APPLE IPHONE 11 REVIEW

This is one of the simplest reviews I’ve ever had to write: the iPhone 11 is the phone most people who are upgrading to a new iPhone this year should get. It’s an excellent phone, with one of the best cameras I’ve ever seen on a smartphone and terrific battery life. Apple’s also dropped the price by 50 bucks: the iPhone XR started at $749, but the iPhone 11 starts at $699.

None of this means the iPhone 11 is a perfect phone or that it has all of the best specs and features you can get. It doesn’t. But it’s great where it counts, and it’s totally fine everywhere else. If you want to live on the bleeding edge of tech, you can spend $300 more and get an iPhone 11 Pro, which I also reviewed this week, or look at one of the many high-end Android options available. But most people don’t need to overthink it: just get an iPhone 11. You’ll be happy.

The iPhone 11 is basically an S update to last year’s very popular iPhone XR. From the front, it looks exactly the same. It has the same design, the same 6.1-inch 720p LCD with fancy rounded corners, the same giant bezels, and the same aluminum body.

But that design has been made slightly better: the water resistance is a little better, and Apple says the glass on front and back is a little stronger. The camera bump on the back is now milled right into the glass, which is kind of neat, but it’s still a camera bump. The whole design remains a little surfboard-y, and it’s definitely not small. If you’re looking to upgrade from an iPhone SE, this thing is going to feel huge.

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If you’ve been holding off upgrades and aren’t familiar with the iPhone XR, here’s a quick catch-up: the iPhone XR was the lower-cost model in Apple’s 2018 line of iPhones, swapping in an LCD screen for the OLED in the iPhone XS. It also had one fewer camera, but, critically, Apple didn’t skimp anywhere else — plus the battery life was stellar. Despite not having the best specs, it was the best iPhone for most people, and it quickly became Apple’s best-selling model. That’s probably why this year’s XR upgrade is just called the “iPhone 11.”

The only major differences between the iPhone XR and the iPhone 11 are the cameras, the slightly better battery life, and the processor. There’s a bunch of other little things we’ll get to, but that’s what you really need to know. Let’s start with the battery.

It’s clever, but there’s no way for reviewers to repeat and verify that test. But in our tests, the iPhone 11 easily lasted a full day at a time and then some. It’s possible you could manage to kill this battery in less than a day, but you’d have to really try. The battery life is great, just like the iPhone XR’s battery life was great.

HE IPHONE 11 EASILY LASTED A DAY AND THEN SOME

Last year, the iPhone XR regularly beat out the XS models in battery life, but this year, that gap has closed a bit with the iPhone 11 Pro models. The iPhone 11 is still on par or better, but it didn’t get as big of a jump in battery life as the Pro models did.

What’s less great is the fact that Apple is still putting its ancient 5W charger in the box, even though the iPhone 11 Pro has an 18W USB-C fast charger. If Apple isn’t going to update the entire line to a fast charger, it should just do the environment a favor and stop putting the 5W charger in the box entirely; there are literally billions of them in the world, and odds are, you have more than one in a drawer already. I’d have rather seen a 3.5mm to Lightning headphone adapter in the box instead.