Apple's iPhone 11 is here. Onstage at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino today, Tim Cook and company debuted the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, a smartphone lineup that comes with major camera improvements, new displays, and a host of feature and performance improvements under the hood.
The iPhone 11 starts at $699, the iPhone 11 Pro at $999, and the 11 Pro Max at $1,099. Pre-orders open this Friday, Sept. 13 at 5 a.m. PT, and the phones will begin shipping on Sept. 20. Here's a breakdown of all the new specs, features, and added capabilities in this year's crop of iPhones.
iPhone 11
The $699 iPhone 11 is the entry-level replacement for the iPhone XR. The glass and aluminum phone has a 6.1-inch LCD haptic touch display and comes in six colors: purple, white, yellow, green, black, and red. The phone also comes with what Apple calls spatial audio, which supports Dolby Atmos and uses an Apple-designed virtualizer to create an "immersive sound field."
On the hardware side, the iPhone 11 has a faster CPU and GPU powered by the new A13 Bionic chip, Wi-Fi 6 support, and an hour longer battery life and better water and dust resistance than the iPhone XR. Apple also says Face ID is faster.
But the most significant improvements across the iPhone 11 line are in the camera. The iPhone 11 maintains a two-camera setup with faster auto-focus, and the camera can switch from wide to a new ultra-wide mode with a 2x optical zoom. The redesigned camera interface gives users a translucent view of what's outside the frame, with the ability to tap into an ultra wide view to get a bigger shot. The ultra-wide camera also allows for edge-to-edge landscape shots, and the ability to virtually "back up" when taking photos in tight spaces.
The front camera is improved as well, with a wider megapixel sensor and the ability to rotate to landscape mode to take selfies. The iPhone 11's front camera takes 4K video as well, with extended dynamic range up to 30fps and a new slo-mo mode, which Apple wants people to use to take "slofies."
There's also a new black-and-white Portrait lighting effect called High-Key Mono, a new feature called QuickTake to quickly capture video by tapping and holding the shutter button in photo mode, and improved HDR tone mapping that treats highlights differently in different parts of the image.
However, the biggest iPhone 11 camera improvements are in Night Mode, which now turns on automatically when it's dark enough to brighten photos and reduce noise.
iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max
Retailing for $999 and $1,099, respectively, the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max come with three rear-facing cameras apiece, significantly longer battery lives, and a few new bells and whistles. Replacing the iPhone XS and XS Max, the 11 Pro and Pro Max have 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch OLED screens with a new matte texture finished glass.
The phones come in gold, silver, space gray, or a new "midnight green" color. The OLED screens are 15 percent more energy efficient than their predecessors and have what Apple calls "super Retina XDR displays" with a 2 million-to-one contrast ratio and 1,200nit peak brightness.
The Pro phones are also powered by the new A13 Bionic chip, which has 8.5 billion transistors and is capable of over 1 trillion CPU operations per second. On the processing front, the 11 Pro and Pro Max support better natural language processing and character animation in augmented reality apps.
The new "low-power design" only lights up the sections of the chip that need to function at any given time, which is why Apple says the iPhone 11 Pro has 4 hours more battery life than the XS, and the 11 Pro Max gets 5 hours more than the XS Max. The phones also come with a fast-charging 18W adapter.
In addition to all the camera improvements mentioned for the iPhone 11, the 11 Pro and Pro Max sport a triple camera setup: the normal camera, the 12MP ultrawide lens, and the 12MP telephoto lens.
In addition to vastly improved low-light photo and video capture in Night Mode, the Pro models will feature a new capability called Deep Fusion coming this fall. Deep Fusion uses machine learning to take photos in low or medium light, and shoots nine images before you press the shutter button then knits them together using the iPhone's neural engine.
It's what Apple SVP Phil Schiller called "computational photography mad science."