iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max review: its camera system outperforms the Pixel 3 and Note10 in bright light and, with Night mode, usually beats Pixel 3 in low light
And the best camera you can get on a phone — Video by Becca Farsace, Alix Diaconis, Phil Esposito, Andrew Marino, Grayson Blackmon, William Joel, and Mariya Abdulkaf
Context & Ripple Effects
The Verge's verdict lands at a turning point in the phone-camera hierarchy: for two years Google's Pixel line had owned low-light photography by default, and this review says Apple's Night mode closes that gap while the new triple-lens system takes bright-light honors over both the Pixel 3 and the Note10. Engadget's same-day take adds the other half of the story — better battery life and a flexible ultra-wide setup, offset by soft detail on that third lens.
What makes this review matter beyond launch week is how durable its conclusion proved: the follow-on Verge reviews of the iPhone 12 Pro and the iPhone 13 Pro treat Apple's camera leadership as the baseline each successor is measured against, not a one-year fluke.
First-order effects
- Google and Samsung lose their standing claim to best-in-class phone photography overnight — the Pixel 3's low-light crown and the Note10's bright-light showing are both directly beaten in this head-to-head.
- Apple gets a marketing asset for the holiday quarter: an independent triple-lens-versus-rivals verdict plus battery-life gains to pair with it.
Second-order effects
- Google and Samsung are forced to answer with multi-frame night-processing of their own rather than single-sensor tricks, since Night mode is now table stakes for flagship comparisons.
- Ultra-wide lenses become a spec-sheet requirement across flagships after reviewers frame them as the flexible third camera — even as Engadget's detail criticism shows rivals can attack the weak point.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through the iPhone 12 and 13 generations, computational photography — software fusing multiple frames and lenses — becomes the primary differentiator among flagships, shifting competition away from sensor hardware toward on-device processing pipelines.
- Review criteria restructure around camera-versatility benchmarks: reviewers increasingly judge phones on how well wide, standard, and telephoto outputs match, not just the main shooter.
The trend: Flagship smartphone competition is consolidating around computational multi-camera systems, with Apple converting a long-standing camera deficit into a durable lead that successors like the iPhone 12 Pro and 13 Pro build on.