But once you do find the right scene, you see detail and shadow pop and it becomes immediately evident even before you press the shutter that it is making it dramatically brighter. Night Mode works only in 1x and 2x shooting modes because only those cameras have the 100% focus pixels needed to do the detection and mapping that the iPhone 11 needs to make the effect viable.
I have this weird litmus test I put every new phone camera through where I take it on a dark ride, like Winnie the Pooh, to see if I can get any truly sharp usable image. It’s a great test because the black light is usually on, the car is moving and the subject is moving. Up until this point I have succeeded exactly zero times. But the iPhone 11 Pro pulled it off. Not perfect, but pretty incredible all things considered.
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.
There are two main two reasons to go for this year's most extreme iPhone: Either you want that larger OLED display (2,688×1,242 versus 2,436×1,125 for the Pro) or you want that extra hour of battery life.
I wouldn't want to spend this much. But if you really are using your phone as a professional camera and you want to see every pixel, you want the best viewfinder and editing display you can get. And, well, this would be that phone.
Why are the Pro phones lasting so much longer? The screen and processor are more power efficient, but they also have bigger batteries—part of the reason they’re a fraction of an ounce heavier and 0.02 inches thicker.
This is one of the simplest reviews I’ve ever had to write: the iPhone 11 is the phone most people who are upgrading to a new iPhone this year should get. It’s an excellent phone, with one of the best cameras I’ve ever seen on a smartphone and terrific battery life.
But I still think the iPhone 11 is a very good phone, even if it’s not a futuristic one. Its faster processor, camera upgrade, and long-lasting battery will be enough to sway those who have been putting off buying a new phone. And the iPhone 11’s price is a lot more palatable for some people than the cost of an iPhone 11 Pro or even a premium Samsung phablet.
These games alone make Apple Arcade seem like a no-brainer subscription for anyone with an Apple device. It's $5 for the entire family -- the price of many individual mobile games -- it already has a handful of strong titles, and you can easily play across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. Apple needs to maintain the stream of quality of games, and could very well raise the price eventually, but for now, Apple Arcade seems like one of the best deals in gaming.
By bundling them into a subscription, Apple sidesteps the individual purchase barrier that it has had a big hand in creating in the first place. While I don’t think it is fully to blame — plenty of other platforms aggressively promote loot box mechanics — a big chunk of the responsibility to fix this distortion does rest on Apple. Apple Arcade is a great stab at that and I hope that the early titles are an indicator of the overall variety and quality that we can expect.
iOS 13’s QuickPath keyboard is surprisingly good for a first effort. In the weeks that I’ve been using the betas, my biggest problem is simply remembering that the feature is there, so accustomed am I to tapping out my messages like someone from the long distant past who still hasn’t seen the series finale of Lost. It’s not error-proof by any means, but what problems I have encountered are outweighed by its convenience in many situations: for one thing, swipe typing when you’re holding your phone one-handed certainly feels a lot easier than tapping.
One of the iPhone 11 Pro's biggest selling points is its triple-camera system, and it's this system that's the star of Apple's latest ad.
In a world where our phones are also video calling devices, multimedia viewers and more, having your iPhone lying flat on your desk isn’t always optimal. That’s where a new “invisible” stand created by Moft X comes into play.
My rule: I never spend more than five minutes writing a work email. And when I manage other people, it’s a rule I ask them to follow, too. Ideally, each email will take 30 seconds to write—then, even if you write 100 emails a day, it’s still only an hour of your day, but five minutes is the max.
I call this rule the five-minute rule, and it’s how I do work email. I also think it’s how you should do work email, so here I’ll give you some suggestions for how to make it happen.
Chatting on the phone provides the bliss of unreviewable, unforwardable, unsearchable speech. If something comes out a little weird, there’s no record of it. (Unless your conversation partner is secretly recording it, in which case you have deeper problems.) If you misunderstand something, there’s no daylong email chain correcting your error. If a conversation has a tense moment, you can’t scroll back up to critique your performance until the heat death of the universe. Snapchat blew up a few years ago because pictures sent between users on the app disappeared 10 seconds after being viewed; talking to someone on the phone has provided the same freedom in verbal form since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.
Smartphones feel terrible to hold to your ear for more than a few minutes, but they make up for poor ergonomic design with one key feature: speakerphone. I often chat on the phone while lying on the couch, iPhone on my stomach, like I’m talking to a friend who’s excused herself to the kitchen to grab a seltzer—or a therapist sitting placidly outside of my field of vision. Afterward, I feel the same contented buzz I got from talking on the phone after school when I was 10, shortly before AOL Instant Messenger swept my generation onto the internet. It’s a feeling that text messages have never given me. (Although, it must be said: Don’t be the person who uses speakerphone in public. You live in a society.)
How might you characterize the conversational style of a digital assistant like Siri? No matter your impression, it stands to reason that striking the wrong tone could dissuade users from engaging with it in the future.
Perhaps that’s why in a paper (“Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants“) accepted to the Interspeech 2019 conference in Graz, Austria, researchers at Apple investigated a conversational assistant that considered users’ preferred tones and mannerisms in its responses. They found that people’s opinions of the assistant’s likability and trustworthiness improved when it mirrored their degree of chattiness, and that the features necessary to perform the mirroring could be extracted from those people’s speech patterns.
“The Commission contends that essentially all of Apple’s profits from all of its sales outside the Americas must be attributed to two branches in Ireland,” Apple’s lawyer Daniel Beard told the court.
He said the fact the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store, other Apple products and services and key intellectual property rights were developed in the United States, and not in Ireland, showed the flaws in the Commission’s case.
Night Mode looks great! Or, at least, the Night Mode photos taken by reviewers look great. Results may differ when it is me that is behind the camera.
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Thanks for reading.