense to retain this module on the regular iPhone 11 rather than having a telephoto module. The wide-angle camera had been pioneered by LG a few generations ago, but last year it was Huawei which brought it to the mainstream. And now in 2019 it’s been a must-have for every vendor, and it would have been shocking if Apple hadn’t adopted it.

Quality-wise, Apple's wide-angle module does adequately well, as it’s definitely one of the better modules out there. Still, there’s been many shots where the pictures ended up notably less sharp than on the Galaxy S10 or Huawei’s phones. HDR had also been a bit better for the competition in some scenarios.

On the main camera, improvements for this generation were relatively muted when it comes to the daylight results. There just isn’t very much difference to the XS. We do note that the color temperature is slightly improved, saturation is sometimes more accurately captured, and HDR is able to now handle highlights better. Still I had expected a bit more – sometimes the competition is able to showcase better dynamic range and thus capture more of a scene. The level of detail between the iPhone 11 series and the XS are essentially identical.

The telephoto module changes on the 11 Pro are a bit odd. A lot of the scenes showcased the new phone as producing noisier shots or just having less detail. The optics of the module have changed, as it moved from an f/2.4 aperture to an f/2.0, so I do wonder if that’s the reason for the discrepancy. Sometimes the new module wins out, but other times there isn’t any improvement or even slight regressions. It’s not a deal-breaker or a problem at all, but it’s still odd to see this development from Apple.

Portrait mode on the main sensor is a new addition to the camera experience, but the issue is that Apple really hasn’t improved its segmentation and depth sensing capabilities. Qualcomm’s ISP here looks to be superior as it’s able to produce better bokeh effects.

Finally, Deep Fusion could very well be a game-changer for the camera. I was extremely surprised by the increased quality in sharpness and detail that the new mode brings. I didn’t have sufficient time to properly evaluate it in a wider range of scenarios and against more phones, but it could very well be one of the features that puts the iPhone 11 series ahead of other phones. It’s something we definitely have to revisit in the upcoming Pixel 4 and Mate 30 Pro reviews as we redo the whole camera comparison with iOS 13.2.

Camera - Low Light Evaluation

It’s hard to argue against the fact that over the last 2 years, Apple has largely fallen behind in terms of low-light photography. The advent of computational photography with new dedicated night modes, along with competitor devices which have massively more performant camera hardware, meant that the iPhone XS ended up being one of the least competitive devices in low light conditions. Some developers out there have even tried to address this gap with third-party camera applications which deliver their take on computational photography night mode capture.

Apple seems to have made note of this and the new iPhone 11 series now does address this missing feature. Let’s see how it holds up against the fierce competition:

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ]
[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Mate 30 Pro ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

Starting off with a low-light, yet still artificially illuminated scenario, we encounter the first aspect of Apple’s new camera: the night mode isn’t a dedicated mode that one can manually select. Rather, it's a mode that gets triggered automatically depending on the ambient light detected by the phone. In this scene, there was too much light available, and as such the phone wasn't able to trigger Night mode.

That isn’t to day that the iPhone falls behind, the main camera is still very much able to produce some excellent results. In such medium light scenarios, the telephoto lens’ wider aperture now allows the camera to actually use the module rather than falling back to the main sensor and cropping the scene, which is what the XS did.

Unfortunately, the wide-angle lens’ results here are just bad and it’s all just blurry. Huawei and Samsung clearly both dominate here in terms of low-light quality, with either better sensors such as the Mate 30 Pro, or making use of Night Mode on the wide-angle unit, something which isn’t available for the iPhone 11.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ]
[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Mate 30 Pro ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [Xperia 1 ] - [G8 ]

Going to a darker scene, we now finally see Apple’s Night Mode in action. Apple’s non-night mode shot is actually more representative of the actual brightness of the scene at the time, but Night Mode really improves the amount of detail throughout the scene. Apple’s implementation here is superior to Samsung’s and Google’s, as it’s able to retain more detail and has a better handling of the noise. Samsung has the odd situation that the new Night Mode on the Snapdragon variants is inferior in quality to the Exynos based models, making things quite blurry. Huawei’s specialized low light RYYB sensor still is the best low-light camera.

It’s odd to see that Apple’s algorithm doesn’t attempt to bring down the highlights, as such the signs on the left which are still very much blown out and overexposed.

I tried to capture a picture with the Night Mode exposure set to the very maximum 10 seconds as made available in Apple’s camera UI, however the end result was always repeatedly always capped at the exposure the camera automatically selected, even if it did appear as if it’s capturing a 10 second shot. I retested this on the newest iOS 13.2 and things did change, as it was indeed able to capture a very different shot – so it seems the Night Mode behavior on iOS 13.1 is still bugged.

