- Hey guys, this is Austin.
This is the iPhone 11
and if you're considering buying an iPhone,
this is the one to get.
So we have to start with the cameras.
So this year, the iPhone 11 has a pair of cameras.
A standard-wide angle as well as a new ultra-wide.
What I'm curious to see is exactly how this compares
to its predecessor, the iPhone XR.
So first of all let's start with the main shooters.
Well I can immediately see
there's a lot more dynamic range on the 11,
especially when you look over Ken's shoulder,
there's a little bit more detail in the road,
whereas it's pretty much bricked on the XR.
Also, this looks sharp.
Like that looks significantly sharper.
If you look at the text above the red, like on the handle,
I can barely read it, it says "Camera front",
but on the 11 that's actually pretty clear.
Something else I like here is that it seems
to be a little bit more natural on the 11.
So, even though the XS as well as the XR,
they had good cameras,
sometimes they would be a little bit too over-aggressive
with their HDR trying to pull a little bit more detail out
even though the image didn't quite look natural.
Whereas on the 11, if there's a darker area,
it doesn't mind sort of crushing it down a little bit
to give you a more natural look.
There's still a lot of detail, a lot of dynamic range.
That's pretty impressive.
Something new this year on the main camera
is that apparently it has 100% focus pixels.
So if I kinda move in and out,
specifically if I get nice and close,
it should actually do a pretty good job
of keeping you in focus.
Now the other thing which is new here is, of course,
that ultra-wide camera,
so I'm recording video with the standard shooter.
However, if I press the ultra-wide button,
it immediately jumps out to the ultra-wide perspective.
This is obviously going to give you a little bit
of a loss in quality, specifically in low light,
but I mean that's actually cool,
especially considering they've got that really impressive
video stabilization.
I mean, this almost looks like I'm on a Gimbal or something.
So, this is what video looks like as I'm walking
with the ultra-wide camera.
Between that perspective as well as the super steady shot.
Gotta say, this is actually pretty impressive,
and if I want, I can jump right back into the main shooter.
And I've gotta say, they've done a pretty good job
of keeping it consistent.
There's no doubt that this year,
one of the biggest upgrades to the iPhone 11
is the definitely on the camera front.
So, neither of them are perfect.
Both have a lot of issues with the camera and the screen.
However, I prefer the look of the 11.
It looks a little bit brighter, a little bit more saturated,
especially in the background.
That portrait mode still actually does
look pretty nice though.
Let's do a portrait selfie, shall we?
So the front-facing camera has been fully redesigned
for the iPhone 11.
So this is the standard shooter.
However, if I press the button,
it'll make it a little bit wider.
Look friends.
I'm actually curious to see how the portrait looks though.
What's my iPhone 11 portrait face like?
You know what?
It completely missed my glasses.
Literally, my glasses are like cut off there.
Yikes.
That's not great, lemme try another one.
Yeah that's better, didn't lose the glasses there.
It does a pretty good job of cutting the hair out.
There's a lot of detail on my face too.
Definitely no smoothing going on.
Now we also have the slofie,
which is, of course, a slow-motion selfie.
Let me demonstrate.
(laughing)
It does slow-motion front-facing video now.
So, there's no doubt that the iPhone 11
is a pretty big upgrade on the camera front.
However, when you compare it to the Pro,
what you're losing here is a telephoto camera
this has the ultra-wide and the wide
but not that zoomed-in shot.
Now a triple camera set up is certainly nothing new.
LG, Huawei and Samsung have all been
shipping triple cameras for a little while now.
Now while it is nice to have a telephoto,
honestly the 2x zoom on the Pro,
as well as something like on the Note 10,
isn't actually that big of a deal.
You do lose quality by going with the Telephoto.
And while it is a little more zoomed in,
often times I actually find it's not that useful.
As far as I'm concerned,
if I was going to pick two cameras,
I would prefer that ultra-wide.
That being said, the 11 Pro does have that other option
that you're missing on the 11
but I mean, eh?
Now, one of the major new features this year
is a night mode for the iPhone 11.
So to test, we're here in the studio
which has been pretty much completely blacked out.
There's a little bit of light over here from the window,
as well as a tiny bit from the ceiling,
but it's pretty dark in here,
as evidenced by if I turn off this phone screen,
you can't see me anymore, can you?
