iPhone 16 Pro Max vs OnePlus 12: now that's a comparison
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Intro
The iPhone 16 Pro Max has just been announced — 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!
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. In fact, let's compare how Apple's new heavy-hitter stands up to the OnePlus 12.
iPhone 16 Pro Max vs OnePlus 12:
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | OnePlus 12 |
|---|---|
| Titanium frame, beveled but otherwise flat sides | Slightly curved display and back panel edges |
| 6.9-inch OLED display, 120 Hz, 2,000-nit peak | 6.8-inch OLED display, 120 Hz, 4,500-nit peak |
| Apple A18 Pro, 8 GB RAM | Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, 12 GB, 16 GB RAM versions |
| Apple Intelligence, full AI suite coming with iOS 18 | Clean Android with the Google Assistant / eventually Gemini |
| 20 W wired charging | Superfast 80 W wired charging |
| 25 W MagSafe chardging | Very fast 50 W wireless charging |
| Triple camera, with a 5x telephoto | Triple camera, with a 3x telephoto |
| Action Button, Camera Control | Hardware mute switch on side |
Table of Contents:
Design and Display Quality
Apple doubles down on titanium
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 more than just mute the phone. But not more than one thing at a time — you assign it an action and that's it. Kind of a letdown, yes.
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 Green, 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.
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 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. Minimum brightness measures at 1.8 nits, which is fine, but may be a bit much for sensitive eyes when used in the dark.
Stay tuned for the iPhone benchmarks!
The front panels are protected by tempered glass — 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 will come with 12 GB and16 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.
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.
There's also the new Visual Intelligence, which is basically like Google Lens — you point the camera to something, you do a quick search. But it's a bit more contextual — if you point it to an event poster, you can add that to your calendar automatically. We would assume it will also be able to grab phone numbers from posters.
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.
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.
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.
| 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 |
The Apple Camera Button will change the experience with the camera app quite a lot. It's a depressable button, which can launch camera and activeta the shutter. But it also detects half-pressure and swipes, so you can select and change the settings of the camera without fumbling through the UI on the display.
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. Look, we have no doubt that Apple can pull some dark magic when it comes to voice focus and noise reduction. But what kind of studio microphone are we talking about here? Probably the marketing kind.
Supposedly that's what unlocks a new Audio Mix edit after recording a clip — you can focus in on the voices of the people in the shot and mute everything else, or you can get the sound mixed like it's a movie, with all voices towards the center of the spectrum. It's... weird, and interesting, and we will check it out.
Battery Life and Charging
No fast charging, meet VOOC charging
We don't have the exact specs for the iPhone's batteries yet — Apple doesn't delve into those numbers, so we are patiently waiting for a teardown. Pre-release reports stated something to the tune of 4,700 mAh, which is not quite as big as your regular Android flagship, but definitely the biggest battery on an iPhone yet. And we expect it to give us a day-and-a-half to two days of use with ease. iOS freezes apps and preserves battery percentages quite successfully.
According to Apple, the iPhone 16 Pro Max can do 29 hours of video streaming on a single charge. Compared to the official Apple numbers for the iPhone 15 Pro Max, that's a 13.8% increase in endurance. So, on our tests, it should pull around:
- Web browsing ~ 22 hours
- YouTube streaming ~ 11 hours
- Gaming ~ 10 hours 40 minutes
The OnePlus 12 has already been through our tests and we know for a fact that it does:
- Web browsing - 18 hours 14 minutes
- YouTube streaming - 13 hours 37 minutes
- Gaming - 9 hours 31 minutes
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. Somehow, we have a feeling the iPhone 16 Pro Max won't beat that. Also, the OnePlus 12 supports 50 W wireless charging with the proper OnePlus charging pad.
Specs Comparison
The iPhone 16 Pro Max vs OnePlus 12 specs show us the bigger picture. This is a difference of $1,199 vs $799 MSRP:
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | OnePlus 12 | |
|---|---|---|
| Size, weight | 6.42 x 3.06 x 0.32 inches (163.0 x 77.6 x 8.25 mm) 8.01 oz (227.0 g) | 6.47 x 2.98 x 0.36 inches (164.3 x 75.8 x 9.15 mm) 7.76 oz (220.0 g) |
| Screen | 6.9" OLED LTOP 1-120 Hz 2,000-nit peak brightness | 6.8" OLED LTPO 1-120Hz 4,500-nit peak brightness |
| Processor | Apple A18 Pro 3 nm | Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 4 nm |
| Storage, RAM, Price | 256 GB / 8 GB / $1,199 512 GB / 8 GB / $1,399 1 TB / 8 GB / $1,599 | 256 GB / 12 GB / $799.99 512 GB / 16 GB / $899.99 |
| Cameras | Wide: 48 MP, F1.78 Ultra-wide: 48 MP, F2.2 Telephoto: 12 MP, 5x Front: 12 MP | Wide: 50 MP, F1.6 Ultra-wide: 50 MP, F2.2 Telephoto: 64 MP, 3x Front: 32 MP |
| Battery | ~4,700 mAh | 5,400 mAh |
| Charging | USB-C 20 W wired 25 W MagSafe 15 W Qi2 | USB-C 80 W wired 50 W wireless |
Summary
In all fairness, the OnePlus 12 is now about 9 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 in early 2025, if release schedules remain the same.
But, for the time being — this is how the "Never Settle" flagship compares against the soon-to-arrive iPhone 16 Pro Max — a flagship that felt like it's settled during that Glowtime presentation.
More to come as the iPhones become available and we run them through our benchmark matrix!
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