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- Stupendous battery life
- Improved telephoto camera
- Centre Stage selfie camera is clever
- Camera bump is huge
- Pricey for the specs
The iPhone 17 Pro Max poses a peculiar problem for smartphone reviewers. On the face of it, it’s the best iPhone you can buy – the one with the largest display, and the longest battery life. It’s the only phone you can get with 2TB of storage.
And yet, I find myself drifting towards recommending the iPhone 17 Pro this year over Apple’s big beast. The reason? The battery life on the smaller model is now good enough, while its more compact size is of bigger benefit than the larger screen on the 17 Pro Max.
That’s not to say the 17 Pro Max won’t be better for some people, though; it isn’t quantitatively worse than the 17 Pro – I simply prefer the smaller phone.
What you need to know
Let’s take a beat, though, and look at what exactly the iPhone 17 Pro Max offers that the 17 Pro doesn’t. The most obvious difference is the screen. As in previous years, the Pro Max totes a 6.9in OLED panel with a resolution of 2,868 x 1,320, where the 17 Pro’s is 6.3in and 2,622 x 1,206.
This leads to a larger, heavier device but one with a bigger, longer-lasting battery – up to 37 hours according to Apple. And, as mentioned, this is the only iPhone you can buy with 2TB of storage. This adds a rather unreasonable £800 premium over the 256GB model, though.
Elsewhere, you’re getting the same generational improvements as the 17 Pro:
- The telephoto camera is upgraded to 48MP
- The selfie camera is upgraded to 18MP with a square sensor and Center Stage auto framing and zooming
- It has the new Apple A19 Pro processor and an upgraded 12GB of RAM (up from 8GB)
- There’s tougher Ceramic Shield 2 glass on the front and Ceramic Shield glass on the rear
- The display reaches a higher 3,000cd/m2 peak brightness
- Wireless connectivity is upgraded to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6
Plus, of course, it ships with iOS 26 preinstalled, with all the new features that entails.
Price and competition
The price of the iPhone 17 Pro Max reflects its flagship status, but the difference between it and the 17 Pro is not as large as you might expect. The base model is £1,199 SIM-free, which is £100 more expensive than the equivalent 17 Pro model, and that price delta remains the same throughout the range.
That also makes it £200 more expensive than the iPhone Air and £400 pricier than the standard iPhone 17.
As for the Android competition, the obvious alternative is the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which you can pick up for as little as £999 right now and offers an even beefier set of features.
The S25 Ultra has not three but four cameras, including two telephotos (3x and 5x), in addition to its 200MP main and 50MP ultrawide options. It comes with a built-in S Pen stylus and has the same size 6.9in OLED display as the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It may not be an iPhone, but you can’t beat it for value right now.
Other options include the OnePlus 13, which has an even brighter display, faster 100W charging, and three 50MP rear cameras, but a shorter 3x telephoto. You can pick up one of these SIM-free for under £800.
And then there’s the Honor Magic 7 Pro, which is only £650, but still provides an enticing set of features: a 200MP 3x telephoto camera, plus a 50MP main camera with variable aperture and a 50MP ultrawide; 100W charging; and a 120Hz, 5,000cd/m2 peak-brightness display with 4,320Hz PWM dimming.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max holds its own, but in terms of value for money, it does lag a long way behind its principal Android rivals.
Design and new features
I discussed the new design at some length in my iPhone 17 Pro review, and I’ll say the same things here. I simply don’t like it, particularly the two-tone aluminium-and-glass rear and the huge camera bump, which Apple somewhat euphemistically calls a “plateau” – as if to lessen the impact of its size and ugliness. And this being the largest iPhone in the range, there’s definitely no missing it.
There are reasons for this design. The glass is there to facilitate wireless charging. However, the previous glass-and-titanium sandwich was both prettier and more practical. One positive aspect of the new design, though, is its slightly softer-feeling, more rounded frame. If you’re the type of person who doesn’t put their phone in a case, this is a nicer phone to handle than the old one.
