iPhone 11 Pro review: One week later

And, if we're going pro and introducing some segmentation into the iPhone line, maybe really go for it and offer an iPhone Edition in ceramic. Apple's materials team is just killing it on the watch and it'd be amazing to see what they could do with a small part of the phone line as well.

As to the camera bump, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm actually starting to not mind it. Maybe even like it in a strange way? Much more than the regular iPhone 11 bump, at least.

There's just something about the slightly wider super ellipse and the three lenses that make it look less like the surprise face emoji of my nightmares and more like an actual old fashioned multi-camera system. Maybe a little military. Maybe a little alien even. But, still, something that does real work in the real world. And, yeah, makes it look just a little more Pro.

Water resistance has improved on the Pro models as well. The XS was already IP68 and rated for up to 30 minutes at up to 2 meters. The Pros will go all the way down to 4 meters, though.

Pro storms, pro spills, all of that is fine. But, again, I'd still strongly caution against repeated intentional submersions, especially in salt or chlorine.

Relax, have fun, don't make phone soup.

Same with the design in general. Like I said in my iPhone 11 review, it's a super car, a high end watch, a classic camera. Iconic. So much so that, when next the iPhone design changes, I bet it'll still stays very much the same.

iPhone 11 Pro Review: Display

Apple went OLED with the iPhone X Super Retina Display. Now, with the iPhone 11 Pro, Apple's taking it to the extreme.

Apple's display team has always done a terrific job with OLED. They spec exactly what they want, down to the materials, get it manufactured on Samsung's industry leading process, and then tweak and mitigate the hell out of it, to both match Apple's other display technologies on other devices, and to mitigate everything from off-axis color shift to burn-in. Which, two years later, you still don't see any significant reports on. In an ocean of other phones with permanent spectral Poke-Balls burned into the bottom of their displays, that's more than impressive.

Still, Apple has found a way to make it even better. Now, the process itself gets better year after year, of course, but Apple's also been doing a ton of research on pro displays for the last couple of years, including and especially the Pro Display XDR — Extreme Dynamic Range — they announced alongside the new Mac Pro back in June.

So, now, Apple is making the Super Retina Display XDR as well.

To earn the name, Apple is focusing on a few different things. First is contrast. That's now 2 million to 1. Second is brightness. That can peak now at 1200 nits and sustain in sunlight at 800 nits.

As a result, HDR10 and Dolby Vision HDR movies, and DCI-P3 wide gamut photos look better than ever. Blacks are still absolute black, but colors and whites are brighter than ever, really stretching out the range in between.

And they're doing all that with much better power efficiency as well. 15% better, to drop Apple's number on it.

One of the things Apple isn't doing, though, is 120Hz adaptive ProMotion. That's the technology that lets the iPad Pro ramp up to 120Hz for fast, dynamic content, but ramp back down to preserve power when the content is mostly static.

Other phones are starting to come out with 90Hz and 120Hz displays so while sticking to 60Hz isn't terrible this year, it's something Apple should think about addressing next.

Now, I love, love, love HDR. I have an LG OLED TV at home. I seek out Dolby Vision theaters. If you offer me a choice between higher resolution and higher dynamic range, I will pick HDR every day and twice on Marvel movie launch days.

I just love it. It makes everything look richer and realer than real. And that's a big part of why I love OLED on the iPhone Pro as well.

iPhone 11 Pro Review: Haptic Touch

The other thing I loved was 3D Touch. But that's gone now. Apple created it… and now they've killed it. Dead.

To make up for it, though, Apple has gone all in with the Haptic Touch they debuted on last year's iPhone XR.

On one hand, it provides a lot cleaner, a lot more consistent user experience. Touch controls can easily become overloaded and 3D Touch would cause a lot of collisions for a lot people. Just ask anyone frustrated with trying to get an icon or especially a folder into jiggly mode.

Apple also never managed to scale 3D Touch to iPads, so you'd have a different experience on the small screen compared to the big one, which made it harder to build optimal interface habits.

Now, with iOS 13, the long press has won. Everything just works the same across all devices, but with Haptic Touch you still get that familiar force feedback on the iPhone. Just without all the speed and tactility of the deep press.

