I finally managed to carve out 20 minutes to go over to the Verizon store and swap my iPhone X for an iPhone 11 Pro Max (20 minutes turned into more than one hour thanks to Verizon’s 9 Mbit in-store WiFi).
I’m in love with the camera so far. Here are a couple of challenging scenes with the standard camera…
Verizon sold me a Gear4 Battersea case. It might be tough, but it makes the already huge phone a little too big for a blue jeans pocket. The case buttons are super stiff and make it tough to turn the phone off from the top side button. An Amazon reader says “after using it for a week I noticed that it has extremely scratched up all four sides of my iPhone”. It is so rigid that I am skeptical that it would protect the screen from shock in the event of a drop. The soft silicone cases seem much more likely to be helpful for a drop on concrete. One good feature: The case is thick enough to keep the lenses of the cameras off whatever surface the phone is resting on.
Readers: Do you carry an iPhone 11 Pro Max in a front pocket? If so, what case works well? What about the Apple silicone case? The Verizon sales guy scared me off by saying that it lacked a bezel to protect the screen from a face-down drop.
I have the Otterbox Symmetry Series case for my iPhone Xs, and I see they make them for the 11 Pro Max. Thin, solid, I moved from the Apple silicone case to this for a more rugged case but wanted a small footprint. I like everything about it, but is a little more slippery than the Apple case I was using. But no front cover (I prefer to used a tempered glass screen protector).
Retail stores sell cases at huge markups. They probably make more profit on the case than on the phone sale. I order 3-6 cases on Amazon, avoiding the high price retail store brands. I try them all, use the one I like best and put the rest in a drawer. You end up with a very high quality case which is exactly suited to your preferences of size, texture, button style, etc.
Why bother with a case?
I have been a smarthphone user for ~10 years. In all of that time — despite having three young children — I have cracked my screen exactly once. $200 out of pocket to repair. The pro-rated cost per year is something like $20 / year — and all that time I enjoyed having the smallest version of my phone at all times (i.e. no bulky case filling up my pockets).
I’m in the no-case camp. You’re paying a tax in effect by using a case. You lose the slim size and the ability to appreciate the design.
Compare it to paying for an extended warranty, another tax. If you only use the warranty every five or ten purchases, you would have been better off just putting the warranty cash in a savings account. Use that to fix whatever it is, or not … maybe you no longer need the item.
I have an ancient, outdated iPhone Xs, but for both this and my previous iPhone 7, I used a Caseology case, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07533S1FG/
Slim enough for reasonably pocket placement, but still provides some additional padding.
I use Apple cases, they work great.
Enough bezel, also bottom designed to be used with faceid feature unlike any other stupid case. Carry in front left pocket, most jeans now have pockets large enough, which wasn’t the case few years ago.