iPhone 16 Pro Max preview: bigger screen, bigger opportunities

Updated: Sep 12, 2024, 7:33 AM

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iPhone 16 Pro Max in black, titanium, white, and desert colors

iPhone 16 Pro Max Intro

The iPhone 16 series is now official! Apple's "Glowtime" event came and went, and we got an earful about Apple AI, new colors for the Apple Watches, Private Cloud Compute, and the new iPhones, of course!

It's a quadruplet of new models, again, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max towers over all of them, of course. The biggest and best, the most powerful and most expensive, and the one with some extra camera tricks up its sleeve.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max gets a slightly bigger screen — now 6.9" instead of 6.7". There's a new Camera Control button, and more features for pro video recording. What else?

Table of Contents:

Specs
Design and Display
Camera
Performance
Software
Battery and Charging
Summary

iPhone 16 Pro Max Specs

First, let's take a look at the iPhone 16 Pro specs and what has changed from before:

iPhone 16 Pro Max	iPhone 15 Pro Max	iPhone 14 Pro Max
Size and Weight 163.0 x 77.6 x 8.25 mm 225 g	Size and Weight 159.9 x 76.7 x 8.25 mm 221 g	Size and Weight 160.7 x 77.6 x 7.85 mm 240 g
Screen 6.9-inch OLED 120Hz	Screen 6.7-inch OLED 120Hz	Screen 6.7-inch OLED 120Hz
Processor Apple A18 Pro 3nm	Processor Apple A17 Pro 3nm	Processor Apple A16 Bionic 4nm
Configurations 8/256GB for $1,199 8/512GB for $1,399 8/1TB for $1,599	Configurations 8/256GB for $1,199 8/512GB for $1,399 8/1TB for $1,599	Configurations 6/128GB 6/256GB 6/512GB 6/1TB
Cameras 48MP main 48MP ultra-wide 12MP 5X zoom 12MP front	Cameras 48MP main 12MP ultra-wide 12MP 3X zoom 12MP front	Cameras 48MP main 12MP ultra-wide 12MP 3X zoom 12MP front
Battery ~4,700 mAh	Battery 4,422 mAh	Battery 4,323 mAh
Charging 20W wired 25W MagSafe	Charging 20W wired 15W MagSafe	Charging 20W wired 15W MagSafe

iPhone 16 Pro Max Design and Display

A new button? Not very Apple-like

iPhone 16 Pro Max from the front, a hand pressing the power button to activate the new AI Siri

The iPhone 16 Pro Max sticks to the design we've known since the iPhone 12 series. Yes, now it's all covered in titanium, and there have been some facelifts, but the general guidelines are there.

For example, we have some more screen now — now grown to 6.9 inches. But the iPhone 16 Pro Max itself is barely bigger — it just has a razor-thin bezel around the display. Cool.

As usual, the screen is protected by the Ceramic Shield on the front — a new generation of the shatter-resistant glass, Apple says —, and it's rated IP68 for water and dust protection. USB C makes its second appearance on an iPhone ever — and with the Pro models, it's a USB 3 port for much faster data transfer speeds. But you will need a cable that supports at least 10 Gb/s to make use of it — that's not what the iPhone ships with.

We have a new hardware button on all iPhone 16 models! A Camera Control Button, which operates as both a shutter and slider. It's a capacitive area that's also pressure-sensitive — a light press allows you to shuffle through different settings for the slider, a hard press takes a snap. Swiping across will modify the currently-selected setting. Also, it's a camera shortcut button — press it and the app opens up instantly.

iPhone 16 Pro Max in landscape, camera app open, hand using the new Camera Control Button to adjust settings on the fly

Of course, the good old Action Button makes a return. Some people liked to make the Action Button their camera shortcut — now that this function is free, you can set it to open another app, put the phone in a special DND mode, light the flashlight, or something else.

In terms of colors, we expect the iPhone 16 Pro Max to come in:

Black Titanium
White Titanium
Natural Titanium
Desert Titanium

Learn more about all the iPhone 16 colors here.

In the box, we expect to get the phone, USB C cable, and nothing much more.

The phone will still have a Face ID system for secure unlocks — hence why it will still have the Dynamic Island cutout at the top of the screen, which is an acquired taste by now.

It's still a Super Retina XDR display with ProMotion. Let's untangle the marketing speak — it's an HDR-capable OLED display with a 120 Hz refresh rate. Brightness remains the same, at 2,000 nits peak brightness, but the minimum has been upgraded to go as low as 1 nit.

It has a 2868 x 1320 pixel resolution, which means sharpness is about 460 pixels per inch. The aspect ratio is 19.5:9, like before.

iPhone 16 Pro Max Camera

Upgrading the ultra-wide

Now that Apple has upgraded the main camera and the telephoto camera on the iPhone Pro Max in the past, it's time for the ultra-wide to shine.

So, the main camera will retain that 48 MP sensor that was an excellent upgrade a couple of years ago. The 12 MP zoom camera will still come with that 5x tetraprism lens. And now, we get a 48 MP ultra-wide camera to match that main one. Apple still does quad-pixel binning for 12 MP pictures with better light sensitivity, but we will also be able to take raw full-res photos with it, like it does with the main sensor.

