Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max review

Not the easiest way to tell the difference between last year’s model is to hold them in your hand. But lay them side by side and the larger screen sizes for both the Pro and the Pro Max become instantly apparent. 6.3in and 6.9in compared to 6.1in and 6.7in making the 16 Pro Max the biggest iPhone ever. What’s that sound? Oh, that’s just Mr. Jobs turning another away in his grave.

Are there inherent advantages to having an even bigger screen? Not so much on the Max, but on the Pro, the slight bump from 6.1 to 6.3in puts it right in the sweet spot without having to debate over getting corrective hand surgery. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who will lap up anything that allows them more real estate or a bigger battery. Or both. That’s the only real reason to opt for the Pro Max this year. And if we are to believe Apple’s claim,  the Ceramic Shield front glass is up to twice as strong compared to any other phone glass now on both the Pro models!

The lens arsenal between both the Pro models is identical now, for the very first time, so you don’t have to choose between what you want versus what you need. Desert Titanium finish is the new colour of the season and like all Pro models, it’s a muted hue of gold that isn’t striking in its newness. But hold it sans a case and the microblasted back glass does feel different in the hand.

With more buttons on an iPhone than ever before, it also feels different on your fingertips. Joining the Action button introduced last year is the much-talked-about Camera Control button. A very Apple-esque innovation that combines hardware and software engineering to create magic. Or does it? More on that in a moment…

An increase in screen size and dimensions does come with a slight weight penalty of 6 grams but the way it’s all so perfectly balanced inside, you could never tell and the 15 Pro Max felt like it had a heavy breakfast in comparison! All of that titanium will most likely be protected by a case thanks to the new Camera Control button which includes haptic feedback and a capacitive layer for identifying gestures. Third-party accessory makers will have to up their game. Apple provided us with the new clear case and it indeed has a “sapphire crystal coupled to a conductive layer to communicate finger movements to the Camera Control.”

Turn on the big new screen and nothing much has changed here either. Same 2000 nits of peak brightness, the same 460ppi resolution and the same ProMotion 120Hz display. What is new is that the ProMotion display can now drop down to 1nit of minimum brightness so the Always-On display should have minimum impact on battery life. In our tests though, a quick comparison between the AoD on and off still showed faster drain with it on. Thumb rule, if you’re travelling or have a busy day of content creation, the always-on display is best switched off.

Visually and for the most part technically identically to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, two hardware specs stand out as the “new” additions. Firstly, even though the primary lens has the same aperture as last year (f1.78), it does have a larger 48MP sensor and Apple’s calling it a Fusion camera now. The second difference is a larger and genuinely all-new 48MP ultrawide camera that will also allow for much higher resolution macro shots since they both share the same lens. Spatial comes to photos too and if you’re one of the early adopters of the Apple Vision Pro, you can shoot in landscape mode and hopefully be immersed in a moment all over again. Let us know how it looks!

The 12MP 5x telephoto and the 12MP selfie cam remain identical for the most part. While we were hoping the selfie camera would get a boost in resolution, we have to concede with the ability to record in 4K with Dolby Vision. Our favourite lens has always been the fantastic 5x telephoto with a focal length of 120mm and how dramatic it makes everyday photos look, in normal or portrait mode. Use it for video with a wireless mic and the results are truly cinematic. There are various minor improvements under the hood through the ISP pipeline. Hence, the difference between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the 16 Pro Max will be noticeable, but only under challenging conditions.

Interestingly, the “experience” of shooting a video or a photo has changed dramatically. Audio Mix, not limited to the Pro models but a feature that works better on the Pro models due to their higher quality microphones, is a big step up. It lets you isolate the subject’s voice from the background noise and lets you select any of the three styles labelled as In Frame, Studio or Cinematic. Each with a subtle shift in tonal balance and the amount of ambience bleeding in, it is most effective with the 1x primary lens since it uses the onboard microphones to capture the original audio and the closer you are to the subject, the better its efficacy. 2-5 metres seems to be the ideal distance for this feature to work best and it does cut out the busyness of city life when you’re trying to shoot a piece to the camera.

The other and probably a lot more frequently used feature we’re predicting, are the new Photographic Styles. Not your regular Instagram filters, these styles range from a warm rose gold tint to classic B&W and give you granular control over luminosity, colour and overall intensity. Even better, you could dial in your preferred photographic style and shoot everything in that mode or just edit your heart out in post-edit! This non-destructive nature that Apple has built into the native app is what separates it from most of the competition in its ease of use and reverting back to the original with a single tap. They are a lot of fun to play around with and genuinely unlock another layer of creativity that will have you opening the camera app a lot more than you would otherwise. Mind you though, the post-capture Photographic Styles edit option will only show up in your photos UI if you keep the capture format to HEIF and not in the ‘Most Compatible’ format.

Moving on to the chipset, Apple’s always pulling ahead of the competition when it comes to real-world performance and the A18 Pro SoC is no different. It features a second-gen 3-nm processor that packs in even more transistors for efficient processing and a new thermal design for an even better gaming experience. But even before you move on to the 2x faster ray-tracing and game mode in iOS18, you can’t help but ogle at the larger screen with even thinner bezels that pull you into the on-screen action like no iPhone before. And what is stark in its superiority, especially after testing out back-to-back Android flagships, is the audio quality through the iPhone’s speakers. Clean, open-sounding and with genuine stereo separation, they remain the gold standard in on-board audio.

