In case you're living under a rock, tonight was Apple's biggest event of the year, its annual iPhone launch. Aside from that of course was a new Apple Watch, as well as a number of other services. But we're looking at whether the new phones warrant your money.
Images courtesy: Apple
The first thing you'll likely notice is the multitude of colours the new iPhones appears to be available in. Aside from the traditional black on the iPhone 11, there's a red, purple, white, yellow, and more importantly a slick new pastel green. The iPhone 11 Pro meanwhile has midnight green, space gray, silver/white, and gold.
That's already a lot more interesting than previous models, and it looks like Apple is finally giving fans the variety they've wanted. +1
There's a 6.11-inch Retina display here on the iPhone 11, which indicates it's an LCD display and not OLED. That's still an upgrade from the XR. For the iPhone 11 Pro that's a 5.8-inch display, with 6.5-inch for the iPhone 11 Pro Max Super Retina XDR (OLED). It's hard to say, but it looks like there might not actually be any noticeable bump up here, except for perhaps some few graphics intensive apps and games.
The second thing you might notice is the new camera bump. It's square this time around with two cameras alongside an LED flash on the iPhone 11, and three cameras on the iPhone 11 Pro.
The dual camera system consists of a 12MP f/1.8 wide-angle and a 12MP f/2.4 ultra wide-angle sensor (with 2x optical zoom).? The third sensor on the Pro and Pro Max is a 12MP f/2.0 telephoto lens.
There's also a new "semantic rendering" feature that relights photos based on the subject in them. "Multiscale tone mapping" meanwhile highlights features in the photo differently depending on where they are. There's also a new Night Mode to bring this on par with the Pixel's capabilities. On the video side is the ability to record 4K video at 60fps.
On the Pro duo meanwhile is a new machine learning-powered feature called "Deep Fusion". This shoots four primary and four secondary images before you even hit the shutter button and then a long exposure shot after you click. This lets the device assemble a single low-light photos for you that still retains a great amount of detail.
On the front meanwhile is a 12MP TrueDepth camera that moves to a wide-angle mode if you rotate the phone to landscape.
So there's a lot in this section for a reason. While there are some blatant gimmicks here (like the slowmo selfies Apple is cringe-inducingly trying to call slofies) there does seem to be a lot of promise for the iPhone 11 Pro's cameras, if not the 11. At the very least, the improved Night Mode and Deep Fusion mode should already make it fairly popular choice.
There's a new chip here, the A13 Bionic. We won't really know much about it until we give it a shot, except that it's obviously better than last year's A12 Bionic. Apple claims it's the fastest chip and GPU in a smartphone today, but we'll see. The Pro duo meanwhile also have machine learning to improve the chip's processing speeds and power efficiency.
It does also have better battery optimization as expected, which Apple says is about 1 hour longer than on the iPhone XR for the iPhone 11. The 11 Pro and Pro Max meanwhile supposedly have 4-5 hours more battery. And at the very least, these come with an 18W fast charger in the box rather than having you spend extra for it, which would frankly have been insulting at this point
Let's be clear, there would be a riot if this iPhone showed no processing speed improvement so let's leave that aside. But if the battery on the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max can truly give you a few hours more of run time, they might be viable buys.
One, the FaceID is supposedly an enhanced version that speeds it up. Not necessarily the most pressing requirement but it could certainly be more convenient. What's more important though is that the iPhone 11 is rated IP68 water resistant up to 2 meters. To compare, the iPhone XR was rated IP67. The glass that?
The iPhone 11 will be available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB models in purple, green, yellow, black, white and PRODUCT(RED) starting at Rs 64,900. For comparison that's Rs 12,000 more than the strata-equivalent from last year, the iPhone XR, was priced at launch. That's one leak we're really glad turned out to be correct. And this device has essentially put the iPhone XR out to pasture for good.?
The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max meanwhile are comparable to the XS and XS Max. They will be available in 64GB, 256GB and 512GB models instead, in midnight green, space gray, silver and gold. These devices will start at Rs 99,900? and Rs 1,09,900 respectively. Again, though the 11 Pro and Pro Max base models start at the same prices as last year's equivalent devices, they're actually cheaper in the 512GB bracket. Couple that with the improved battery and camera and it's a no-brainer.
With the iPhone 11, though there are some favourable points, there doesn't really seem to be enough going for it to justify upgrading from the iPhone XR or XS. However, it's very much the clear choice though if you're coming off an iPhone 8 or older if you're looking for the user experience more than the top-end features, especially with that massive price cut. Like the XR, this is probably going to be 2019's runaway hit for Apple. It'll be phone of choice for Apple first-timers and those skipping a gen, and maybe even a few upgrading from 2018 models.
If you want to break the bank, this time the iPhone 11 Pro or Pro Max might actually be worth your time, even if it's only a single generation upgrade. You're not buying an iPhone for its calling or texting after all, you're likely after the status symbol and/or the camera. And with this upgrade, the 2019 flagship might actually be able to compete with the latest Pixels and Samsungs out there, if not beat them. We can confirm that once we get our hands on the devices, but for now they certainly hold promise.
Unfortunately, though they're slightly cheaper than last year's flagships, these two are still way too close to the Rs 1 lakh milestone for Indian stomachs. So it's quite likely (if the cameras perform as well as promised) these two will be the ones you drool after, but not likely the iPhones you purchase.