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Intro
The iPhone 16 Pro Max is now out and is finaly getting the first hints with AI thanks to the recent iOS 18.1 update. The phone itself is, of course, Apple's next big bad smartphone that, like it or not, will become the industry standard that other flagships measure up to. Whether it be other expensive premium phones — like the Galaxy S24 Ultra — or handsets that are priced more aggressively, but cut down on some extras... like the OnePlus 12!
In fairness, the OnePlus 13 is right at the doorstep, seemingly ready for a global release. Once that's out, it'll be a much more fair comparison against Apple's heavy hitter. But, for the time being, we have the OnePlus 12 on hand, so that's what we are comparing!
Now, don't take us the wrong way, we think the OnePlus 12 is an excellent phone with a lovely design, very snappy performance, and decent camera. It offers a lot of phone for its price, and it's very possible you wouldn't find yourself missing any "extra bells and whistles" that top-tier flagships come with. In fact, let's compare how Apple's new heavy-hitter stands up to the OnePlus 12.
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12/256GB OnePlus 12: $150 off and free OnePlus Buds Pro 3
The base OnePlus 12 model with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage is now available at $150 off via the OnePlus Store. On top of that, you get a free pair of the OnePlus Buds Pro 3 ($179.99 value) with your smartphone purchase.
You can also grab your fancy OnePlus 12 phone straight at Amazon. The base storage model featuring 12GB RAM and 256GB storage is now available for 19% off its MSRP.
The new iPhone 16 Pro Max looks a lot like the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but does add more... stuff to the existing formula. Most obviously, a new Camera Control Button, which we will get into later. That's another addition to last year's Action Button, which can be programmed to do various different things. Then, the screen is slightly bigger than before, now at 6.9" thanks to slimmer bezels. And the titanium finish comes in a new color, called Desert Titanium — kind of brown.
The OnePlus 12 also looks very similar to its own predecessor. It's a softer shape with rounded corners, with a curved display edges, and a curved back panel. With that much tapering, the OnePlus 12 feels incredibly thin, and it's also on the lighter side. Though, its metal frame ends up being quite thin. Those that are looking for a nice flat edge to grip on to will immediately prefer the iPhone here.
The OnePlus continues to be the only Android flagship to have a hardware mute switch, which is wild — that's such a convenient little controller to have!
iPhones have had those for ages, though the classic mute switch is now a new Action Button, which can be programed to do other stuff than just mute the phone. But you can only assign one type of action to it, which is kind of a letdown.
For biometric locking, we have Face ID on the iPhone 16 Pro Max, obviously. It's quick, intitive, and secure. On the OnePlus 12, we have an optical under-screen fingerprint scanner, which is also very good. It's quick to read and unlock the phone and mostly accurate.
The OnePlus 12 is up in two color options — the flagship finish you will be seeing in all promo materials is the new Flowy Emerald, which looks almost like a liquid frozen in time. Then, there's the Silky Black, with the back glass having a disctinct grippy texture applied to it. The iPhone 16 Pro Max colors are Black, White, Natural, and Desert Titanium, with the latter dominating the marketing materials and seeming to be the audience fave as well.
On the bottom, we get USB C ports — now standardized across the industry. And both support USB 3 transfer speeds, welcome to 2024!
As for what's in the box — OnePlus uses special SuperVOOC chargers to get its incredibly fast charging speeds. So, it includes the 80 W wallplug in the box, making sure you can enjoy the optimal charging! The iPhone... comes with a nice braided cable!
The iPhone 16 Pro Max has the largest iPhone display thus far — now grown to 6.9 inches, thanks to its super-thin bezels. It has the rather awkward resolution of 1320 x 2868 pixels to achieve the sharp 460 pixels per inch. And it's still an OLED panel with a 1-120 Hz refresh rate, and 2,000 nit peak brightness. This year, it has been slightly "upgraded" with the ability to hit 1 nit minimum brightness — bedside users will aprreciate that.