While certain benchmark parameters might give the GPU edge to the Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 3 on certain flagships, video processing and 4K edits always had a faster turnaround time on the iPhone 16 Pro Max. It handles Triple-A games without stutter and the camera burst mode still fires away like a M134 minigun and processes batch photos through its ISP faster than anything else out there. No wonder it’s the creator’s choice, even with a “mere” 8GB of memory compared to the 12GB and even 16GB options on some Androids.

Adding to its video superiority, there is the new 4K/120fps video mode that ups the resolution and frame rate to create some stunning-looking slow-mo shots. Paired with HDR, it makes for footage that instantly stands out while scrolling through your social feed and we found ourselves using this a lot more than the usual Slow-mo modes on any other device. Changing frame rates from 24/30/60 and 120fps is also possible after shooting, making life easier and editing some creative reels even more fun. One gripe is that even with a new lens coating, the green flare dots still hound you while shooting in low-light conditions and Apple hasn’t been able to fix that yet.

Photography is more of a mixed bag. There is evidence of more processing going on in the pipeline now, making for sharper images than ever before. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Even the new 48MP macro shots can be breathtaking, but only under good lighting conditions. Anything less than ideal and there is still more noise than music, so to speak. Where it excels though is in consistency. As a point-and-shoot camera system, the iPhone still stumps any Android device out there when it comes to colour and exposure neutrality across all the lenses and the accuracy of the Super Retina XDR display itself. The seamlessness between 0.5x -2x and 1x to 5x in video zoom is unmatched in the Android realm, making you appreciate the little things about the iOS interface and the A18 Pro chip’s fluidity in handling it all. Overall, the camera performance is great if you were happy with the results from your iPhone 15 Pro Max or even 14 Pro Max, you will only be more pleased. Some of the eastern flagships may have better optical zoom, bigger sensors and more AI tricks out of the box, but none match the responsiveness and predictability of the iPhone camera results and that is what makes it the professional’s choice across professions! What you see is what you get. And it’s shocking how many Android phones don’t follow that decree.

Camera Control is a great idea. In theory. At least until Apple Intelligence comes along and it becomes a quick visual search button. Or when it can be customised for scrolling too. While there is no contesting the ingenuity of the concept, the execution is riddled with questions arising from hand grip to control options to even stability. In the Pro Max case, the Camera Control button in Portrait mode doesn’t fall naturally on the thumb, forcing you to alter your grip to a very precarious position. The two-layered menu system works well and is swift to get around once your muscle memory is locked in, but after you adjust the settings by gently tapping to select, double tapping to go up one sub-menu and then full press to click a photo, invariably your other hand rises to grab the top of the phone and provide additional stability. Let’s lean into Apple’s promotional visuals for a moment and try using it in landscape mode (yes, coz 95% of the world shoots everyday pictures in landscape mode, right?). Here, the problem is again the very tendency every serious photographer wants to avoid - micro-vibrations. When you can just brush your fingertip on the on-screen shutter button without upsetting the balance of the phone, why would you choose to firmly press down on a haptic button and cause involuntary instability? To be fair, the resulting images didn’t suffer from any blurring or smearing of the images, even when the shutter speed was 3 seconds under low-light conditions. This only proves how good the iPhone’s ISP is but it doesn’t absolve the camera control button of being an idea akin to the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pros from 2019. Everyone loved it but hardly anyone used it.

Control-wise, double-clicking the camera control button opens up the photo mode by default. If you want to use it for shooting a video, you will have to revert to the on-screen controls. When in video mode, the Photographic Style and Tones options still show up in the Camera Control menu, even when these features are not usable in video mode. Not to mention, changing focus areas will anyway require you to tap on a particular area on the screen. So Apple needs to sort it all out before it begins to feel irreplaceable.

For serious videographers and photographers though, the Camera Control does have the potential to become a great user interface once mastered. More than being faster, it opens up the entire display as a clean canvas to frame your shot in and if you’re into that sort of workflow, this is a thing of beauty. Similar to the Dynamic Island, it’s a feature only Apple could pull off, thanks to its tight software and hardware integration. For the vast majority of others who simply want to post their morning muesli with a stolen inspirational quote, this isn’t life-changing.

With capacity lower than its competitors, the iPhone 16 Pro Max at 4685mAh still crushes it. With heavy editing, shooting video, playing around with Photographic Styles, web and social media browsing, playing music and podcasts, it still typically goes to bed with us with about 18-20% remaining in its tank. This number will of course vary wildly depending on usage, but objectively too, it will easily outlast the iPhone 15 Pro Max by a couple of hours at least. This number changed with the Always-On display though and suddenly, doing all the usual things, the Pro Max demanded a sip of the electrolyte juice by 8 pm. Slightly faster charging of 25W is also offered on the MagSafe wireless charging pad provided you have a 30W adapter but in terms of wired charging speeds, we didn’t encounter any significant change from last year’s model. A full charge still takes about 90 minutes.

An iPhone is an iPhone and the Pro Max will always appeal to someone who wants the best and the biggest iPhone. It’s certainly not a must-have update year for the iPhone though and if you’re coming in hot from a 15 Pro Max, you will barely notice any significant difference unless you shoot a lot of slow-mo video or use the built-in mics. The big step-up was always going to be the all-new Siri and Apple Intelligence which strangely, isn’t included out of the box with iOS18. Apple will begin rolling out iOS18.1 at some point in October with a few Apple Intelligence features to begin with and only 2025 will see all the good stuff showcased at WWDC24 come to life. By design all iPhone 15 Pro models will support Apple Intelligence too, making the decision to upgrade to the 16 even harder. So unless you currently are on iPhone 14 or earlier, this may sound like deja vu…but an upgrade would only be if you want to. Not if you need to.