 Remind me in three minutes to make a point to our viewers. Okay, I'll remind you at 5.13 PM. I spent the last three weeks exclusively using the iPhone 11 Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 5, and the second-gen AirPods to immerse myself in the ecosystem as much as I could. And I was constantly frustrated by the clear and obvious problems that Apple has had years to fix and just hasn't bothered with. However, for the Android fans that are foaming at the mouth right now about a 10-minute hate speech about how bad Apple is, you guys can chillax because there's lots of good stuff here too, along with some strange stuff. Like, what is so pro about a phone? So it's with this question in mind that our journey begins. Right after today's sponsor, Ruggable. Ruggable rugs are spill-resistant, stain-resistant, and machine-washable. They even stay in place with their non-slip pads. Use code FUNLINUS15 to get 15% off your order and free shipping at the link below. So the setup process was awesome as usual. Apple finally dropped the SIM requirement to activate your new device, and they moved iOS 13's new dark mode front and center on the setup screen. Now, some third-party apps don't respect that setting, but otherwise, it's great, and I never switched it off again. And there's a lot of other smaller things that add up too. Stuff you might not notice at first, but when you do, you'll wonder how you lived without it, like offline dictation, which I immediately enabled when I saw it, and I also enjoyed that Siri's voice responses sound more natural than ever before. Tell me a bad joke. I was so late to the cannibal banquet. They just gave me the cold shoulder. Wow, that one was good. Hard-pressing Wi-Fi in the control center now gives you a list of nearby access points, which makes all the sense in the world, and what about the fact that you can attach a photo to a reminder? That's freaking awesome. Actually, the new reminders app overall just makes Android's handling of reminders look stupid. Unlike Android, you can set any ringtone you want, even a longer ringtone style one that won't shut up until you deal with it for stuff that, oh, I don't know, you might actually want to notice and be reminded about. Anyone else notice the reminder from my Android phone? Nope, me neither. Also, managing your tasks is straightforward with easy ways to both mark completed and delete outright, and my only complaint about it is that reminders can be easily swiped away with no way to restore them, and so parents who lend their phones to their kids will know why this could be a problem. Another nice to have is that Apple now provides what looks like a way more accurate set of battery stats than their competition, and even made it easier to replace the battery with convenient pull tabs that contributed to iFixit's six repairability score. So good job, Apple, is what I would say, if they hadn't gone and added DRM to their batteries at the same time as saying that they consider them to be consumable. Guys, it's called right to repair for a reason, not privilege to repair, which I guess brings me to some of the low points of iOS 13 for me. Compared to previous versions, apps are prompting me constantly on privacy and security permissions. This used to be an Android problem, not an Apple problem, and there are a lot of other little things that they've had generations to fix now. I will complain about the lack of T9 dialing on the iPhone until I am old and gray, and the fact that your home screen always ends up looking like that one relative's desktop. You've just got everything on there. Why is it all there? Furthermore, I still need to swipe from the very bottom to fully unlock the phone, and the frosted glass back can make large hand shifts like the one to get down there and then back up here, very dangerous. Why don't they just use haptic touch to scroll through notifications and then a flick to unlock or vice versa? Also, car play is still bad, even compared to the horrendous recent Android auto update. Navigate to subway. Siri has this major delay between activation and when she actually starts listening. Apple Maps needs manual input for most navigation, and when I dared go outside the ecosystem with my Google Play Music subscription, I only got music playing about half the time and then never with the screen actually working so I could see what track was playing. Though in fairness, Google should probably be shouldering some of the blame here. Actually, I guess it's kind of an aside, but I need to get this out of my system. Both Apple and Google need to grow the f**k up and start treating the users of another platform as what they are, your paying customers. I'm not the only one complaining about this Google Play Music issue on the iPhone, and it has been months. And this childish app kneecapping even carries over to the Apple Watch where