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The OnePlus 12 has a large 6.82-inch display with sharp QHD+ resolution (3216 x 1440 pixels - 510 PPI) and a dynamic refresh rate between 1 Hz and 120 Hz. It's also a high quality OLED panel and you get to fine-tune its colors a bit — whether you want super-saturated or tame and realistic. The iPhone sticks to the one color tuning that Apple chooses for you (and it's also excellent).
The CIE 1931 xy color gamut chart represents the set(area)of colors that a display can reproduce,with the sRGB colorspace(the highlighted triangle)serving as reference.The chart also provides a visual representation of a display's color accuracy. The small squares across the boundaries of the triangle are the reference points for the various colors, while the small dots are the actual measurements. Ideally, each dot should be positioned on top of its respective square. The 'x:CIE31' and 'y:CIE31' values in the table below the chart indicate the position of each measurement on the chart. 'Y' shows the luminance (in nits) of each measured color, while 'Target Y' is the desired luminance level for that color. Finally, 'ΔE 2000' is the Delta E value of the measured color. Delta E values of below 2 are ideal.
The Color accuracy chart gives an idea of how close a display's measured colors are to their referential values. The first line holds the measured (actual) colors, while the second line holds the reference (target) colors. The closer the actual colors are to the target ones, the better.
The Grayscale accuracy chart shows whether a display has a correct white balance(balance between red,green and blue)across different levels of grey(from dark to bright).The closer the Actual colors are to the Target ones,the better.
The OnePlus 12 does promise a shocking peak brightness of 4,500 nits, which is a lot — like a "why?" type of a lot. The iPhone 16 Pro Max has a 2,000 nit peak brightness, which should be good enough to view HDR content even outside.
For casual, everyday use, we measure average picture level (APL), which gives us a better idea of how bright the display gets when reading emails or taking photos. The OnePlus 12 hits around 1,100 nits there — which is pretty good and usable, and slightly higher than the iPhone, which reached 1,040 nits. In real life, both feel plenty bright, so no worries about usage outdoors.
You will also notice that both have relatively the same color cast. They slightly drift to the warm yellows, which is fine and barely an issue in real life. The iPhone has the True Tone feature, which constantly adjusts color temperature based on your ambient lighting, but OnePlus answers that with Nature Tone, which is essentially the same thing. Long story short — both phones adjust their colors automatically and we find that they are pretty and close to reality.
The front panels are protected by tempered glass, where Apple has the newest Ceramic Shield, which has proven to be quite shatter-resistant. OnePlus uses Corning's latest-gen Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which is also top-tier.
Performance and Software
Apple's second-gen 3nm is here
All eyes are on the iPhone 16 series with their Apple A18 chips. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is powered by an Apple A18 Pro, built on an improved 3 nm process. It's supposed to be more powerful and more energy-efficient than even last year's A17 Pro. More importantly, Apple says it has upgraded the thermals for 20% better sustained performance. After all, that was the A17 Pro's biggest drawback — it was fast... for a bit.
With a 6-core GPU and hardware ray tracing, the A18 Pro is aiming to be a mobile gaming chipset, and Apple made sure to mention that a couple of times on stage. As you probably know, we now have Resident Evil: Village, Death Stranding, Assassin's Creed: Mirage on the mobile App Store. And more will, undoubtedly, come.
The OnePlus 12 has the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 — still built on a 4 nm process, but nonetheless a heavy hitter. Almost as fast and powerful as the A17 Pro before it — it also comes with ray tracing and tons of productivity up its sleeve. Sadly, the Android ecosystem hasn't scored a deal with console-grade game developers just yet, but rest assured that the OnePlus 12 can run the fancy Hoyoverse games or the hot Arena Breakout extraction shooter.
The OnePlus 12 comes with 12 GB and 16 GB of RAM, in storage tiers of 256 GB, 512 GB. The iPhone 16 Pro Max has 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, all with 8 GB of RAM.
