Apple iPhone 11 Pro Review: It’s All About the Camera | WIRED

What does “Pro” really mean? In Apple’s world, “Pro” is both a brilliant and nebulous marketing phrase. It’s an extension of a naming convention—there is already a MacBook Pro, and a Mac Pro, and an iPad Pro. The word is supposed to signal that something is better, or more advanced.

In the case of the iPhone 11 Pro and the larger Pro Max, the word “Pro” equates to a nicer build and a more capable camera than the less expensive iPhone 11. The iPhone 11 is a very good phone, but the Pro phones are aspirational objects; new glass slabs to load with the productive and creative and high-resolution elements of our lives, and rectangular on-ramps to Apple’s growing subscription services.

So if you’re one of those productive and creative people, and you’re thinking of going pro, here’s what you need to know if you’re considering the iPhone 11 Pro or Pro Max.

Big Money

With these Pro model phones, Apple is maintaining the same pricing it had last year. The iPhone 11 Pro costs $999 for a model with 64 gigabytes of internal storage, which is barely enough for anyone considered a “pro” user. Bump up to 256 GB or 512 GB and you’ll end up paying $1,249 or $1,349, respectively. The iPhone 11 Pro Max caps at $1,449, for the maximum amount of storage.

That is nearly $1,500 for a phone. There are all kinds of justifications for this price, including but not limited to a) Apple’s mobile processors now perform better than some desktop processors, and b) a person’s smartphone might be the most important device in their life. Anyway you slice the pie, it’s a lot of dough. For comparison’s sake, Samsung’s most expensive phone, the Galaxy Note 10+ with 5G, tops off at $1,399.

Apple is accepting handset trade-ins, which might reduce the cost if you have an older iPhone that’s in good condition. The $999 iPhone 11 Pro, for example, goes down to $599 if you have a working iPhone X that you’re ready to unload. But Apple’s website indicates that your old phone is only worth something if the “body is free of dents and scratches” and “the touchscreen and back glass are undamaged.” Good luck with that, ye owners of fragile phones.

Glass House

The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max have stainless steel frames, while the cheaper iPhone 11 is made of aluminum. All three new iPhones this year are thicker and heavier than their predecessors (iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR). The iPhone 11 Pro Max, in particular, is a chonk of a phone, to use the internet’s current parlance for fat cats.

I personally would not buy the iPhone 11 Pro Max. It’s too much. It has a 6.5-inch diagonal display, while the iPhone 11 Pro has a more reasonable 5.8-inch diagonal display, same as last year’s iPhone XS. The iPhone 11, meanwhile, falls between the two, with a 6.1-inch display. It’s unfortunate that Apple’s solution for people with smaller hands is a small-ish phone that also happens to be one of the more expensive models—unlike the fan favorite iPhone SE, which was both small and inexpensive.

All three new iPhones have what Apple claims is the most durable glass on any iPhone. However, the back of the Pro phones have a textured and less slippery matte finish, and it’s one that I prefer, given my track record for shattering phones. The Pro phones also come in colors that are more understated than the iPhone 11’s pastels, contributing to the gravitas of the Pro’s.

One of the key differences between the pro models and the regular, nonpro iPhone 11 is the display technology that Apple uses in each. Apple is calling the display on the Pro iPhones “Super Retina XDR,” which is a way of saying it’s an OLED display with an extremely high resolution. It also happens to be the brightest screen in an iPhone, with up to 1,200 nits of maximum brightness. The iPhone 11 has an LCD, and while it’s also a high-resolution display and has the same True Tone color technology, it’s not nearly as luminous or rich as the Pro displays.