The iPhone’s 11 series' wide-angle module continues to be pretty terrible in low-light.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ]
[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Mate 30 Pro ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

Apple’s night mode here continues to impress as it’s able to reproduce an excellent representation of the scene with a lot of detail. Google’s Night Sight is comparable, or even better, in detail, however the colors are too vivid.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ]
[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Mate 30 Pro ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

We continue to observe that in more well-lit scenarios that the night mode doesn’t engage. Even without it, the new iPhone 11 is an improvement over the XS.

The wide-angle module remains terrible and frankly I’m a bit puzzled why it does so bad even in a more well-lit scene like this one. The phone gets pretty much embarrassed by all the other devices.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [iPhone XS ] - [iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ]
[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Mate 30 Pro ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [Xperia 1 ] - [G8 ]

One thing we notice about the new Night Mode is that it’s not really able to bring out details in areas where the sensor doesn’t see anything. For example, in this scene the roof of the abbey remains clipped to black, while other devices such as the S10 or the Pixel are able to bring out the roof’s structure and details. The darker it gets, and as long as there’s some brighter elements to the scene, we’re seemingly hitting dynamic range limitations on Apple’s night mode.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ]
[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Mate 30 Pro ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

In more uniformly dark areas, the iPhone is able to extract a ton of light, but in areas where the sensor just isn’t sensitive enough and it’s not able to provide any data for the algorithm to accumulate over time, it leads in some odd looking results such as this extremely pronounced shadow of the play castle.

[ iPhone 11 Pro ] - [ iPhone XS ] - [ iPhone X ]
[ S10+(S) ] - [ S10+(E) ]
[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Mate 30 Pro ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ G8 ]

Here again, in a very uniformly lit but still extremely dim scene, the iPhone 11 is able to bring out a ton of light and the result here is significantly brighter than how the scene was in reality. The iPhone beats Google and Samsung in terms of detail and only Huawei’s devices remain as the better rivals.

Low Light Conclusion – A Much Needed Feature Added, Wide Angle Lacking

Overall, Apple’s addition of the new night mode very much elevates the camera capture ability of the iPhone 11 series. It was as solemnly needed feature given that almost all other vendors in the industry have embarked on the computational photography train.

Apple’s implementation shines in a few regards: First of all the fact that it gets selected automatically rather than it being a dedicated mode that you have to switch to is a significant plus. as well as a very large practical advantage over other vendor’s camera experiences.

Quality-wise the pictures that the iPhone 11 series is able to produce in low light is top of the line and is challenged only by Huawei’s massive specialized camera sensors in terms of detail that it’s able to capture. There are a few limitations – for example the phone isn’t able to bring out details in areas where the sensor just doesn’t see anything, particularly scenes with brighter objects requiring a wider dynamic range in the capture is where things hit a snag, although details are still excellent even in these scenarios.

The biggest disappointment was the wide-angle camera. Here it’s not only that Apple’s night mode photography isn’t available for this unit, but the module doesn’t even compete against phones without their respective night modes enabled. So the iPhone 11 series is utterly put to shame when they do enable it. I do hope Apple is able to iterate on its processing for this unit as currently it’s just outright terrible and not competitive.

I do have a feeling that we’ll be seeing further updates and improvements from Apple in improving the various aspect of the camera. Already I did notice that iOS13.2 fixes exposures longer than 3 seconds for the night mode, and there’s of course the question of how Deep Fusion behaves in low-light scenarios where the night mode doesn’t kick in.

Video 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.

Conclusion & End Remarks

As we’re coming to the end of the review and writing up the conclusion, I’m still left with the unanswered question as to whether the iPhone 11 family is a notable upgrade for the series, or if it’s just another iteration for Apple? We saw a lot of core fundamental upgrades the new devices, but in other areas there’s nothing too terribly improved about the iPhone 11 series.

Design-wise, the phones did receive a more notable redesign of their backs, and I very much welcome the matte finish of the back glass of the Pro models. However as a whole, it’s still very evident that the phones are just a continuation of the design first introduced with the iPhone X. As I had mentioned in the introduction, Apple seemingly likes to hold onto their industrial design for at least three generations, and the iPhone 11 series represents the last iteration of this blueprint.

As things stand we’re expecting the Cupertino company to move on to a new design language next year. But in the meantime I feel as if Apple is being a bit too conservative in this regard; the competition in 2019 was able to push out a ton of different designs that certainly look a lot more modern than the iPhone 11 family – and the newly released devices will have to keep up appearances for another year.

The new iPhones are however wolves in sheep’s clothing, as the lack of change on the outside of the phones undersells the fact that the internal hardware has fundamentally changed in many regards. For the iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro Max, the two biggest disguises come in the form of the new display panel and the new batteries.

Visually, the iPhone 11 series' displays remain the same as their predecessors. That is to say that they’re still among the best calibrated and most accurate screens in the industry. There’s really no match for Apple’s thorough work in terms of achieving excellent display characteristics. And for the Pro models in particular, one larger visual change is that the new OLED panels can get a tad brighter than their predecessors. While this is a nice addition, the bigger and more important change is the new display’s increased power efficiency.

