iPhone 11 Review — 6 Months Later By Rene Ritchie

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Now the iPhone 11 an iPhone 11 pro were really well reviewed when they first came out - The iPhone can actually go head to head with the pixel for low light shooting and bringing out the details while keeping the noise much lower as well. - All three of these phones last a full day. That is no need to charge them even if you come to a place like this. - It's better than the 10R in every way but that price went down to 699. - There were also some criticisms though - the iPhone 11 however the non-pro still comes with the garbage barely functional 5Y USB-C to lightening charger.

- And yes you can complain about the omission of USB-C and reverse wireless charging and all that kind of stuff. - And that really brings me to iOS 13 in general which is pretty buggy in all of my iPhone review units so far. - But times change hardware gets worn software gets updated new competition comes out expectations change and so to circumstances especially right now when many of us are rightfully stuck at home and depending on our phones in a very different way than we plan to. It makes the whole question of what to buy and when to buy it just like alternate reality different than it was at launch. So I'm going to do my very first deep dive into all of that and I'm going to do it right now.

I'm Renee Richie and this is the iPhone 11 six months later. - iPhone 11 has a beautiful anodized aluminum and glass design. - Apple's overall bill quality is still among the best in the industry. It's why you see so many old iPhone still out and about three four five or more years on. They're built like little metal and glass bricks.

I do like that this year Apple has used Corning's top of the line glass front and back on the iPhone 11 because last time the iPhone XR didn't get quite as good as the iPhone XS glass on the back. Honestly though the glass has been a bit of a mixed bag for me. I've said this before but I don't baby review units. I want to see how resilient they are so I throw them in my pocket with key with wallets or when I'm doing a lot of testing with other phones with their big gnarly camera bumps on the back which are literally the worst things. And I've gotten a lot of scuffs and scratches on my iPhone 11.

I can't see them at all when the display is lit up which is great because it means it doesn't really affect my usage at all. If it did I'd probably start babying them immediately. I've heard anecdotally that the characteristics of ions exchange glass chemistry can be biased more towards scratch resistance or shatter resistance. In other words different formulations perform better in one way or the other never both. If that's accurate this generation definitely feels biased more towards shatter resistance at least to me.

And I say that as someone who's dropped both the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 11 pro a bunch of times never on purpose and had them all end up totally fine not a crack on them. So now that Apple's done so well with the shatter I'd love to see them figure out the scratch even if it means a Sapphire option on the higher end like the watch has because people like me we need it. - There's a beautiful new matte textured finish that looks great and feels awesome in your hand. - We've had glossy finishes. We've had frosted finishes now too but they've all been not zero friction like the galaxy flip but close.

A good number of the drops I've had have been because of those slips. So the more Apple can iterate on those finishes to fix that The better - It has a 6.1 inch liquid retina display. - It's a new old LED panel that has 2 million to one contrast ratio. - The LCD display on the iPhone 11 and old LED display on the iPhone 11 pro remain terrific. I personally prefer the Old LED because I'm a sucker for HDR video and Apple's display team has just done such a terrific job on extending the dynamic range while still mitigating color shift and burning.

Problems that have played a lot of other old LED phones over the years. It's something I've come to really appreciate much more lately because stuck at home like many of us are right now. It lets me watch all the glorious high bit rate HDR content Disney plus Apple TV plus. Even Netflix have been pumping out over the last six months pretty much anywhere around the house even out on the balcony. But I can't stress this enough I am a nerd who really appreciates that kind of stuff.

Apple's truly excellent color calibration and color management make the LCD displays look eerily close to identical to OLED. So close It's hard to tell them apart unless you're comparing them side by side. Which given the differences in technologies involved its absolutely remarkable. You don't get the deep blacks with the peak brightness of the OLEDs with the LCDs but you also don't get the color shifts and the pulse with modulations which some people still claim really bothers them. I long ago debunked a lot of the dumb hot takes around OMG not even 1080p but it's true some people claim they can see the aliasing and don't like watching upscaled 720p or downscale 1080p videos on their phones.

