iPhone 11 Pro: 1 Year Later By Jerry Schulze

- We're just about a week away from the introduction of the iPhone 12, and we'll probably see faster iPhones, and better cameras, and 5G. I've had this iPhone 11 Pro for just over a year now, and I thought it'd be a good time to look back. How has it held up over the last year? And is it worth considering in 2020? Let's find out. Hey I'm Jerry, and the iPhone 11 Pro came out a year ago with the same overall design of the iPhone 10 from three years ago. It's essentially a stainless steel frame sandwiched between two pieces of glass with a notch on the front, and of course a giant camera bump on the back. Let's just get the notch out of the way.

When the iPhone 10 was released three years ago, people complained before they even had the phone that the notch was ugly, and it was terrible, and it just looked disgusting, and it had the ears. But once the reviewers actually got the devices, many of them said that the notch just kind of fades away. And that's really been my experience with the notch over the last few years, you don't notice it anymore. The functionality of the face ID is huge compared to the slight inconvenience or slight aesthetically unpleasing notch. The only issue that I have with it of course is our current pandemic epidemic situation, and wearing masks, and trying to go somewhere, and use face ID to unlock your phone if you're wearing a mask.

However, I'm at home most of the time so it's not really an issue for me. So bottom line, I like face ID, I don't care so much about the notch, which is good because rumors point to the iPhone 12 having a notch as well. So below the notch, there's a big, beautiful display, 5.8 inches that Apple calls the retina display XDR. And what that means I have no idea, but Apple says it gets up to 1200 nits when watching HDR content. Which doesn't mean a whole lot to most people, except that when you go outside and use the phone outside, you'll actually be able to see the screen.

So along with the brightness, we get true-tone, we get a 2 million to one contrast ratio. All of these things really converge to just an enjoyable display to use. Apples had the best displays for a long time. Even when they were all LCD, they still had better brightness and color accuracy compared to most phones on the market. And now with OLED they're continuing their tradition of just improving year over year the quality of their displays.

On the backside of the iPhone 11 Pro we have a frosted back glass, and a non frosted camera bump. This contrast is really nice. It makes the camera stick out, and actually has this almost concave feel to it. I think that's the right word, concave. Where it looks like the camera bump is indented instead of coming out of it.

Over the last year I've had this thing in and out of cases, sometimes I use it with, sometimes I use it without. I like the Apple Silicon case, or I liked the Apple silicon cases until a couple of them fell apart on me. But I also like the Spigen Air Armor and some other cases. And over that year, there's essentially no scratches on the sides or on the back glass of this iPhone 11. Before this phone, I had the iPhone 10s in silver, and that thing was a magnet for micro-abrasions.

The entire steel frame around the side was just scratched and scuffed to heck. And I'm really glad that I went with the midnight green color for this iPhone 11 Pro, because it's done a much better job at masking or hiding the scratches. There's really none to be seen. There are a few, but they're few and far between, and it has to be the right light, the right angle, and the right spot to actually see them. A lot of people made fun of the cameras on the back of the iPhone 11 Pro when it came out, making comparisons to like cooktop burners or aliens.

However, just like with the notch, once you start using it, all of that stuff just kind of fades away, and the aesthetic oddities just don't matter. But what does matter more than I thought it would was the wide angle camera. I liked having the telephoto lens on the iPhone 10 and 10s, and I use those quite a bit, even though the quality was never quite as good. When the ultra wide was announced for the 11 Pro, I was not very excited about it until I started using it. I found that there was a number of occasions where you actually had a tight area to shoot a picture in, and using the regular wide angle lens, it was too narrow of a shot, and the ultra wide angle made a huge difference in being able to make sure you captured exactly what you were looking for.