Hi Matt, are you ready to be my photo demo?
- Oh yeah, I'm ready.
- Okay, let's start out the iPhone XR.
With the XR, ready and erm I will say it's not terrible.
There's a little bit of detail here,
but muddy would be a good way to describe that one.
Let's try on the Pixel.
Okay, are you ready Matt?
- Oh yeah.
- Ready, and
you know that actually looks really impressive,
so there's way more detail here.
I mean, I can literally see your individual eyebrow hairs.
That's pretty solid.
So something interesting with the iPhone 11
is that we do have a little night-mode button,
so I can actually change how long it's going to run.
So this is with it off and it'll go up to 3 seconds,
or max of 5, but I'm gonna leave it on the auto setting.
Alright, are you ready Matt?
- [Matt] Yep.
- And, shooting, holding still, counts me down
and boom we have our photo.
That's also very impressive.
I mean, it looks like there's straight up light in here.
Take a look at what Matt looks like right now,
and now take a look at what he looks like on the iPhone 11.
The Pixel looks to be a little bit smoother
but I think it's mostly
because they're sort of aggressively
cleaning up that detail.
I do think that the iPhone
got the color balance a little bit right.
On the Pixel, everything looks a bit blue.
That's pretty impressive.
Although, I will say your skin tones
definitely do look better on the Pixel,
but everything in the background looks very washed out.
That's pretty close.
Regardless though, this is super impressive
considering just how dark it is in here.
If I'm going to point out the biggest weakness
of the iPhone 11,
it is definitely going to be the display.
So, just like with the iPhone XR,
we're looking at a 6.1" IPS panel.
And well, just like the iPhone XR,
it is usable, it's fine,
but it is certainly not as good
as most other high-end phones on the market,
especially that iPhone 11 Pro.
Not only is it fairly low resolution,
but it also lacks the excellent brightness and contrast
of the OLED on the iPhone 11 Pro.
Now, last year,
this actually was a slightly closer comparison,
as the XR, even though it didn't have the higher resolution,
it actually had was a slightly brighter panel
with very very slightly better color accuracy
compared to the XS.
But this year, it's no comparison.
The 11 screen is fine, it's usable,
but it's not as good as that 11 Pro.
Now, there's some other small differences,
including that bezels are a little bit bigger
on the iPhone 11.
But on the flip side,
you actually have a wider array of colors available.
So you have this, what do you call this?
Like lavender, lilac?
There's yellow, there's green, there's red,
there's white, there's black.
Personally, I like the colors
and I also really like the fact that it does
only have the two cameras on the back.
Obviously, it would be nice to have three cameras
for practicality, but it's not ugly.
This is much much better than the 11 Pro.
I know I'm giving the Pro hard time
and I'm sure a month from now,
I'll completely forget about it,
but I can't unsee just how unsightly
those triple weird cameras are.
This looks so much cleaner.
Now, there are a couple of other downgrades with the 11
but most of them are fairly minor,
so it does only support 2x2 LTE as opposed to 4x4,
so speeds will be a little bit slower.
It is made out of aluminum instead of stainless,
which feels not quite so premium.
And there are the other things,
such as while it supports fast charging,
it doesn't actually come with a fast charger in the box,
which is annoying.
A lot of this stuff isn't a big deal.
I mean, am I ever going to realize that my two meters
of water resistance on the 11 isn't as good as
four meters of diving on the 11 Pro?
No, I'm never gonna take it that deep,
but I don't know why anyone else would.
If you take a look at Apple's site,
they probably proclaim that the iPhone 11 Pro
is the first iPhone worthy of the Pro name.
Okay, so when you look at it in real life,
this is actually a very straight forward upgrade
compared to last year.
So instead of selling the iPhone XR, they have the iPhone 11,
the XS is turned into the iPhone 11 Pro,
and the XS Max turned into the 11 Pro Max,
because, yes, the iPhone 11 Pro Max is now a name
that I have to say with my words.
While Pro Max isn't exactly a great name,
I actually do think that the iPhone 11
is a much much cleaner branding play,
compared to the iPhone XR of last year.
So I think a lot of people sort of maybe...
They didn't write off the XR,
because it was a very big seller for them,
but a lot of people assume that this was the budget iPhone.