you still straight up cannot interact with a Gmail message. Seriously, your multi-billion dollar companies, put your heads together and figure out how I can scroll through as much of the email as I damn well please, then mark it red if it's not important. I've said this before, but here it comes again. I am your customer, and I am one of many people out there who pays for your service but might not always use your operating system. As for the Apple Watch itself, I actually love the hardware. It finally has an always on display, making it the first Apple smart bracelet that also functions as a competent watch. Wow. Dictation is great, but with a great big asterisk, there's no way to make quick corrections. You need to press the digital crown to cancel and try again from scratch. So if whatever you're trying to say is kind of jargony or full of acronyms, then good freaking luck. Honestly, the thing is full of these kinds of simple user experience gotchas. Siri can't understand how to mute my notifications, so I have to do that manually. Hey Siri, mute my notifications. To see your notifications, swipe down from the top of your Apple Watch face. Longer emails often cut off after the first paragraph, which misses the point of a smartwatch entirely for me. And some apps have no way to click through and then throw the app up on your phone, even if they do give you full read and reply function. I mean, how is this still acceptable to Apple? How is this still acceptable to Apple's users? Why am I dictating to this right now? Stop. It just feels like Apple is backwards in a lot of ways here. And the one way where that's a good thing is that the Apple Watch is actually the only place where 3D Touch still exists on a current generation Apple device. 3D Touch was one of my favorite features that Apple introduced with the iPhone 6S. Unfortunately, it wasn't a 6S, I guess. So they killed it. I had said before that was a hard press on the WiFi thing. No, it's just a Faco hard press. It's a long press that buzzes. So the XR didn't have it, and now the entire 11 series, Pro included, dropped it. And I'm really sad. I really wanted it to take off, but instead we're left with haptic touch, which is just long pressing with a nice vibration. It's only a little bit slower, but I do still miss it. For what it's worth, they did make good use of its removal. The 11 Pro's battery is a full 0.65 millimeters thicker than before, and only 0.4 millimeters of that is from thickening the phone outright. Actually, maybe Apple has been listening to me all along in a backhanded sort of way. And what that culminates in is a worst case scenario of over six hours and 20 minutes for the Pro in Geekbench 4's battery life, with the Pro Max even better than that. And that's at half screen brightness, not bad at all. As for the rest of the guts, there are a lot of adhesive seals, yeah, but that's kind of par for the course for a phone that is rated for such an impressive, to the point of honestly being kind of overkill level of ingress protection. Four meters of water is deeper than most swimming pools go. So you would have a hard time killing this phone with submersion alone. And if something did die, virtually everything inside the phone is a detachable module. Even the face ID sensor and selfie camera are separate from the display in case you need to replace that someday. Which you might because the screen on mine scuffed the first time I put it in my pocket with nothing else in it. The front and back glass may have proven to be every bit as shadow resistant as Apple says, but the hardness, at least from my experience, doesn't seem to have followed suit. So I would recommend a case and a screen protector because guys, you do not want to break this thing. Dumb super retina display XDR name aside, the screen really is great. Not only is it incredibly sharp and bright at any given time thanks to its sustained brightness of 800 nits, it can even hit 1200 nits while viewing HDR photos and videos. That is a 20% higher brightness than even most high-end monitors and TVs. And get this, the display HDR spec only actually calls for 500 nits on true black displays like this AMOLED one. To put it in a mobile perspective, it's nearly double what the iPhone XS Max and most competitors are capable of. So it's great for showing off those next gen smart HDR photos that you can take with the three rear cameras. Did I mention it looks great from any angle? Love this thing. All right, cameras. Yes, cameras, plural. I'm starting a movement where we don't call these lenses anymore because that isn't what they are. It's like me jumping from my minivan over to my motorbike and saying I'm changing my tires. Slow fees are irrelevant, I hope, but the front-facing camera is a lot better than previous generations and I am all for that. The stock camera app, while still lacking professional