Fall is almost here and with it comes new Apple iPhones. Smartphones are announced throughout the year, but not many create the buzz of Apple’s annual September Event. While we believe that the iPhones were the darlings of the day, Apple also announced a new iPad and the Apple Watch Series 5, as well as Apple Arcade and Apple TV+ services.
Since Apple first introduced the iPhone in 2007, the company’s fall announcements are always much anticipated. This year was no exception with the unveiling of the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max.
[Flashback warning] Apple turned it up to 11! The rest of this blog will hopefully shed some light on the new iPhones and the satirical significance of 11.
iPhone 11
The iPhone 11 comes with a 6.1-inch Liquid Retina LCD display and features two 12-megapixel (MP) cameras, one with a 26mm wide angle lens the other with an ultra-wide angle 13mm lens. The front-facing camera, used for selfies and video chatting, got an upgrade to 12 MP and, for the first time features slow-motion video support. The product pitch suggested people will start taking “slofies,” which might be a cool thing for TikTok videos, but is not likely a feature that will be used every day. All-day battery life was mentioned as an improvement of the iPhone 11, but noted it would last 18 hours. This raises the question – isn’t all-day 24 hours long?
iPhone 11 will ship with iOS 13, Apple’s latest operating system, and comes in purple, green, yellow, black, white and PRODUCT(RED) starting at a US list price of $699 (64GB). Pre-orders for iPhone 11 will begin September 13 with availability planned for September 20.
iPhone 11 Pro
The iPhone 11 Pro (5.8-inch display) and Pro Max (6.5-inch display) feature a new triple-camera system that comes housed in a stainless steel and glass constructed handset. Each of the cameras features a different focal length and aperture – the wide-angle lens is 26mm f/1.8, the telephoto is 62mm and f/2.0, and the ultra-wide lens is 13mm f/2.4. There is a new Night Mode which combines the power of all three cameras to gather enough light to greatly improve dark photo subjects. Video is not to be forgotten, another impressive improvement with this new camera system is the ability to capture 4K video at 60 frames per second (fps) with the front facing camera.
The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max will be available in 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB models in midnight green, space gray, silver, and gold starting at $999 and $1,099, respectively.
All three iPhone models feature a new A13 bionic chip built that boasts a faster neural engine for real-time photo and video analysis, as well as new machine learning accelerators allowing the CPU to deliver more than 1 trillion operations per second.
Apple also introduced a nifty camera feature called QuickTake. This feature, exclusive to the iPhone 11 series, allows a user to take a short video clip by clicking and holding the shutter button, without leaving the photo mode.
So what’s the ‘Turn it up to 11’ reference all about? Well I might be dating myself for sure here, but all I could think of during the press conference was a funny scene from the 1984 cult-classic movie This is Spinal Tap, a comedy about a fictional rock band from England. During an interview, band member Nigel Tufnel proudly points to one of the band’s amplifiers and boasts that all the numbers go up to 11. Interviewer: “Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?” Nigel: “Exactly.” Interviewer: “Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?” Nigel: “Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten.”
Although many hoped for something exciting and game-changing from the iPhone 11 series, I was left with the feeling that while the phones were new and featured some impressive computational photography advances most of the announcements fell flat. The feeling of “Well it’s one higher, isn’t it? It’s not ten.” was my parting thought. An informal poll of some of my iPhone friends, not at all scientific, showed that only one out of ten was considering the jump to iPhone 11. Most thought it sounded interesting, but not worth the investment to upgrade; they are just happy to stay with their older handsets. It just doesn’t seem to be enough to get people to move up, although interesting to note a few mentioned they might step up to the 10, since this new phone didn’t seem “that much better.”
Looking forward to see if other smartphone vendors to heat up the Fall market in preparation for the upcoming holiday season.
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