Of course other people claim they could see flicker and didn't like at three XUI down scaling on their 1080p iPhones plus either. Ultimately it's about balancing costs and power efficiencies against the limits and quirks of human vision. And right now with everything that's going on most streaming services are reducing bit rates and YouTube is defaulting to 480p anyway. The iPhone 11 are still also 60Hz and not 120Hz promotion like the iPads pro have been since 2017 and an increasing amount of Android phones have gone to over the last year. I've been using a pixel four at 90Hz for the last six months as well and I really like it.

Though the implementation is a little uncanny compared to the iPad pros. The pixel also phots us in and out depending on ambient brightness and Samsung degrades resolution when you enable high frame rate probably for power efficiency reasons. Which makes it easy to see why Apple didn't do it yet with the iPhone 11. So for me HFR high frame rate is like HDR high dynamic range. Nerds just aren't going to see it and never want to go back.

But most other people won't even care even if they can notice. - And haptic touch and even more places with iOS 13 like contextual menus. - I still miss good proper 3D touch. I get that removing it saved some costs and some space and let Apple not only fill up on battery but provide consistency between long press and forest press and across devices like the iPhone and iPad. And haptic touch has gotten more capable but it's still cognitively slower than 3D touch because you're left waiting for the long press to occur instead of busily creating the force press.

I don't know maybe Apple could do something like Google's just done with Android and use machine learning to try to guess force based on deformation during touch events. In other words speed up haptic touch response by how fast and how much your fingertip just flattens out against the glass. Basically anything to make haptic touch as quick and physically gratifying to do is 3D touch was. - And the glass that surrounds the camera has a Sculpted 3D Geometry. - I've said I'd be willing to take a camera bump on a Mac book if it meant getting a really good camera in there don't at me so I'm not going to begrudge the massive units on the iPhones 11 especially now that Google went with something similar and Samsung basically said hold my case of beers.

- With an all new wide camera with a new sensor with a hundred percent focus pixels for faster auto-focus 3X faster in low light. - Pretty much everyone agrees it's one of the best still cameras on a phone and arguably still the best video camera on any phone period. It's also I think what makes them useful for mainstream media productions whether it's just a few shots in a feature film or an entire film. It's similar to how so many Pro Photographers seem to swear by the iPhone quality consistency and just a killer app ecosystem because of both of those things. Google's latest Pixel 4 which I've also been shooting with for a while now can capture better stills under some circumstances.

It has better segmentation masking for portrait mode and it just creams the iPhone at digital zoom something I really hope Apple addresses next the way it address night mode previously. The iPhone 11 is still using better camera hardware better optics and combining those with the machine stuff like smart HDR in bright conditions deep fusion indoors and in the mid range and night mode when it's dark. But in all cases it's letting the photos be the photos. Sometimes that's worse other times it's just quirkier yet others It's brilliant like you'd expect from a real camera. Every once in a while though there can be some weird Artifacting and recent software updates really haven't done anything to mitigate it for me.

Samsung and Huawei meanwhile are using far more massive camera systems now with exponentially more Megapixels and bending them down to try and get an average that's better than the sum of the parts. They're also using Periscopes so width can be used instead of depth to shove much better telephotos into their phones. Personally I just love to see what Apple could do with more megapixels and with pixel binning options at their disposal. You want to be able to take photos of your pets running around the park or your kids on the playing field of a big game and have them look like your pets your kids nothing goofy and unusable like 100 X but just really solid 10 to 30 X. It's one of the basics of real world camera work left for Apple to still conquer.

- All right let's talk about night mode - Coming from nowhere Apple caught up with Google who was the best in the industry just last year. It keeps night looking like dark moody light It just reveals the subjects. I liked that it's automatic and biases towards instant shutter. The delay on the pixel force still causes me to misjudge shots a lot but I do wish you could force it on and that it was faster to force off. Just to sometimes get those edge case photos i really want to get.

