Apple iPhone 11 Pro - A Ruthless Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWelcome back everyone, I'm ThioJoe, and it'sonce again time to review this year's iPhone.As you probably know, Apple created threemodels, the iPhone 11, the 11 Pro, and the11 Pro Max. The one we're gonna be lookingat today is the iPhone 11 Pro which I chosebecause I like the size of this one, I justthink the Max would be too big. But it's notlike this is going to be a comparison videoor anything, we'll just be focusing on thisphone. And as usual I'm going to be doinga ruthless review, so I'm gonna tell you everythingI love, what I hate, and everything in betweenwith no sugar coating, especially consideringthe pricetag.Before we jump in also be sure to follow meon Instagram I try to post cool stuff andhilarious jokes on there. So if you want tocheck that out it's just @ThioJoe over on Instagram.So what we'll do is start out with the basicdesign of the phone followed by the internalhardware, then onto performance with stufflike the camera and battery, then move ontothe user experience and software features,and finally I can talk about more generalthings I like and dislike about this phone.Alright so the first up the general design,the screen is a 5.8\" OLED screen Apple iscalling the \"Super Retina XDR display\", andbasically it's just a really good lookingOLED screen that's even brighter than lastyear's XS. There's still the notch for FaceID,which I will never think is not ugly, andApple didn't even shrink it so that's a bummer.On the sides you have what you'd expect, withthe volume buttons, silent mode toggle, powerbutton, and speakers on the bottom along withthe lightning jack.Things get a bit more interesting on the backwhere there's now a matte finish to the wholething, which I'm definitely a big fan of becauseit's way less likely to show fingerprints.The other big thing is obviously the triplecamera setup at the top, so there's the regularwide, ultra wide, and telephoto lenses, thenthe flash and microphone next to them. We'lltalk more about the cameras later but onething I don't like is how there's basicallya double camera bump here, so the whole moduleis elevated, and then each lens is also stickingout. I'm not a fan of camera bumps in generalbut I'd think this is even more likely toget dirt and dust stuck in the crevices. Thatbeing said, as a side note, the case I haveextends to the camera bump so it sits flushon surfaces which I really like. It's theSpigen 'liquid crystal' case, I like it becauseit's thin and clear so the phone doesn't feelany bigger. It does tend to discolor overtime though, but it's so cheap at like $10,you can just buy a new one when it does. Ifyou want to check it out I'll put that linkin the description for Amazon. That's the case I use.Besides the cameras though, and the now centeredapple logo, the overall body shape and designis pretty much the same as the last two generationsof iPhones.Talking a little bit more about the screenthough I will say it's noticeably brighter,at least when it needs to be like in brightsunlight. It supposedly has 800 nits of typicalmax brightness which compares to the XS which was rated at just 625nits. And when I tested it with my own lightmeter, the 11 Pro was reading about 970 luxvs the XS at 900 lux. That's a different unitfrom nits so it doesn't convert exactly, but itstill shows that it is indeed brighter. Asfor how the screen looks generally, iPhoneOLED screens are going to look great in anycase, so I wouldn't say I notice any differencecoming from the XS, but obviously it justlooks good. And the resolution is 2436x1125at 458ppi, so which is the same as the XS.I am really disappointed though that theydidn't add a high refresh rate screen, itDEFINITELY feels like they're holding thatback which I hate, especially consideringthey've been offering the iPad \"pro\" witha higher refresh rate for a while now, andI think it would be a feature that a lot ofpeople would immediately notice and love.So now we've seen the outside of the phone,let's talk about the internals. The CPU isApple's own A13 Bionic, so no surprise it'sjust a new and improved CPU that's fasteras you'd expect, and also apparently morebattery efficient. The battery capacity forthe 11 pro isn't listed on Apple's website,but is 3190 mAh. I'm really happy about this,because Apple has had a history of puttingtiny batteries in their phones, and even thoughiPhones are way more energy efficient, itwas still a joke. So this battery capacityis actually decent, and when combined withthe great power efficiency for the phone,it's a big plus, though we'll talk more aboutbattery life later.As for RAM there's 4GB, which in my opinionisn't really enough considering Apple literallybranded this as a \"pro\" device, and apparentlythe camera