The massive camera bump has been implemented to maximise the internal space for a bigger battery. Although I’m moaning about the way it looks, that’s largely a good thing, because the 17 Pro Max has incredible levels of stamina (see the performance and battery life section for full details).
But there’s no getting past this resulting in a significantly heavier, bulkier phone than the iPhone 17 Pro. It measures 78 x 8.75 x 163mm (WDH) with the camera bump adding almost half a centimetre (4.55mm) to the thickness, and it weighs a pocket-sagging 233g.
And that’s before we get to the longevity of the finish, because although the anodising on the iPhone Pro models this year is impressively tough – rated at 9 on the Mohs scale of hardness (the same as the sapphire crystal glass) – some customers have been reporting that the sharp corners surrounding the top of the plateau have been showing evidence of scuffing up and showing the aluminium finish beneath.
There are some reasons to be cheerful, however, and first among these is the presence of Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. There’s also a new vapour-chamber cooling system inside to keep temperatures down and extend battery life.
Display
The screen on the iPhone 17 Pro Max uses what Apple calls its Super Retina XDR technology, which is to say it’s an OLED screen with a resolution of 1,206 x 2,622 pixels, peak brightness of 3,000cd/m2 and an adaptive refresh rate of between 1Hz and 120Hz, topped with tough Ceramic Shield 2 glass.
It comes with all the features you’d expect from an iPhone Pro phone: TrueTone to match the white point of the light in your environment, P3 wide colour gamut support, full-screen always-on display and the Dynamic Island system.
It’s a great screen, no doubt about that, but the specifications don’t tell quite the full story, so I set about measuring the screen armed with my X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus calibrator and the DisplayCal software.
The first thing to note is that you’ll only ever see that 3,000cd/m2 peak brightness in very bright ambient light while watching HDR content. I measured peaks of around 2,940cd/m2 in these conditions.
To be fair to Apple, it is completely transparent about this. Without auto-brightness, it says HDR peaks at 1,600cd/m2 (I measured 1,640cd/m2) and with non-HDR material, the claims are for up to 1,000cd/m2. With auto brightness and very bright ambient light on, I measured 1,072cd/m2.
That’s quite a lot of numberwang to wrap your head around, but in short, what you’re getting here is a display that will remain readable and watchable, however bright your surroundings, whether you’re browsing messages and web pages or watching TVs and movies.
Importantly, it will also dim right down at night, all the way down to 1cd/m2, so there’s no danger of blinding yourself or others if you need to sneak a peek at a notification in a darkened room. And colour accuracy-wise, I have no complaints either. Measuring the Delta E colour error for regular sRGB content, I saw an average of 0.67, which is exceptionally good.
It is worth noting, however, that the screen’s PWM dimming rate does sit at a comparatively low 480Hz, which can cause issues in people sensitive to screen flicker. Other phones, such as the Honor Magic 7 Pro, utilise higher frequency PWM dimming, which causes fewer problems.
Pulse width modulation is a technique used by phone, tablet and laptop manufacturers to dim the display while saving energy. Instead of simply reducing the current to the display to dim it, the LEDs are turned off and on again rapidly – the longer the LEDs are on, the brighter the display and vice versa.
The trouble with PWM is that it can cause eye strain and other symptoms in people sensitive to screen flicker, especially at lower brightness on screens that use lower PWM frequencies.
Cameras
When it comes to the cameras, the big upgrade for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, like the iPhone 17 Pro, is that the telephoto shooter moves up to 48MP from a lowly 12MP, bringing all three cameras up to the same resolution this year.
Oddly, the telephoto pairs this upgrade with a small reduction in optical magnification – down from 5x to 4x – but the boost in resolution is more than enough to compensate, as you can see from the image comparison below:
Read the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s spec sheet closely enough, and you’ll also see Apple boasting of 8x optical-quality zoom. This, however, is mere semantic sleight-of-hand; what you’re actually getting at 8x “optical-quality zoom” is a 48MP image cropped down to 12MP. Apple doesn’t even bother to upscale it back to 48MP for you.