And that's the drawback. A long press feels like it takes longer than a deep press, which makes the system feel ever-so-slightly slower. Also, while Haptic Touch is in more places now, it's still not quite everywhere 3D Touch was.

It supports Home screen shortcuts, which is huge for me. Just press on an app and you get all the options — plus a new one right at the top to go into jiggly mode and rearrange apps. Which, on its own, will fix so many collisions and is so great to see.

You've also got peak-style previews now in Mail, Safari, Notes, Photos, Maps, News, Phone, Music, and pretty much everywhere else you'd expect.

About the only things I'm still missing are the ones haptic touch would probably have an impossible time reproducing — the ones that require actual pressure manipulation to work.

That includes the previous keyboard functionality where you could deep press to toggle between cursor movement and selection. The two finger alternative just isn't as elegant or as exacting.

And, of course, drawing apps, where 3D Touch provided pressure data that could be used for line thickness or opacity. There's no alternative for that, sadly.

At least not until Apple brings the Pencil to the iPhone Pro the way they did to the iPad Pro.

I know that sounds ridiculous to some people but it's why the Galaxy Note has always been the only Samsung phone to really tempt me.

I would hard settle on the 6.5-inch Max in a heartbeat to use it with the Apple Pencil. More than even the iPad mini, it would be the digital field notes and sketch pad of my dreams.

Hey, as long as Apple is making the iPhone a Pro, they might as well make it every bit as pro as the iPad.

For everything else, though, haptic touch is winning me over.

iPhone 11 Pro Review: Cameras

There's a new ultra wide camera in town and the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max have it. But, really, all the cameras here are new in one way or another.

The main, wide-angle camera is still an effective 26mm, 6-element wide angle f/1.8 but it's got way better light sensitivity now and also 100% Focus Pixels, which is Apple's name for phase detection auto focus. It just means that instead of some fraction of the pixels in the camera sensor being used to determine focus, every one of them is being used in order to make it three times faster in low-light, which is something we'll talk more about in a minute.

The updated telephoto camera is still an effective 52mm, and 6-element, but has gone from f/2.4 to a larger f/2.0, letting it capture 40% more light.

The new ultra wide angle camera is an effective 13mm, 5-element, f/2.4, and 120º field of view.

And, as you'd expect, because iPhone, they all work together as part of a unified, fused camera system.

The interface is the same as the standard iPhone 11 but in addition to the wide angle camera hinting at what lurks off to the sides in ultra wide angle mode, wide angle does the same in telephoto mode.

Instead of being able to tap between 1x wide angle and 2x telephoto optical zoom like on every Plus sized iPhone ever and the X and XS, or between 1x wide angle and 0.5x ultra wide angle like on the iPhone 11, you can tap between all three on the iPhone 11 Pro. Effectively giving you up to 4x optical zoom.

And again, Apple is fusing the camera output in the preview, not faking it, so what it hints at is accurate as to what you'll get. I love that.

Effectively, it means you have a much broader range from a single vantage point, from close up to wide to long, all without having to sneaker zoom in or out, taking time and potentially altering the angle or losing the light or composition.

You can still digitally zoom up to 10x and it looks… somewhere between terrible and non-terrible, but other cameras are going higher optically now, and even using ludicrously cool periscope lenses and machine learning to make functional if hella creepy 50x zoom.

Apple's absolutely nailing the cameras and zooms it has, but they're not pushing it yet when it comes to the extreme telephoto. Or, for that matter, macro. Now that I finally have ultra wide angle, I have to start pining for something else, don't I?

Last year, I lamented that I wanted both the iPhone XS's telephoto and the iPhone XR's wide angle portrait modes both on the same camera. Even if the latter had to remain limited to Focus Pixels and segmentation masks.

Well, this year we're getting almost exactly that. Almost because, thanks to the third camera, wide angle portrait mode isn't limited at all. Just like the wide angle provides real depth data to the telephoto portrait mode, now the ultra wide angle provides real depth data to the wide angle portrait mode.

Auto-adjustments works similarly. Once you turn on Photos Capture Outside the Frame in Settings, you can shoot with telephoto and extra field of view data will be captured from the wide angle, or with the wide angle and it'll be captured from the ultra wide angle.