It's the one that you didn't really wanna get.
Obviously, a few years ago there's was the iPhone 5C,
which was, straight up, a worse iPhone
compared to the 5S of the day.
However, with the iPhone 11, they've made this,
pretty much, the default option.
If you're gonna go buy a new iPhone,
I want the 11 or do you want the Pro with that?
Do you fries with that?
Do you want super-size with that?
What if they called it the iPhone super-size?
I talked in the past about why the iPhone XR
was my favorite iPhone of last year.
And there were a lot of reasons for that.
Not only was it $250 cheaper,
but of course, it had the best battery life
of any iPhone.
It was so much better than the XS.
However, when you look at the 11 this year,
things have changed just a little bit.
When Apple announced that the iPhone 11
is cheaper than the iPhone XR,
I was legitimately impressed.
So now, when you look at the line up,
you have at $700, the iPhone 11,
at $1000 dollars, you have the Pro,
and $1100 dollars for the Pro Max,
but it's actually even a better deal for the XR
as soon as you look at the storage.
Wait, I mean the 11.
The 11, 11.
So, all three phones this year come with 64 gig standard.
However, the iPhone 11 has a $50 upgrade
to go to 128 gigs of storage,
which in my opinion, is the sweet spot.
If you wanna upgrade the storage on the Pro or the Pro Max,
that's a full $150 to go to up to 256,
which I think is probably overkill for a lot of people.
So, if you want some kind of mid-range storage,
the value proposition looks even better for the iPhone 11.
One thing that's the same
between the iPhone 11 and Pro are the specs.
As inside, they share the same Apple A13 Bionic chip.
Now, the A12 of last year
is already the fastest chip on a phone.
And this promises about 20% more performance.
So that's good.
It's easy to kind of make fun of it
of it's a little bit faster here, a little bit faster there,
but the Apple chip making team
deserves some major, major props.
This thing is ridiculously powerful.
Now, there are two ways of looking at this.
On one hand, it is a nice thing
that both the lower-end iPhone 11,
as well as the higher-end Pro,
have the exact same spec.
In fact, compared to last year,
whereas the iPhone XR had a little bit less RAM,
they also shared the exact same four gigs.
The other side which I do think
is important to consider is that
as an Apple designed chip,
they've actually made some
pretty significant gains in efficiency,
so this should be around 30% better than last year.
Again, directly relating to some of that better battery life
that we're seeing on all three of the new iPhones.
Obviously, having a bigger cell inside is important,
but having a more power-efficient processor
that is more powerful and less power-using?
Power inefficient?
Basically, it is a faster chip
that needs less power to run.
They've done this by employing buzzwords,
such as machine-learning.
Okay, so hear me out here.
The machine-learning algorithms they're actually using
in that specific part of the A13 chip
are actually very powerful.
And what they use it for is actually turning off
different parts of the A13 Bionic that aren't being used.
Now, generally speaking,
there's some kind of level of finesse
where you can turn off a core,
or you've idled down something,
you can do some stuff traditionally.
However, almost every potion of this A13 chip
can be completely idled off
which means that you're not losing battery life
just sitting around doing nothing.
It's actually a very, very clever thing
that they're doing here.
Now, I think all this plays into a much grander vision
of how the iPhone can continue to stay relevant.
Even at $700, while this is cheaper than the Pro,
it is certainly not anywhere
near the excellent budget options
which could be several hundred dollars cheaper.
On one hand, you have people who have older iPhones
which honestly are still totally fine
and not really needing an upgrade,
and on the other, you have people
who are brand new to buying a new smartphone,
and they don't mind switching over to Android.
And I think, to be able to convince both of those groups,
you gotta have the whole package, right?
And that why you see such an emphasis on the camera
adding the wide-angle, adding these different options.
That's why you see such an emphasis
on the performance, the battery life.
I mean, at this point, if you're selling an expensive phone,
you need to deliver on all aspects.
It's no longer good enough to have a 90% phone,
but it lets go on this or that.
I mean, there are so many excellent phones
which are available for three, four, five hundred dollars
that the world has changed in a major, major way.
And when you got that iPhone 6S
which is still putting in work all these years later,
I'm not surprised that Apple's getting a little bit nervous.
And they're really stepping up the game here.