app uses a lot more memory thanpreviously. I think 6 GB would have been moreappropriate, but I'm not surprised Apple isagain just putting in the minimum amount theycan get away with here. And when it comesto storage capacity, the base model is stillonly 64GB, which for a so-called \"pro\" phoneis kind of a joke. The next step up is 256GBwhich I think is more than enough, but doescost an extra $150, and the 512 GB model costsan extra $350 above the base model. I thinkif Apple made the base model 128 GB that wouldbe perfect, but I'm not gonna even hold mybreath for next year.As for water resistance rating, I will givethem props for improving that even further.It's still IP68 technically but they wentbeyond that rating so it can now survive beingsubmerged in 4 meters of water for 30 minutes,as opposed to 2 meters of water. So theoreticallyit could survive being dropped into the deepend of most pools.Finally for specs we can go over the cameras.All of the cameras including the front facingone are 12 megapixels. The three on the backare the regular wide angle at f/1.8 aperture,the ultra wide at f/2.4, and the telephotoat f/2.0. The front facing camera is f/2.2,and is actually capable of capturing slo motionvideo at 120fps, compared to the back cameraswhich can do 240fps.Alright so let's get into what it's like usingthe phone, just in general and then we'llget into specifics like with the camera. Overall,there are really no surprises, it's a topend iPhone, so it does not lag or stutterat all. Apps open really quickly as you'dexpect, so it pretty much performs flawlesslyjust like every recent new iPhone generationdoes when it's released. FaceID does feela little bit faster at times I think, whichmakes sense, the whole phone is faster. Andwhile FaceID apparently can now capture froma wider angle, it must be very slight becauseI have not really noticed any difference inthat regard. It's not like it can unlock whenit's sitting on my desk even right in frontof me when I'm looking at it. So yea, I stillhate FaceID and want my fingerprint sensorback, but I doubt that's going to happen.Now one feature that you will probably noticedid get removed is 3D Touch, which I likedso I'm kinda bummed. But apparently it wasremoved so they could fit the bigger batteryin. So if that's the case, I guess I'll takethat tradeoff, but I do findmyself tryingto force touch things and then rememberingit doesn't work anymore. So they replacedforce-touch with just holding things downnow.Alright so now let's get to possibly my favoritepart of this phone, which is the camera, orrather cameras. I actually love the threecamera setup. I used the telephoto cameraon my XS, and I honestly didn't think I'dreally need the ultra wide angle lens, butnow that I have the phone, I've found myselfusing it pretty often. And obviously the telephotolens comes in handy too, so having all threeis awesome for me.And obviously you can expect them being iPhonecameras, they're going to look good. And Ihad the perfect opportunity to test out thecamera because Waymo, Google's self drivingcar company actually invited me and a bunchof other people to their facility and checkit out. They flew everyone down and gave usa tour, and let us even ride in the cars,so here are some photos from that. And bythe way I will be making a separate videoabout that probably next week so be sure tosubscribe to see that. Anyway these aren'teven the best lighting conditions basicallybeing in a big warehouse mostly, and theystill look good, there's a combination ofmostly wide and ultra wide shots here.All that being said, the regular wide anglelens is clearly the highest quality of thethree in most situations, probably becauseit has the widest aperture so it can let inmore light, so there's less noise. The ultra-wideis noticeably softer, and has nearly a fullstop slower aperture, so while it's not bad,if you have the ability to shoot with theregular focal length, that's the one to gowith. If the situation is really bright though,I would think they'd all look really good.One big feature with the camera app though,is there's actually a feature in the settingscalled \"Photos capture outside the frame\",where if you take a standard picture with the regular lens, it willactually save the ultrawide image too, or at least some data of it. So if yougo into photos and edit it after the fact,you can basically uncrop the image. So thisis great if you realize later that there'ssomething cut off the edge of the frame, youcan salvage the picture. And interesting,when I tested this out, when you 'uncrop'the image, it seems to retain the same detailfrom the regular lens, so it does NOT appearto be just capturing a regular and separatewide shot, then switching to the wide shotif you uncrop it. I think it's intelligentlystitching the