Apple today has finally revealed their new generation of iPhones. The iPhone 11 and the iPhone 11 Pro. This is usually their most important announcement in a calendar year since the iPhone is still their biggest moneymaker.
So what is new with the next generation of iPhones? Well, first of all, the new design. The new iPhones have additional lenses at the back enveloped in a square-ish location. The iPhone 11 has two while the iPhone 11 Pro has three cameras at the back respectively. However, the rest is still the same. The iPhone 11 retains the aluminium body we saw with the XR while the iPhone 11 has stainless steel sides like the iPhone XS and XS Max.
The iPhone 11 has a 6.1 inch display and looks almost identical to last year’s iPhone XR. We have 2 iPhone 11 Pros with a 5.8 inch and 6.5 inch OLED screens respectively. The Pro displays have stunning displays according to Apple which they call the Super Retina XDR display which pays homage to their Pro Display XDR display they announced earlier in the year. The new OLED panel can go upto 1200 nits, has a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio and is 15% more energy efficient according to Apple.
Powering the new iPhones is the latest and greatest Apple A13 chip. Apple has always been the leader in mobile CPUs and last year’s A12 Bionic is still competitive to date. Apple claims the A13 has the fastest GPU and CPU on a smartphone, which is a pretty great feat to brag about.
The iPhone XS family had pretty good cameras but the competition on the Android side has stepped their game up. Huawei released the P30 Pro which is a beast in low light conditions and Samsung have the S10 family and the Note 10 family which have incredibly competent slew of cameras that range from ultrawide cameras to telephoto cameras.
The new iPhones now have updated cameras at the back. On the iPhone 11, they retained the main 12MP camera with the f1/.8 aperture, but they added a 12MP f/2.4 wide angle camera which makes them join the heard in offering wide angle cameras. The iPhone 11 Pro adds a telephoto camera with a larger f/2.0 aperture to give it the complete suite of cameras that we’ve seen with top Android phones.
Finally, the new iPhones add night mode which allows people to take better low light photos without a flash. Apple employs what they call “Deep Fusion” to do this which employs taking 9 images (4 short, 4 secondary images and one long exposure) and uses machine learning to stitch it int one photo. Deep Fusion will be released as a software update later on.
The selfie camera has now been updated to a 12MP unit which is a great step forward. They’ve added what they call slofies which are slow motion videos you can take with the selfie camera. The selfie camera can now shoot 4K videos too thanks to the increased resolution.
The other major feature is that the new iPhone 11 Pros have significantly better battery life than the XS and XS max (4-5 hours more according to Apple). This is the biggest delta change we have seen in a while.
There are other features that they have quietly added. There is now faster FaceID. They have included 18 W fast charging bricks which is was more than welcome because the 5 W chargers they had were ridiculous.
iPhone 11 starts at $699 while the iPhone 11 Pro starts at $999 for the 5.8 inch model and $1099 for the 6.5 inch model. The iPhone 11 Pro has a new “midnight green” colour which joins the usual gold, silver and space grey colours. The iPhone 11 will ship in either white, green, yellow, black, red and a new purple colour.
