Apple unveiled its upcoming trio of new iPhones today, covering the iPhone 11 and the new iPhone product family., in favor of a simplified structure. The iPhone 11 is just the iPhone 11, while the professional

The iPhone 11 has a 6.1-inch screen and will be offered in a variety of colors, including black, green, purple, red, white, and yellow. Features like haptic touch, a True Tone LCD, and a dual-camera are all standard. According to Apple, the new A13 Bionic will offer up to an hour of increased battery life over the iPhone XR, which already had the best battery life in the iPhone family.

All of these new devices run on Apple’s A13 Bionic SoC, about which relatively little is known at this juncture. Apple claims the new chip offers up to 20 percent faster performance and its neural engine is supposedly more efficient as well. Apple claims the iPhone 11 Pro will get four hours more battery life than the iPhone XS, while the iPhone 11 will last five hours longer than the iPhone XS Max.

iPhonebattery health on smartphones is highly situational depending on what, exactly, you are doing. We’ve absolutely seen these kinds of battery life improvements before — but they’ve typically arrived when a workload that was previously being handled in software (like video decoding) is transferred to fixed-function hardware blocks (like a GPU’s onboard video decoder).

We’re not saying Apple can’t deliver a 4-5 hour battery life improvement, but that improvement may be very workload-dependent. A 4-5 hour improvement in battery life in all heavy use scenarios would be the equivalent of a major leap forward in battery technology. That’s a bit farther than we’re willing to go until device characteristics have been thoroughly tested.

 The iPhone 11 continues not to do so. All of these devices are rated for IP68 water-resistance, commonly referred to as being waterproof.