- And we have a new ultra-wide camera with 120 degree field of view. - Optically it's nowhere nearly as good as the wide angle. It's f/2.4 instead of f/1.8. So it just can't drink in as much light and suffers from more noise. It's four elements instead of five.

So it's not quite as molecularly tack sharp and it has no focus pixels instead of 100% focus pixels. And because it's so wide it elongates objects closer to the edges not like fish eyes but maybe like Amphibian eye. I also really like Apples 1X 2X and new 0.5 X buttons. Which in most cases let you instantly zoom in or out much more elegantly than trying to manually spin a dial interface especially when trying to capture a photo which yeah makes it super weird and frustrating that the 0.5 X button seems to stop working. Once you hit record at 4K 60 and then gives you the dial interface instead.

Ultimately I still think the ultra wide angle was a better choice in the telephoto for the iPhone 11. Most of the time I can sneaker zoom to get closer. Sometimes especially in lower light the camera system actually uses the main wide angle for telephoto anyway because it's still pulling in that exact same data. You can't always go back far enough to capture an ultra wide angle though especially indoors where many of us are stuck these days and there's just no way to get that data if you don't capture it. if you're just taking photos in or of your house you can show the whole room.

If you're making TikTok videos you can show way of the background or even fit in more of your family or you know in better times your friends. Some people might argue that most of this doesn't matter that many of us are shooting for social media these days which just absolutely destroys the quality of our images and videos and makes $200 cameras with crushed blacks and boosted SAT look as appealing if not more appealing than thousand dollar color accurate cameras on Twitter and Instagram. But those services are slowly so agonizingly slowly beginning to introduce higher quality image support and more importantly for many of us these are the only cameras we're using and a few years or a decade from now when we look back at the photos and videos we've taken of our families our children, our pets our travels ourselves. We're gonna to want those to be the best possible photos and videos they can be. - Now were introducing the A13 Bionic the next generation of our industry leading chip.

- The A12Z and the latest iPad pro makes many of pc and Mac cry itself to sleep mode and this is still next level to that. I've yet to really peg it this side of massive AR scenes and it even handles complex photo filters and simpler AR scenes with ease. And those were the things that I could use to peg the A11 and A12 and that's fine. Apple is on record saying they're not building chip sets for current performance. They're building them to maintain performance two or three or even four or more years out and the versions of iOS and apps and maybe peripherals that'll require it.

It's also great Apple is putting that chip in not just the iPhone 11 pro but the regular iPhone 11 as well with PCs it's almost expected that cheaper bills will have worse processors. A lot of phone companies put older or lower performance chips into their less expensive phones. Apple also uses very different chips and it's pro max versus it's standard line. It makes me think that iPhone premium while a far worse marketing name would be a far more accurate name for how Apple is segmenting its lineup. Because in almost every way that really matters from main camera to processor.

You're getting a first-class experience with both the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 11 pro. I do wish there was either more Ram like the most recent iPad Pro or better app hibernation actually both. Most times everything is fine but if you're switching between really heavy apps like Pokemon go and Safari and camera other apps will just jettison from memory left and right then have to relaunch or reload completely When you come back like pre-iOS 4 days. I don't need the ability to pin apps and memories i don't need one more job that feels very much like having a mechanic right around in the car with you. I just need something that better handles the much higher demands apps are putting on the system these days.

- It'll still have an hour more than battery than in your iPhone 10R - up to four hours longer. - it's up to five hours longer in your day. - I've run all of them 11 Pro Max write down during Pokemon go events. And yeah that remains my absolute favorite way to really stress and load test battery life on phones. And they've all lasted just hours and hours even with constant display at full brightness, GPS data graphics rendering everything.

