Physical Form and Display
The iPhone 11 is a sleek, slightly slippery, glass-backed phone that comes in six compelling colors: black, green, purple, red, white, and yellow. The new dual-camera bump on the back is a rounded square near the top left edge, with slightly sharp-feeling edges. The phone is gorgeous, but the glass back looks eminently breakable; I prefer the matte back on the Pro phones. All three models are waterproof.
At 5.94 by 2.98 by 0.33 inches (HWD) and 6.84 ounces, the iPhone 11 is the exact same size and weight as the iPhone XR, and noticeably wider than the iPhone 8 or iPhone 11 Pro. That makes a difference, at least in my hand. It's difficult to find narrow, one-handed phones these days, but if that width is a killer for you, it's time for the $300 Pro upcharge.
The 11 uses a new version of the XR's 6.1-inch LCD, at the same 326ppi pixel density. Does that screen density matter? It does if you look at a lot of small text. And perhaps in a subtle push toward the more expensive phones, Apple puts some very small text on its home screens nowadays. The iPhone 11's 326ppi is certainly readable, but the Pro's higher-density 458ppi display is a little more restful if you're staring at it a lot.
The display is noticeably brighter than the iPhone XR's. We tested it with a Klein K-80 colorimeter and Portrait Displays' CalMAN and MobileForge software, and found that the 11 has very strong color performance. It's noticeably more color-accurate than the XR, which tends to be undersaturated in our tests.
There's no headphone jack or a standard USB-C port. Apple remains passionately committed to its Lightning accessory revenues.
Processor and Performance
All three of the new iPhones have Apple's A13 processor, which at the moment is the fastest mobile chip available. It's 40 percent faster on the Geekbench multicore benchmark than the iPhone XR, 17 percent faster on web performance, and 50 percent faster in terms of GPU. On Geekbench, it's 30 percent faster than the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ on multi-core performance and 20 percent faster on web performance. This is in part because Apple's and Qualcomm's chip releases are spaced six months apart; Qualcomm will probably catch up early next year. On graphics benchmarks, the iPhone 11 even performs better than its more-expensive siblings because it has fewer pixels on the screen.
The A13 enables Night mode in the camera, which is a very big deal. But in other apps, it seems like the hardware has outstripped the software for a moment. I can't think of any apps that run poorly or slowly on A12-based devices, and Apple has made a point of keeping things running well even back to the A10 (which is in the brand-new iPad).
iOS 13 has been a moving target, because it's pretty buggy—Apple has already revved it twice since I started researching this review. In my experiences with the three new iPhones, they've frequently crashed and quit applications, but I'm not going to hold that against the hardware. iOS 13.1.1 fixed data signal loss, battery drain, and stability issues; 13.1.2 has even more bug fixes. That's part of the pluses, not the minuses, of having an iPhone—when you have an Android phone, you get used to months, not days, between bug fixes and new feature additions.