shooting modes, even on the pro models, is still very simple, very usable, and they've added a bunch of features, including a much more mature edit mode in the Photos app and, and, Samsung, I hope you're taking notes, they added the ability to quickly capture video while you are in photo capture mode. This is such a useful feature and I can't even begin to imagine through what convoluted process Samsung managed to pioneer it only to abandon it later and then let Apple take the lead. I guess I'm just glad to see it coming back because once Apple does it, everyone's gonna have to do it. When shooting photos, Apple's new semantic rendering engine makes extensive use of the A13's Bionic Machine Learning Accelerator to quickly identify what's in the image and optimize for it. It works in two parts. The first is similar to traditional HDR and that's a buffer of underexposed frames which is used to reconstruct detail in bright areas and then a single overexposed frame that's taken for reconstructing darker areas. Then the engine scans for things it recognizes. The sky gets denoised while hair is sharpened and faces are given subtler highlights and shadow processing from the previous step to retain a more striking true to life effect. This is also how Apple manages to pull off their high key light mono portrait effect. Lttstore.com by the way. All of this is helped even further by a combination of optical image stabilization and software image stabilization that makes for a ridiculously stable shot. Both while shooting stills and obviously it's especially noticeable while shooting video. The ultra wide camera doesn't get OIS but with that wide of an angle, it's pretty tough to notice. Just like it's tough to notice any significant difference in image quality between the three cameras. They all look great. As we saw in our non-pro iPhone 11 review though, not everything is perfect and compared to the likes of the Pixel line, results can sometimes be below par in terms of clarity and color accuracy. But I don't think anyone's gonna complain about the image quality overall here. What I'll complain about is that in spite of all the good in the cameras, the hype train made it seem as though you could switch between them seamlessly. And there is definitely a delay when you do it. I mean, it's not a huge deal. Like being able to do it with a delay is better than not being able to do it at all. But well, Apple didn't exactly go out of their way to temper expectations during their demos and zooming isn't as smooth as I was expecting. But I guess that's really what this all boils down to, expectations. There are so many things that are missing that would lend the iPhone 11 Pro some pro street cred, like a high refresh rate display, USB type C, bi-directional wireless charging, professional shooting modes, a high quality analog output or a reduced or removed notch. But if we take a step back from telephoto and have a look at the ultra wide picture, the whole thing comes together in a way that's still really positive, even if I think it costs more than it should and everyone should just buy the iPhone 11 non-pro. So stupid name, stupid camera bump and decidedly last generation looking display notch, but it's the most premium iPhone experience and long gone is the time when iOS versus Android is some kind of black and white, this one is better decision. And anyone who says otherwise is frankly a pathetic fan boy. Now to be clear, I've preferred Android for quite some time now. And as of filming this, I am already back enjoying the widely varied, if sometimes buggy hardware ecosystem on the Android side of things, this time in the form of the Galaxy Fold. Review to come by the way, subscribe so you don't miss it. But I actually plan to keep wearing the Apple watch if for no reason other than to make a point about the deplorable state of Android smartwatches. So thanks for watching guys, check out our 10 ways iOS is better and our 10 ways Android is better videos for more of my thoughts on the two ecosystems as a whole. Massive shout out by the way, to our sponsor for today's video, dbrand. I didn't have to give Apple any of my real money for iPhones although I did buy the watch. I mean, seriously, a thousand Canadian rubles for this thing. It's almost as overpriced as like fancy stickers for your, oh shoot, dbrand. The dbrand grip case is super grippy so you'll never drop your phone again. They use military grade impact protection absorbing technology. It's ultra low profile at just two millimeters thick. They've got ultra tactile buttons with their springy polymer and they've got of course compatibility for dbrand's overpriced, excuse me, dbrand's genuine 3M vinyl skins. Check it out at dbrand.com slash Linus dropped, oh you bastards, that's the vanity URL. I hate you guys so much. Anyway, thanks for watching guys and I'll see you at the next video.