The performance numbers are not too shocking. The iPhone has plenty of CPU power, ergo the GeekBench points are quite high. Impressive work from the Snapdragon in the OnePlus for the 3DMark test — it does peak higher than the iPhone, but ultimately throttles below the iPhone's minimum. We did find that, just as with the A17 Pro last year, this year's A18 Pro peaks high for the first cycle of 3DMark, but immediately throttles down. However, it sustains that 3000-ish level for the full 20 cycles of the benchmark torture test, which is quite good.
As for software — we are looking at iOS 18 with Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute vs vanilla Android 14. What does any of that mean? Well, the "Apple Intelligence" features, which we first saw demoed at WWDC, are a collection of the many things we've seen before. Generative photo editing and "magic eraser", image generation, auto reply composer, text redaction with specific tone and meaning, scanning camera information to perform Google searches, and if all else fails — a ChatGPT integration with Siri.
Right now, we are at iOS 18.1, which added the first AI features. Most of them have to do with text — summarizing emails, helping you format your messages a bit better, summarizing actual phone calls to short text notes, smart search in Photos, which lets you get very specific, and Image Playground, which allows you to generate images via text prompt. More to come with iOS 18.2, which should bring about that ChatGPT integration into iOS as well. Also, Siri is now more contextually aware and conversational.
The OnePlus 12 currently has Android 14, and it has received the Gemini Assistant update. Google has stated that it wants to bring AI to all of Android — with Pixels as the testbed. So, the OnePlus 12 now has a slightly smarter language model assistant, but nowhere near the full integration of AI across its operating system, like iOS 18 will eventually.
The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max now come with Wi-Fi 7 connectivity — Android flagships can say "welcome", as the OnePlus 12 was ready and waiting for the protocol to launch. Wi-Fi 7. This newes standard allows for faster connections, more robust routers, and muti-channel transfer, meaning Wi-Fi 7 devices can connect over 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz simultaneously for even faster and more stable transfers.
Camera
Square stove, round stove — what's the difference?
The iPhone 16 Pro Max comes with a 48 MP main camera, an upgraded 48 MP ultra-wide camera with auto-focus for macro, and a 12 MP telephoto camera with the 5x tetraprism lens. By digitally cropping into the sensors, Apple gives you automatic steps of 0.6x, 1x, (2x), (3x), and 5x (where (is digital)).
The OnePlus 12 comes with the same Hasselblad branding on its lenses as before, but also a new sensor inside — the 50 MP Sony LYT-808, which employs a new dual-layer tech to collect more light. The ultra-wide is another 50 MP sensor, and also allows for auto-focus macro. The zoom camera is a 3x telephoto with a 64 MP sensor. OnePlus crops into that sensor to take "lossless" 6x photos, too.
iPhone 16 Pro Max
OnePlus 12
Main camera
48 MP, F1.78
50 MP, F1.6
Ultra-wide
48 MP, F2.2
50 MP, F2.2
Telephoto
12 MP, F2.8, 5x zoom
64 MP 3.0x zoom
PhoneArena Camera Score:
Photo
Video
Phone
Camera Score
Photo Score
Main (wide)
Ultra Wide
Selfie
Zoom
Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max
154
158
82
24
28
25
OnePlus 12
145
152
79
21
27
25
Phone
Camera Score
Video Score
Main (wide)
Ultra Wide
Selfie
Zoom
Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max
154
150
76
23
27
24
OnePlus 12
145
139
73
20
26
20
Find out more details about photo and video scores for all phones we have tested on our PhoneArena Camera Score page
Of course, Apple kind of broke the camera game when it introduced Photographic Styles — the ability to fine-tune how the iPhone processes your photos. You can choose to have punchier colors or more contrast in your dynamics. With the iPhone 16 series, Photographic Styles get upgraded to give you even finer control over exact colors. You can save your custom setups and recall them easily with the Camera Control Button.
After playing with it for a while, they do give you the illusion of camera customization, while being quite restrictive still. The colors and settings you can affect are still pre-determined. But you do have some freedom to create a favorite camera style with the iPhone, so that's good.