Battery health on the 11 and the 11 max is still 100% the 11 Pro which I use roughly twice as much as the other two is still at 98% and that's after a month and months of daily abuse. Staying at home all day you think plugs and pads would be just plentiful and I'd always be topping up but I really just don't want to have to even think about it. So the longer it lasts between charges the better. When I do charge the new USB-C cord and USBC adapter are ACEs so much so I really wish Apple would include them with the iPhone 11 as well not just the iPhone 11 pro is in premium. - Now we want to give you a sneak peek of a new feature coming in the camera that will be available with the software update this fall but it's so cool we have to tell you about it.

- We're at iOS 13.4 already. When some years we don't get much past 0.2 and frankly it was necessary. Where iOS 12 was one of the most stable releases I can remember any long time from beta to final bug fix iOS 13 was a hot mess in beta and not much better at launch. It is better now though there are still some bugs old and new but for the most part it's finally smooth and solid. And in the meantime Apple's also delivered new features like deep fusion for more detailed photos and indoor lighting and new emoji and Memoji because those are the things that actual people actually care about and of course cursor support for the iPad.

Which I kind of wish was on the iPhone now as well especially because the iPhone is just so overpowered but so screen constrained a cursor and attract pad especially with airplay could just unlock a lot of utility for people, especially for people locked at home. Same with multi windowing and picture and picture. I know Apple wants to keep things simple on the small display but I still often wish I could take notes while surfing the web type messages while watching video all of that kind of stuff the stuff I do on the iPad. I know Android already does this as well. The operating system started off on opposite ends of the spectrum but are converging on a similar feature and interface set.

They just have very different points of view and are very differently problematic. This though is something I think Apple could do really well. I asked all of you on Twitter what you thought about the iPhone 11 six months later and a ton of you responded. I'll link the whole thread in the description but it was pretty much exactly what I went over here. Great camera great battery, and for the baseline model great price.

- So this is our lineup of three new iPhones starting at $699 $99 and $1099. - Hell in an age where Samsung has just blown past the 1000 Mark and never looked back nevermind the foldable which are fun but as resilient as doilies, even the iPhone 11 doesn't look quite as stratospherically priced anymore, but I've been saying for a long time now it isn't about price It's about value, what it delivers to you for that price and with the iPhone 11 models Apple is just delivering a ton of value especially when you factor in all the free software really free not just free as in privacy and data that comes with them. Normally six months later I throw in some caution as well that new models will be arriving like clockwork in just another six months. And while we might get a new lower cost home button iPhone update soon, there's just no way to tell when or how anything else will play out this year. Even with Apple's typically rock solid release schedule.

So I'll just remind you again that while the tech universe is obsessed with year over year upgrades, unless you're on an annual plan most people just don't think that way. Most people keep a phone for two increasingly three or four years and typically only upgrade when they have to but having new iPhones every year means any year you choose to upgrade guarantees you'll get the best iPhone possible that year. One that can see you through another two three four more years. And that's exactly the case here. If you have an iPhone 6 or 6s an iPhone 7 even 8 then the iPhone 11 remains an absolutely terrific update.

And since I phones keep their value better than pretty much any other phone in the industry whether you're trading in handing down or selling so you can trade up you can likely save some cash not only on your next iPhone but by rinse and repeating the same process with every subsequent iPhone you get especially if you want or need that new iPhone now because you're working from home or just stuck at home. The cameras are great for getting creative indoors even when you can't go out the battery life lasts all day even at your kitchen counter or on the sofa and the price especially for the iPhone 11 proper is just all shades of right. And that's true even if you just want to sit around between con calls and watch money Tom Scott's new original game show on nebulous. - I invited five people to play some games - I trust no one - None of us had trustworthy - In an environment. designed to slowly break their team apart.

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So that's my real review of the iPhone 11 some six months later. Now I want to hear from you. If you've been using an iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 pro for a while now how's it holding up for you? What do you love about it? And what do you hate? How has it helped or hindered you while you're working from home? And if you're still considering it what's tempting you and what's holding you back. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and then hit up the comments and let me know. Thanks for watching.

See you on the next video.

Source : Rene Ritchie