Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Apple announced three new iPhones for 2019, and for the first time in over a decade, it’s switched up the naming scheme: the XR model is now the “mainline” iPhone 11, and the more premium OLED duo is now the iPhone 11 Pro line, the first phones from Apple to get the suffix.
Apple isn’t the first phone maker to slap a “pro” moniker on a phone — OnePlus, Huawei, Xiaomi, and others have all done the same — nor is the iPhone 11 Pro the company’s first product to have the “pro” title, with its numerous MacBook Pros, iPad Pros, Mac Pros, and even an iMac Pro.
These two facts lend to two different questions: what does it mean for a phone to be “pro”? And what does it specifically mean when Apple applies the moniker to a…