The work that Apple started with the XR continues in the new iPhone 11, which I’ve just spent a little time with. I find myself drawn to the 11 for the same reason that I liked the XR so much: You’ll get serious power at an even more serious discount. Remember: The standard iPhone 11 will set you back $700, down from the $750 that the iPhone XR debuted at last year.

When it comes to pure performance, the 11 uses the same A13 Bionic chipset as its Pro siblings, and I didn’t notice any substantive difference in how well the 11 and the 11 Pros played games and launched apps. Apple’s more basic phones tend to use slightly less RAM than the more expensive models, but I couldn’t confirm that on the ground. If there is a power gap between Apple’s new iPhones, it’ll never really leap out at you — that’s good news for phone shoppers trying to save a little cash.

The biggest aesthetic change here — aside from a handful of new colors, like a neat minty green — is the dual camera around back. Most of the rumors going into the event suggested we’d be getting a telephoto camera here but Apple zagged on all of us with a 12-megapixel ultra-wide cam, and that was probably for the best. When you want to mix up your shots with different perspectives, going wide beats going tight — for me, anyway. The few photos we get to take looked plenty slick on this 6.1-inch LCD display, as did some of the 4K60 sample footage we captured. Apple didn’t load up the iPhone 11 segment of the show with superlatives the way it did for the Pros, but the camera setup here already seems like a valuable one. The bigger question is how well it actually performs in the field against the competition, though, and we just can’t vouch for that yet.

Developing…