Then, machine learning will stitch that extra data into the photo for subject reframing, basically to recover people or pets that may have accidentally been cropped out, and horizon correction, if you accidentally shot off-angle.

It requires a good amount of light, but it can work wonders if and when you need it. Especially because the data is also accessible via the cropping tool. You can tell when it's available by the little auto adjust icon at the top right of the Photos page, opposite the Live Photo icon on the left. When you see it, just hit edit, hit crop, and then move around your photo until it's exactly where you want it.

The same technology is used in QuickTake, which I talked about in the iPhone 11 review. After you tap to take a photo, and hold down to switch to video, machine learning follows your subject and the wider data is used for tracking and stabilization.

It's awesome, and one of the things I love most about Apple: They tend to ship feature sets, not chipsets. They didn't ship a second camera. They shipped 2x optical zoom and portrait mode. Likewise, here they're not shipping a third camera, they're shipping 4x optical zoom, other clever features like Auto Adjustments, and later this year, the super detailed deep fusion.

I also love that they don't tend to do features as one-offs. Everything builds on everything else. They invest in it, like it's a platform, and so when new elements are added in, they almost instantly become more than the some of their parts.

For example, Apple spent a few years building up their DCI P3, completely color calibrated and managed imaging pipeline. Which, internally this year, is now 10-bit.

It can do over a trillion operations per photo, and because it fuses the image signal processor with the neural engine — which previously included facial landmarking and segmentation masking, so it could tell not just where a face was, but the individual parts, and separate it all from the background — it can now do semantic rendering as well.

That means it can expose, multi-scale tonal map, and sharpen that face, for example, differently than it would bricks or beams in the background.

Apple is also using it as part of its new and improved Smart HDR process to better distinguish and preserve skin tones and textures, to prevent blowouts, and reduce noise while preserving proper details. And, again, to expose and present people not just as part of the shot but as the focus of the shot.

Stepping back, it's also what's allowing Apple to keep color and cast consistent even as you're switching between all three of the new cameras. Which, if you've ever watched an MKBHD or TheMrMobile review, you know isn't the case with other triple camera systems.

What Apple is doing here specifically is pairing and calibrating all three cameras for color and exposure together at the factory. Then, while you're using one, Apple sends all the data, in real time, to the other cameras. So, if and when you switch between them, they're all primed and ready with everything from focus to exposure to white balance too tonal mapping.

Now, that lets them minimize shifts in tone and color, but not eliminate is complete. Because, for example, all three cameras have three different apertures. So, when in low light conditions you can see some differences, not so much in color but in exposure. When in bright light, though, the consistency is impressive. Most impressive.

The third thing I love about Apple is that more often than not, the capabilities behind the features are also given over to developers in the form of frameworks they can use in their own apps.

Halide and Obscura, famously, expose a ton of manual controls and a RAW mode beyond what apple offers in the built-in camera app. Focos exposes the depth data, almost like a 3D model, for you to work with.

But that also prompts the question: If Apple's offering a Pro iPhone with a Pro camera, should the Camera App also become more… Pro?

Should it build-on more manual controls, allow you to shoot in RAW, have pretty much every toggle currently buried in Settings exposed and available right up in the app, and otherwise do more of what a pro photographer might want to do?

I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, I can see having all that stuff just front loaded, ready, and waiting to be interesting to people who really do want to do a lot of their own heavy photography lifting.

On the other, even the iPhone Pro camera isn't a traditional camera with a huge hunk of glass hanging off it up front and a ginormous sensor lurking inside. Pretty much everything that's making iPhone photography so great is happening beyond manual, beyond RAW.

Maybe it would be interesting if Apple let us bias more settings the way we can focus and exposure, or save a RAW version of the image alongside the processed, like we can with the extra field of view data for Auto Adjustments.

That way we get all the benefits of the silicon and the machine learning, but also the ability to go back and tweak the data more to our liking, when and if we need to.

The biggest new camera news, of course, is the new SF Camera font Apple's rolled out for the interface. While it definitely pays a lot of respect to Leica's aesthetic, it's also most definitely through the lens of Apple.