Indeed, this improved efficiency in combination with the Pro models' vastly increased battery capacities is what makes the new phones outright excel in terms of battery life. With a 17% increase in battery capacity for the iPhone 11 Pro and an even more impressive 25% increase in capacity for the 11 Pro Max – as well as a more efficient SoC – the new devices are able to showcase the best battery results ever seen in an iPhone. This praise isn't just limited among iPhones either, as the new devices rank among the longest lasting flagship phones we’ve ever tested.

Continuing under the hood, Apple has upgraded essentially everything that relates to cellular and wireless connectivity. Next to Samsung’s S10 and Note10, the new iPhones are only other devices that offer WiFi 6 (802.11ax) support. Furthermore, Apple is now using a newer generation Intel modem (likely XMM7660) which improves cellular capabilities as well as efficiency. It would have been nice to see 5G, but the ecosystem this year just isn’t ready, and it does look like it would be wiser to wait out until next year for more mature products.

At the heart of the iPhone 11 series lies Apple’s newest A13 SoC. The new chip improves on its predecessor in several ways.

Firstly, the new "Lightning" performance CPU cores have continued Apple’s relentless yearly performance increases, and we’ve been able to verify the company’s claims of a 20% performance bump. However it's not all positive, as Apple had to increase the power consumption of the CPUs in order to achieve the performance improvement. At the end of the day, power efficiency at the peak performance states even saw a slight regression.

The more exciting CPU changes this year were actually found in the new "Thunder" efficiency cores. Here Apple has instituted some larger microarchitectural changes, and the new cores are a lot more performant than their predecessors. Not only that, they’re also more efficient. Apple has tuned the dynamic between the efficiency and performance cores this generation – I think that’s why even in the face of the more power-hungry Lightning cores, we’re still seeing that A13's overall power efficiency has improved.

But the biggest surprises and largest performance increases were to be found in the A13's GPU. Where the new chip really shines and exceeds Apple’s own marketing claims is in the sustained performance and efficiency of the new GPU. Particularly the iPhone 11 Pro models were able to showcase much improved long-term performance results, all while keeping thermals in check. The short version of it is that Apple has been able to knock it out of the park, delivering performance increases that we hadn’t expected in what's essentially a mid-generation refresh on the chip manufacturing side of matters.

Finally, we have Apple's new cameras. Over the last year and a half we’ve seen tremendous innovation from the competition, and Apple’s sole task here this generation was to catch up and to keep up. The new triple camera setup is one feature that Apple really needed a checkmark on if it wanted to compete with the versatility presented by the competition. The new wide-angle camera in particular will be extremely interesting to a lot of existing iPhone users as they first experience the new wider field of view.

In terms of camera quality in daylight, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The new main camera did showcase improved color balance and better handling of highlights in HDR, but frankly in the vast majority of the time there’s not too much difference to last year’s iPhone XS. The telephoto module was also a bit odd, as many times it showed more noise than what was exhibited on the XS. On the part of the new ultra-wide-angle camera, it’s a competitive module, but it's far from being among the best.

As for low-light situations, the addition of Night mode now allows the iPhone 11 series to properly compete in the market. Not only is it able to compete, but in many cases it’s able to outshine the competition in terms of the details it’s able to capture. Unfortunately, Apple does not extend the Night mode to the wide-angle module, and here the camera just completely falls apart in low light, delivering some of the worst results of any ultra-wide-angle camera out there.

I do hope Apple is able to further upgrade the camera experience with future software updates. Apple will already be taking the first step here in iOS 13.2 with the introduction of Deep Fusion. The new mode is extremely impressive in what it’s able to achieve, and in general it warrants a re-testing of the iPhone 11 cameras, which we’ll be doing in the upcoming Pixel and Mate 30 Pro reviews.

At the end of the day, are the iPhone 11s worth it? For me, it depends on the model.

I wasn’t too impressed by the regular iPhone 11. It does bring the same performance upgrades of the rest of the line-up, and it does have the new cameras minus the telephoto module, but it lacks the other large generational improvements that the Pro models received such as the new display or the vastly improved battery life. And personally, I’m still put off by the prospect of buying a device with such a low resolution screen at the end of 2019.

The Pro models, on the other hand, I feel are proper and worthwhile generational upgrades. Users coming from an iPhone 8 (Plus) or earlier models can now upgrade to the new Pro models without having to worry about taking a hit to battery life. Meanwhile performance is self-explanatory, and the camera upgrades are very solid, albeit the wide-angle has some definite weaknesses. Still, the phones feel like very strong devices which notably improve upon the fundamentals, showing that even 12 years after the first iPhone, Apple is still capable of delivering meaningful upgrades to their high-end smartphones.