ultra wide lens image data ontothe edges of high quality regular image, whichis impressive.The camera app for the Pro is also redesigned,so when you zoom you can drag your fingerwhich brings up this dial. I like this becauseyou can see the exact zoom amount, and alsosee exactly when it's going to switch betweenlenses. And you can kind of notice it when you go from one level to the next. Also there's this swipe gesture tobring up some capture settings, like flashsetting, timer, aspect ratio, and filters.And then when you swipe down again you cancycle through the camera modes like photo,video, portrait, panorama, etc.But next, we have to talk about night mode.I think the camera's night mode is actuallymy favorite feature on the whole phone. Basicallywhen the scene is dark enough, the night modeoption will appear which you can toggle onwith a little button, and if it's really dark,night mode will automatically be enabled.When it's enabled, there's a little dial nextto the shutter which determines how long itwill capture the image for, kind of like along exposure, but much more advanced. Itwill have an automatic suggestion for howlong it will go based on how dark it is, butyou can adjust it to be a bit longer if youwant, but the maximum you can set it to isalso determined by how dark the scene is,and I think it can also tell if it's on atripod. So usually if it's handheld I thinkthe longest you can go is 10 seconds, butif the phone is still, the longest I thinkit goes is up to 30 seconds.Anyway, the images the night mode can produceare actually amazing, they look awesome. Here'san example from the top of a hotel withoutnight mode, and this is the ultra-wide lenswhich does not support night mode unfortunately.And then this is with the night mode on theregular wide lens. It's really night and day.Notice how it maintains the brightest partwhich is the pool, but also does an awesomejob lightening up the surrounding areas withthe chairs, which were completely blackedout in the other one.I also did a couple extreme dark room testswhere I basically went into a bathroom andclosed the door so it was super dark and testedit out. So this is what it looks like justtaking a regular photo, obviously it's superdark, you can really only see my outline.Then even dragging up the brightness it'sstill completely muddy with no details whatsoever.But even with a tiny amount of light justfrom the cracks in the doors, this is whatit was able to do with night mode at 3 secondsexposure. It literally makes the room lookbright. Now I know just looking at this pictureby itself it looks crappy, but compared towhat it would have looked like, holy crapit's literally like night and day. And that'san extreme test, so you can see why in a anormal, reasonably dark environment, it cancapture crazy detail.Up until now I would have definitely saidthat Google's pixel cameras were by far thebest, specifically because of how well theyperformed in low light. But I actually thinkwith the iPhone 11 Pro, the night mode hereis just as good as the Pixel's Night Sightmode, and in some situations even better basedon some people have made comparing the two.Now as for video, it's also great. The dynamicrange in particular is surprisingly good.Here's another great example, when I was insideone of the waymo self driving cars, wherenot only can you actually see everything insidethe car, but also outside for the most part,specifically out the side windows, even though itwas an extremely sunny day. And this was withthe wide angle lens too, so that came in realhandy, I was able to actually capture thewhole inside of the car because of that.So yea the camera overall is awesome as usual,but is even more so when you consider thethree lenses and that night mode.Next up when it comes to performance, we can'tforget about battery life. And I'm happy tosay it's actually great this year. Not onlyis the battery physically larger by a significantamount compared to last year, but apparentlythe A13 has some specially power efficientcores on top of that. Coming from the XS it'sreally a huge difference. I'm a pretty heavyuser, I like to watch YouTube videos all thetime on my phone, and before I'd have to rechargemy phone once a day around the afternoon,but now I can usually get through the wholeday without charging it at all, even usingit on medium screen brightness. For exampleI've gotten nearly 6 hours of screen on timehaving only used around 50% of the battery,which is crazy. So finally, I think I cansay the battery life on this iPhone is good or even great.Not totally amazing or anything, but muchbetter than it used to be for iPhones. Superhappy about that.So finally, let's get into some other miscellaneousfeatures and thoughts I haven't talked aboutyet. One nice thing is Apple FINALLY includeda fast