As for video, we are getting some massive upgrades to audio, which we find hard to believe — with the power of AI and the iPhone 16 Pro's excellent microphones, you'd be able to filter out and process voices from a recorded video. What Apple showed in the presentation looked (sounded) incredible — almost unbelievable. We'll see if the iPhone truly performs this way in reality!

Slow motion capture has gotten a huge upgrade — now able to record 4K at 120 FPS. That's a lot of frames that you can slow down at super-high res and aspiring vloggers or film enthusiasts would problably love to play with that.

An upgrade for Photographic Styles has also been introduced — now, we will get even more control over how styles act and adjust vibrancy on per-color basis, if we wish. You will also be able to retroactively remove them from photos, so... kind of like adfanced filters?

And, of course, we can't not mention the AI image tuneups that were inevitable. iOS 18 will bring us the new "Clean Up" tool in Photos, which allows you to easily remove an object, much like Google's Magic Eraser feature. Apple has added a few nice animations to this and while the results are not always perfect, it's a really cool tool to have.

iPhone 16 Pro Max Performance & Benchmarks

Superpowered silicon — we hope it stays cool

The 16 Pro Max has the new Apple A18 Pro chipset humming inside. It's built on an improved 3nm process and comes with a 6-core GPU to power these gaming moments. And, Apple specifically stated that the improved thermals of the new iPhones will ensure at least 20% better sustained performance — a clear throwback to last year's phones with the A17 Pro, which weren't doing great in the heat department.

No joke, Apple is taking a foray into gaming — console-grade games have started popping up for iOS and iPadOS — and the new iPhones supposedly have improved cooling for better sustained performance. Wait for the benchmarks, boys, but this one might be the one to get!

We will now get Wi-Fi 7 as well — something that Android flagships were prepared for almost a year prior. It's a new protocol and standard, which allows for mucha faster — and more stable — data transfers between your phone and router. You do need the latter to be Wi-Fi 7 compliant as well, of course.

But, Apple will also want it to shine in AI. There are exclusive NPU cores inside the A18 Pro to power those Apple Intelligence features that will be coming out throughout the year.

Storage options start at 256 GB and go up to 512 GB and 1 TB, like last year. Prices start from $1,199 — no change there, thankfully.

iPhone 16 Pro Max Software

AI will be the name of the game for a while, and iOS 18 is jumping into the fray loaded with various AI features. Well... some AI features. Apple takes it seriously and has built an entire system that it calls the Private Cloud Compute — basically, anything that AI can't do on your iPhone will be sent to and calculated in the cloud. But it's all encrypted, all super-secure, Apple says.

So, what will AI do on launch? Image tuneups, generative editing — these, we've seen before. A new Visual Intelligence, where you point the camera to something to get info about it — kind of like Google Lens. A new way to reorder your notifications, based on importance and personal meaning. Generated auto replies or assistance when composing messages and emails. And Siri will now be so smart that it can tell you how to do stuff on the iPhones that you don't know about — basically killing a lot of How To articles on the Internet (besides "How to activate Siri?")

iPhone 16 Pro Max Battery

Bigger battery, faster charging?

With a slightly bigger size, the iPhone 16 Pro Max will house a slightly bigger battery — Apple doesn't reveal those "geeky numbers", though — not for iPhones. So, we will have to wait for a teardown to see the exact specs of the cell inside.

But it also comes down to the CPU's energy efficiency and the operating system's resource management. We typically get great battery life from the Pro Max models — iOS is adamant on freezing and stopping background tasks, so the phone barely drains energy in standby. Which is why we easily get 2 days of regular use from an iPhone 15 Pro Max.

What Apple does reveal are battery life estimates according to their own internal tests. Here's what the official numbers say about the recent iPhones:

Video Playback	Video Streaming	Audio Playback
16 Pro Max: 33 hours	16 Pro Max: 29 hours	16 Pro Max: 105 hours
16 Plus: 27 hours	16 Plus: 24 hours	16 Plus: 100 hours
16 Pro: 27 hours	16 Pro: 22 hours	16 Pro: 85 hours
16: 22 hours	16: 18 hours	16: 80 hours

Apple hasn't been in a hurry to get fast charging to its phones. The iPhone 16 Pro Max now gets upgraded MagSafe — 25W MagSafe charging, up from 15W. But wired charging is still capped at 20W.

Summary

The iPhone 16 Pro Max is shaping up to be a solid device — no surprises there. One might say it's a "boring" upgrade, as Apple doesn't do major sweeps every year, but hey — the iPhone has gotten this far for a reason. It's predictably dependable, solid, and delivers a premium experience in every front without taking too many risks (well... risks were once taken, like taking the headphone jack out, and it somehow worked).

We'd love to get our mitts on it and run it through all our torture tests and our new camera benchmark, we'll have more to share then! Pre-orders open on the 13th, shipping — on the 20th of September.

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Preslav, a member of the PhoneArena team since 2014, is a mobile technology enthusiast with a penchant for integrating tech into his hobbies and work. Whether it's writing articles on an iPad Pro, recording band rehearsals with multiple phones, or exploring the potential of mobile gaming through services like GeForce Now and Steam Link, Preslav's approach is hands-on and innovative. His balanced perspective allows him to appreciate both Android and iOS ecosystems, focusing on performance, camera quality, and user experience over brand loyalty.