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tThe iPhone 16 Pro Max is Apple’s latest superphone, with a huge screen, the fastest chip and the most advanced cameras ever on an iPhone, ready to be your entertainment hub – if you can fit it in a pocket or bag.
This huge iPhone has an equally high price. Starting at £1,199 (€1,449 / $1,199 / A$2,149), the 16 Pro Max tops the iPhone 16 series, beating out the £999 16 Pro and £899 16 Plus, although it at least comes with twice the starting storage as the rest. .
Unlike their predecessors, the 16 Pro and Pro Max have matching cameras, chips and capabilities, allowing you to choose the size between a relatively compact 6.3-inch screen and the largest ever installed on an Apple phone.
The 16 Pro Max’s 6.9-inch screen is 0.2 inches larger diagonally than the outgoing 15 Pro Max, making it one of the largest on the market, surpassing superphones from Samsung and Google. The screen looks fantastic: bright, sharp and sleek, with its 120Hz refresh rate keeping scrolling and animations fluid. For widescreen video, the viewable screen is only 10% (18mm) shorter than the iPad mini, so it feels more like watching movies on a small tablet than a phone.
Thinner bezels around the screen have absorbed some of the increase in screen size, but the 16 Pro Max is 6g heavier, 3.1mm longer and 1mm wider than its predecessor. That makes it 13.4mm taller, 6.1mm wider and 28g heavier than the regular 16 Pro.
You’ll need two hands to use it most of the time and probably a phone grip to avoid strain on your hands.
Budget
Screen: 6.9-inch Super Retina XDR (120Hz OLED) (460 ppi)
Processor: Apple A18 Pro
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 256, 512 GB or 1 TB
Operating system: iOS 18
Camera: 48 MP main, 48 MP UW and 12 MP 5x zoom, 12 MP front
Connectivity: 5G, Wi-Fi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3, Thread, USB-C, Satellite, UWB and GNSS
Water resistance: IP68 (6 meters for 30 minutes)
Dimensions: 163×77.6×8.25mm
Weight: 227g
A18 Pro chip and a large battery
The 16 Pro Max has the same fast new A18 Pro chip as its smaller brother and comes with a minimum of 256GB of storage, which should be enough for most who aren’t trying to film the next blockbuster movie.
The battery lasts about 55 hours of general use between charges while actively using the screen for almost eight hours with a combination of 5G and Wi-Fi. That’s 10 to 15 hours longer than its predecessor and the 16 Pro, and means charging it every three days or less with lighter use. Playing games and other intensive tasks took a toll on the battery, but the 16 Pro Max will still outlast even the most intense days of use.
iOS 18.1 and the start of Apple Intelligence
It runs iOS 18.1, which has several new customization options, RCS support for messaging Android users, and the iPad’s excellent math notes feature. The recent update has also enabled the first of Apple’s new AI features that are available in beta, but only in US English, and English in the UK, Australia, and other non-US languages. .will be enabled in December.
These include a change to the way Siri appears, now presented as a glowing border around the screen. You can also type queries by double-tapping the gesture bar at the bottom of the screen, which is quite interesting. Siri is still far behind its rival Google Gemini and others in terms of usefulness, but you can understand natural language better, especially when you change your mind in the middle of a query.
The new writing tools are capable of proofreading, summarizing and rewriting your text in different styles, such as friendly, professional or concise. The tools are available anywhere the keyboard is, in virtually any application. But they are clearly designed for writing messages and emails, and they had problems with longer documents, sometimes appearing blank for a few seconds before the text appeared. They weren’t all that useful in my daily life beyond a more advanced spell checker.
The Mail app now puts urgent emails at the top and offers email summaries instead of the first line when viewing your inbox. A smart reply system suggests answers to questions in emails and messages as you type, which is a bit hit and miss.
The Photos app has natural language searches, like “Sam drinking a beer,” that work quite well. It also has a new AI Clean Up tool, similar to Google’s Magic Eraser, that removes objects from photos by simply touching or circling them with your finger. For simple removals of background or foreground objects, it can work fine, but has problems with anything complex, leaving behind strange looking artifacts.
The new voice transcription in the Notes app is fast, but with variable accuracy, and it misses common words, phrases, and names; good enough to get the gist, but for now its accuracy can’t be trusted. You can now also record calls directly from the phone app, which alerts the caller that they are being recorded.
None of these tools are new, and Google already has arguably better versions, including the Gmail and Google Photos apps on an iPhone. But the new notification summaries are new and useful.
They condense and summarize groups of notifications, such as multiple WhatsApps, security camera events or even news app alerts. You can choose which apps it summarizes, but by setting it to do all of them, I found it worked better than expected. You can tap the stack to see each individual notification, but often I could just swipe through it without needing further questioning or seeing that there was anything significant in the flurry of pings.
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Sustainability
Apple says the battery should last over 1000 full charge cycles with at least 80% of its original capacity and can be replaced by £109. Out of warranty screen repairs cost £389. The 16 Pro Max has repair guides available and was awarded seven out of 10 in repairability by iFixit specialists.
Contains more than 25% recycled material, including aluminum, cobalt, copper, gold, lithium, plastic, rare earths, steel, tin and tungsten. The company breaks down the phone’s environmental impact in its report. Apple offers free exchange and recycling programs, even for non-Apple products.
Camera
The triple cameras on the back are similar to last year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max and match the system on the smaller 16 Pro which works in the same way. They include an excellent 48-megapixel main camera, a 5x optical zoom camera, and an upgraded 48MP ultra-wide camera.
The 16 Pro Max can also take spatial photos and videos for viewing on headphones like the Vision Pro, and it has Apple’s great new audio mixing feature that can remove background noise and make it sound like the ones on the shot had lapel microphones.
But it’s Apple’s improved Photo Styles feature that makes the biggest difference, allowing you to adjust the tones and colors produced by the camera, either while shooting or afterward.
The camera control button works great for quickly opening the camera and taking photos, but it’s fiddly to use to adjust camera settings precisely.
Price
The iPhone 16 Pro Max costs from £1,199 (€1,449/$1,199/A$2,149) with 256GB of storage.
For comparison, the iPhone 16 costs £799, the iPhone 16 Plus costs £899, the iPhone 16 Pro costs £999, the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL costs £1,099the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra costs £1,249 and the Fairphone 5 costs £499.
Verdict
Apple’s largest iPhone has grown even larger by 2024, which is its key selling point and a hurdle.
It has everything you’d expect from a superphone: a huge, excellent screen, a battery that lasts for days, an incredibly fast chip, and excellent cameras that can outshoot and zoom most regular phones.
But its enormous size makes it unwieldy, causing my hands to hurt with prolonged use, and making it harder to fit comfortably into pockets and bags.
The first Apple Intelligence features enabled by the recent iOS18.1 update are a bit disappointing and mostly fall short of competitors. Siri in particular needs an intelligence upgrade to compete. However, the AI notification summaries are novel and useful, and Apple promises more advanced features in later updates. But I don’t think Apple Intelligence has any great features that will make people upgrade yet.
Unlike previous years, the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max have the same features and specifications, except the size and battery life. So if you can handle the size and stomach the eye-watering price, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is a very good phone. It’s just not the model I would choose.
Advantages: glorious huge screen, multi-day battery life, excellent cameras including 5x optical zoom, USB-C, camera and action control buttons, superior performance, long software support, Face ID.
Cons: Very expensive, heavy, really big frame is harder to hold and carry, camera control is a bit complicated, early Apple Intelligence features are a bit disappointing.