It really gives you a completely different perspective to be able to stand in one place, and take three pictures at different focal lengths, and that allows you to choose and share the photo that best fit the feeling of that situation. Then there's night mode, which like the pixel before it can get you some pretty amazing shots with very little light. I'm sure you've seen how it works. When the ambient light is low enough, the iPhone will enable the night mode, and take a bunch of shots and compile them into something that is hard to believe would be usable. One other thing I wanna mention about the cameras is the video quality.

It's still unmatched in basic clarity and stabilization. You can do 4k 60 or 1080p at 120 frames per second for slow motion. The cameras are so good that I sold my Canon M50 earlier this year and was using just this iPhone, and eventually this iPhone 11 somewhere for all of my videos here on YouTube. And speaking of video, audio is an important part of this phone as well, because the speakers on it are really good. I use this phone frequently for watching video while getting ready in the morning, whether that's news, or YouTube, or listening to podcasts.

And I even use it in the shower. Yeah, I know crazy. But because these things are waterproof, I can set this on the shelf on the top of my shower, and not worry about it getting splashed or the humidity or anything like that, and I can take my time getting ready, listen to the news, watch the news, whatever I need to do, and I'm good to go. And I can hear it because the speakers are good. All right.

That might've been a little weird, but let's talk about performance. The iPhone 11 came with Apple's A13 bionic processor. And just to cut to the chase, they're fast. Each year reviewers talk about how much performance the iPhone gains year over year, over year, over year, and how nothing really takes advantage of all that power. And that's true.

I don't need all this power to browse the web, or go through email, and that's gonna be true for the upcoming A14 bionic processors as well. The biggest benefit to all the power built into this iPhone 11 Pro, and probably back to the iPhone 7, is that performance is there for a few years down the road when you're actually going to need it. Who knows what kind of apps or new features will be available in a couple of years that will actually require that performance overhead that we have now. So the short answer to the question you're asking is yes. It will play fill in the blank game, and yes, it will run fill in the blank app just fine.

So even after a year the performance on the iPhone 11 Pro is outstanding. It hasn't slowed down one bit, and you don't need to worry about it slowing down over the next couple of years. The last thing I need to mention is battery life. Apple promised that the iPhone 11 Pro would get four more hours of battery life than the iPhone 10s. Now, that depends on a whole lot of things, but overall I did see a huge improvement when moving from the iPhone 10s to this 11 Pro.

Over the last few months I've used my phone more at home than I ever have, averaging over six and a half hours of screen time. Holy crap. And no wonder why my posture and tennis elbow is the way it is. So it's no wonder that I've noticed I've had to charge my battery more in the last few months than I had before. And that's due to watching AT&T TV NOW for watching news or checking YouTube stats constantly, and doom scrolling on Twitter more than I ever have.

The battery health on my phone is showing 94%, whereas my 10s showed 100% after its first year. This is probably due to heavier usage and more charging, but it's still something I wanted to point out. Generally, pre-pandemic I had zero issues getting through a day and a half a battery if I needed. So, with just a week before the iPhone 12 introduction, there will be that desire for the newest, coolest iPhone. It will be faster.

It will have better cameras. It will have slightly redesigned form factor, probably with flat edges. But, what will it really offer over the iPhone 11 Pro? It'll play all the same games. It'll run all the same apps. It'll have the same iOS 14 for better or for worse.

It'll probably have 5G for the 17 people that have access to it. It's possible the iPhone 12 will have something we don't even expect. Like how the iPhone 11 came with the U1 chip that to this day is still pretty much useless. All I'm saying is that after a full year, the iPhone 11 is still pretty great. The design, cameras, performance, and other features make this a winning combination, and no sane, rational person should go out and spend another $1000 next week when you have a device, or if you have a device that's 95% of what the iPhone 12 will be.

On a separate note, if you are like me, and you struggle with wanting to use your device caseless as the creators intended, but you can't get over that anxiety of potentially damaging it if you drop it, you should check out this video over here about going caseless. It's a real struggle. Hit the thumbs up if you liked it. Hit subscribe if you want, and I'll see you next time. (bouncy music).

Source : Jerry Schulze