The Apple Camera Button sounds like it changes the camera experience with the iPhone 16, but we found that it doesn't really. It's a bit awkward to use, it's flush to the frame, which makes it require a bit of pressure to press in, and we often find ourselves just using the software shutter button — the way we are used to.
For video — iPhones have been excellent these past few years. Now, we are getting 4K at 120 FPS for super-fine, super-slow motion. On the flip side — the OnePlus 12 can record 8K video at 24 FPS.
The iPhone 16 Pro Max now has a — hold on to your seats for this — "Studio quality, 4-mic array", with exceptional wind noise reduction. Yes, we poke fun at the "studio quality" marketing term, but the new Audio Mix editor for recorded videos is actually pretty good. You have 3 presets to choose from, and you can choose how heavily to apply them. They easily clear out background noise and give voices a different tuneup and stereo positioning, depending on which mode you choose.
Battery Life and Charging
No fast charging, meet VOOC charging
Thanks to teardowns, we now know that the iPhone 16 Pro Max battery is rated at 4,685 mAh, which is definitely the biggest battery on an iPhone yet. And, it performs as expected — with iOS' energy efficiency and optimizations, you can easily drag it out for two days with casual usage.
The OnePlus 12 is breaking through the 5,000 mAh barrier to give us a 5,400 mAh battery — quite the achievement, considering how thin and light the phone feels. And our battery tests showed us that it can also comfortably give you two days of use.
As our benchmarks show, the iPhone can give you 10 hours of consistent screen-on, no matter what you are doing. That's iPad levels of battery endurance — quite good! Our Battery Life estimate is a calculation of how much time you can get from a phone with heavy, constant usage. As you can see, both of these can last you a full working day with no rest sessions and no time on a wireless charger. Now, add a Qi2 puck to the mix and you have easy sustain!
For charging — those that trusted rumors saying the iPhone is getting fast charging will be disappointed. The iPhone 16 Pro Max still caps out at 20 W wired and 25 W MagSafe wireless charging.
The OnePlus 12 charges via a 100 W SuperVOOC charger and goes from 0% to 100% in 37 minutes. Also, the OnePlus 12 supports 50 W wireless charging with the proper OnePlus charging pad. So, even if you forget to charge with the OnePlus, you have a very easy "get out of battery jail" card, while the iPhone will take a while to charge back up.
Audio Quality and Haptics
The iPhone 16 Pro Max speakers sound good... shockingly good. They are loud, meaty, with lots of details in the mids and very good bass. As good as a medium-sized Bluetooth speaker — no qualms about listenting to music through them. In comparison, the OnePlus 12 speakers are OK at best. Kind of tinny, kind of compress-y, and a bit harsh in the upper midrange. So, they are still OK for YouTube binging.
As for haptics, both phones click with a pleasing tap whenever you interact with the interface. No complaints about feedback speed and accuracy!
In all fairness, the OnePlus 12 is now about 10 months old. It'd be a much fairer comparison when we get to look at the OnePlus 13 vs the iPhone 16 Pro Max — which should happen within weeks. The official OnePlus 13 page in China is now official, and if history teaches us anything, it's that a global release is about a month off. Unless OnePlus staggers the release a bit more for one reason or another.
For the time being, this is how the most current "Flagship Killer" looks against the big bad titanium beast. Or, you may be visiting this page from the future, wondering if you should get a OnePlus 12 at a bargain clearance price. If that's the case, then first of all — hi! Secondly, yes!
Consensus is that the OnePlus is "pretty good!". It has an MSRP of $800, but is reduced to $650 at the time of updating this article, and that's almost half the iPhone 16 Pro Max price. But it is definitely not half the phone — it's snappy, it's pretty, it has a great screen. Is the iPhone "better"? Yeah, with a better camera, better speakers, and software depending on your subjective opinion about iOS. But is it twice as good as the OnePlus 12? Not really.
So, while the OnePlus 12 is no "iPhone killer" it is certainly a viable alternative — nay — a very good smartphone if you don't want to approach that $1k threshold that other flagships are very comfortably crossing nowadays.
(but the iPhone 16 Pro Max is better)
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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.
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