Watch out, too, when shooting anything at around 85cm or closer using the telephoto camera – the iPhone’s standard camera app will switch you to the main camera and use a digital zoom without telling you because the telephoto camera won’t focus much closer than that.
As I mentioned in my iPhone 17 Pro review, the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s cameras are perfectly decent for still photography, but other rivals offer more bang for your buck, notably the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and Google Pixel 10 Pro, both of which offer a 5x optical magnification and up to 100x digital zoom on the telephoto, with the Samsung providing an impressive 200MP sensor on the main camera.
The Honor Magic 7 Pro, meanwhile, offers a 200MP telephoto camera, alongside its 50MP ultrawide and main cameras, and the latter also comes with variable aperture control.
For video recording, despite the lack of 8K capture, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is much stronger than the competition, offering the ability to shoot in 4K at up to 60fps in Dolby Vision or Apple’s ProRes Raw file format with a new feature called Genlock. The latter enables professional videographers to automatically synchronise video clips shot on different devices to a single timing reference signal.
As video professionals will also be painfully aware, however, Apple has not yet solved the lens flare issue that has afflicted iPhones for a number of years. In dark conditions, bright light sources in the frame are echoed as ghost images (of “floaters” as I like to call them) elsewhere in the image.
The last major camera improvement for the iPhone 17 Pro Max is the new selfie camera. This is an 18MP f/1.9 unit that utilises Apple’s Centre Stage tech to deliver a number of benefits. First up, it has a square sensor, which means you can shoot in either portrait or landscape without having to change your grip on the phone – that’s super handy for video clips and calls as well as holiday snaps.
Second, it can detect faces in the frame and automatically zoom and frame the image to fit everyone in. This is a feature that, generally, works pretty well, although image quality on this camera is nowhere near the same standard as the rear cameras.
And while I’m on the subject of selfies, it’s now possible to shoot video in dual-capture mode, recording video from both the front and rear cameras simultaneously, in a picture-in-picture arrangement.
Performance and battery life
As you’d expect, the Apple A19 Pro chip inside the iPhone 17 Pro Max delivers the fastest performance yet in an iPhone, both for CPU and GPU tasks.
The A19 Pro comprises a six-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores, a six-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine for running AI tasks locally. It runs at up to 4.26GHz and delivers a solid performance advantage for single-core, multi-core and GPU tasks over the iPhone 16 Pro, which has a 4GHz A18 Pro chip inside.
In an echo of previous years, its single-core performance is faster than the fastest Android phones running the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor (although this year only just), while multi-core and graphics performance lag behind.
The more interesting aspect of the performance picture, however, is the new vapour chamber cooling system. It’s designed to help the phone perform at a higher level for longer before slowing and throttling down due to thermal issues. This does indeed have an effect.
I ran the 3DMark Steel Nomad Light stress test, and rather than performance falling off a cliff after a minute or so, as it did with the iPhone 16 Pro, it tailed off gently over time. Better yet, over the course of the test, unlike the iPhone 17 Pro, the Pro Max lost less of its performance overall.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max’s battery life, on the other hand, is unequivocally brilliant. With more space internally, the battery is Apple’s biggest yet, and I saw the iPhone Pro Max soar past the 17 Pro’s time of 31hrs 31mins to hit 37hrs 57mins in our video rundown test.
That makes it the longest-lasting iPhone ever (in our testing), and it even managed to beat the previously unrivalled Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Verdict
The iPhone 17 Pro Max isn’t outright the best phone you can buy. Most Android phones deliver far better value, and I’m not a huge fan of the design, either, which is ugly and a little bulky.
But the iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t need to be the outright best in every category to be a success because it doesn’t miss the mark by much in any particular category.
It’s fast, the screen is very good, the cameras are highly capable, and the battery life beats pretty much all comers. I still think the iPhone 17 Pro is the pick of the iPhone bunch this year based on value, pocketability and overall performance, but if you’re an iPhone devotee who prefers a larger phone, the Pro Max will not disappoint.