charger in the box with the 11 Proand Pro Max. I don't even think most averagepeople didn't even know iPhones since the8 have supported fast charging. I mean it'sstill a joke they only include the crappysmall one with regular iPhone 11's but atleast they're shipping them with the Pros.There are also a couple features that areapparently coming soon to the iPhone 11 Prothat are worth mentioning. The first has todo with the camera and it's called \"deep fusion\",and will basically allow the camera to capturelots of images in the background up untilthe point you press the shutter, and thencombine them into one.And this will just make the images look a lot sharper potentially.This feature is availablein beta versions of iOS only so far, but reportshave shown that it really does look prettygood, so I'm excited about that.Another hardware feature in the phone thatapparently hasn't been activated yet is theU1 chip, which is like an ultra-wide bandradio. This will give the iPhone 'spacialawareness' so to speak, meaning it will beable to locate other devices with similarchips much more accurately. For example, ifyou go to airdrop to someone elses' iPhone11 Pro, the phone will know when you're pointingat them, and prioritize their phone to airdropto. It's would also probably work with therumored upcoming device locator product fromApple, kind of like Tile, where instead ofjust telling you how far away your lost itemis, it can tell direction. So it will be reallyexciting when this feature actually comesto be.So now with everything we talked about, wehave the big question, is this phone worthupgrading to. The answer, as you'd expect,is not so easy. In my opinion, there's notreally any one single KILLER feature thatis unique to this phone. I mean yea we dohave the camera's night mode which is awesome,the battery life is greatly improved, andhaving the three cameras is really nice. ButI'd just consider these all great improvementsto existing features, nothing totally new.The only exception might be that night modebut it's subjective. I'd say if you're comingfrom an iPhone XS or even X, and you don'thave enough money to upgrade every year, youmight want to hold off until next year, whenwe'll likely get a bigger redesign. But ifyou're coming from an older generation likean iPhone 7 or earlier, even that will dependon whether you'd rather wait until a muchbigger upgrade next year. From an older generation,the cumulative incremental upgrades wouldbe a huge jump for you, so if you feel likeyou really need an upgrade I do think you'dbe happy with this phone.Now as a side note, one thing to keep in mindis because batteries degrade over time, youmight be considering upgrading your old iPhonejust because the battery life sucks. But rememberyou can go to the Apple store and pay to havea brand new battery swapped out in a matterof hours. You should check your battery'shealth in the settings to see where it's at.If it's below like 80% or so, it would probablybe worth it to pay the $50 to get a new battery.But I digress.As for me, even coming from an iPhone XS,I am actually very surprised that I do feellike it was a worthwhile upgrade now thatI have it. Originally after watching Apple'sannouncement keynote, I was really disappointedthat there were apparently no new major features.You might have even seen my video where Isaid it sucked, but I bought it anyway becauseI felt obligated to review it, and honestlydidn't think it would be worth it. But now,I actually think Apple SOMEHOW managed toundersell and overdeliver in this case. Afterusing it for the past couple weeks, especiallywith the cameras and night mode, and improvedbattery, I've found myself liking it a lot.So in my case at least, even coming from theXS, I'm happy with the purchase.So basically what I'd say is if you're someonewho usually upgrades every year, you'll probablybe really happy with the iPhone 11 Pro. Andif you have a pretty old phone that just isn'tcutting it anymore, I also think you'll bereally happy after upgrading. At the sametime, if you have a phone that you're finewith, and you're on the fence about whetheryou should upgrade or wait till next year,in that case you should probably just wait.Again all these features are incremental,even though they're pretty big increments.So you won't be missing out on anything gamechanging. And if there is a feature you justknow you have to have, well you can probablyjust decide that for yourself anyway.And that's what I have to say about that.Now remember there are a lot of other newfeatures in the recently released iOS 13 thatyou might not know about, but should haveeven on older iPhones. I made a video talkingabout that which I recommend that you cansee by clicking here next. So thanks so muchfor watching guys, and I'll see you in thenext one.\n"