iPhone 17 Pro Max review: Pro with a capital ‘P’

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There was a time when Apple offered one iPhone model. That’s it. You want an iPhone, you got it. Does someone else you know want an iPhone? They got the same one you did.

Times are a little more complicated, and now Apple offers multiple iPhone lines and models. Plenty of reasons exist for why that is, including the evolution of technology, the maturing of the market, Apple’s approach to sales, and more. But all that doesn’t matter to you. What matters is that a simple task is no longer so: Which iPhone should I get?

Apple is doing its part to clarify which iPhone is the right one for each customer. Take the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the focus of this review. It’s Apple’s top-of-the-line phone, and it’s oozing with high-end features. Those high-end features are geared towards professionals more than ever–it’s really a Pro model–which means that for regular folks, the iPhone 17 Pro Max may be more phone than they need.

That being said, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is an iPhone that can make you feel like you can accomplish almost anything. It’s an iPhone that empowers the person holding it. That’s special.

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The iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro Max are almost identical, using the same type of display, chip and other internals, cameras, and other aspects. While this review looks at the iPhone 17 Pro Max, many of the evaluative statements made here can apply to the iPhone 17 Pro. The clear exceptions are the phone’s display and battery, where this review specifically addresses the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

iPhone 17 Pro Max: The color and the shape

I am the proud owner of an orange car, so that gives you an idea of how I feel about the iPhone 17 Pro’s Cosmic Orange. It’s one of the better colors Apple has used on an iPhone. It’s rich, electric, and fun, but it almost doesn’t matter because I always use a case. A clear case lets the orange through but dampens the effect.

I am using an Apple TechWoven Case with MagSafe in Sienna, and time will tell if TechWoven holds up better than FineWoven. But for $59, it better not fall apart. You can get a sturdy case for much less with the help of our iPhone 17 case guide. One important thing: USB-C cables with wider plug casings won’t plug in if you have the TechWoven Case on. The case gets in the way. Apple’s USB-C cables, which have a narrower plug, work fine.

The iPhone 17 Pro is available in two other colors, Deep Blue and Silver. Black isn’t an option, which is odd considering its popularity. Again, if you’re using a case, it doesn’t matter. Get a black case.

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If you thought the previous Pro Maxs were too big, this one won’t change your mind. The overall size of the iPhone 17 Pro Max is a smidge larger than the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and noticeably larger than the iPhone 15 Pro Max. I prefer iPhones in this size category, and though it is larger than ever, it hasn’t yet stretched the boundaries of my comfort when carrying and using it all day.

With the iPhone 15 Pro, Apple introduced a titanium frame into the Pro series, and continued with titanium in the 16 Pro. But with the iPhone 17 Pro, Apple switched to a proprietary “aerospace-grade” aluminum and implemented it as a unibody instead of a frame. The unibody provides rigidity and works with a new vapor chamber to dissipate heat that could affect performance. Apple claims it’s 20 times greater at thermal conductivity and “significantly lighter” than titanium.

Apple also introduced Ceramic Shield 2, an improvement of the Ceramic Shield treatment of the glass Apple uses for the front of the phone. Ceramic Shield 2 offers better scratch resistance, but more importantly, it comes with an anti-reflective coating that’s supposed to reduce glare by 60 percent. While I didn’t take an awl to the phone to test the scratch resistance, I did notice the anti-reflectivity, and it makes a noticeable difference compared to previous models. I can stop ducking away from the sun and other lights when using the iPhone 17 Pro Max. As for the back glass, it has the original Ceramic Shield treatment.

The camera bar–excuse me, the “plateau”– is a big departure from the camera array on past iPhones. Fortunately, it didn’t hinder my handling of the phone at all. Apple put the plateau to practical use by placing components other than the cameras inside it to make room for more battery and installing an antenna around the rim, which is an ingenious use of space that takes full advantage of Apple silicon’s efficiency. It’s also clear that Apple also uses the plateau as a way to instantly tell it’s an iPhone Pro, especially in Cosmic Orange. Just go to Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro website and bam!–the orange plateau is up front and center.

iPhone 17 Pro Max: Cameras come together

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have three “Fusion” cameras: a main camera, an ultra-wide camera, and a telephoto camera, each of them at 48 megapixels. Here’s how the Fusion part comes into play: Apple shoots a 12MP and a 48MP image and uses digital processing to create the best image at 24MP. (You can shoot pictures at 48MP, but there are some restrictions, and it creates very large file sizes.)

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Having all three cameras at 48MP is new; past iPhone Pros had only one or two 48MP cameras, either the main (iPhone 15 Pro and earlier) or the main and ultra-wide camera (iPhone 16 Pro). The telephoto finally gets the 48MP Fusion treatment, but to my eyes, I can’t tell the difference in image quality from before–it still looks great.

The iPhone 17 Pro now offers five optical zoom options: .5x, 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x, a nice change from the .5x, 1x, 2x, and 5x on the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, and a jump from older models. The way I personally go about taking pictures relies on zoom a lot, and using the iPhone 16 Plus for the past year felt very limited. Using the optical zoom in the iPhone 17 Pro Max felt like I had been freed from the shackles that had been holding me back. And the images I’ve been shooting look great. Macworld contributor Mahmoud Itani took a deep dive into the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s zoom capabilities if you’d like to learn more.

The camera I’ve been having the most fun with is the new 18MP Center Stage camera, which is also on the iPhone 17 and iPhone Air. We have a separate article that goes into detail about how it works (the article covers the iPhone 17, but it’s the same for the iPhone 17 Pro) and the kind of quality it produces. In my own experience, when taking selfies, I try to avoid shooting vertically because I prefer to have more scenery in my shot. Holding the phone horizontally for a selfie, though, is awkward and sometimes impossible. The ability to hold the phone vertically for a horizontal selfie is a major improvement–and so is the image quality.

Apple added ProRes RAW and Genlock support to the video camera, which joins 4K Dolby Vision at 120 fps, Apple Log, Academy Color Encoding System, and other pro-level features that moviemakers and other serious videographers take advantage of. I may never use those features in any practical way, only in an experimental sense of seeing how they work.

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The video recording feature I think I’ll make use of is the new Dual Capture mode (another feature available on all of the new iPhones). Dual Capture creates a picture-in-picture video, with the back camera as the main footage and the selfie footage in an inserted window. It’s going to take practice to make good Dual Capture videos; I don’t know where to look, which affects how I appear in the video, and splitting my attention between the main footage and the selfie footage while shooting is difficult. Once I get the hang of it, I can see it being very useful at the next hands-on Apple event.

iPhone 17 Pro Max: Overdrive

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max feature the same A19 Pro chip. It has a 6-core CPU (two performance cores and four efficiency cores), a 6-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine. To see how much of an improvement the new A18 offers, we ran a series of benchmarks, starting with Geekbench 6, which offers insight into general, all-around performance.

The iPhone 17 Pro’s A19 Pro chip offers a 20 percent multi-core and a 12 percent single-core increase over the A18 Pro. It’s the incremental but expected improvement we’ve seen from Apple’s last few chip generations. If you’re disappointed and were hoping for more, don’t be. Remember, the iPhone Pro is among the best-performing phones, if not the best. It’s got plenty of horsepower for all users, whether it’s you and me using the phone the way we do daily, an influencer posting to social media, a professional videographer who’s making a movie, or a photographer shooting in RAW file format.

If you’re looking for more dramatic increases, check out these graphic results. The 3Dmark benchmarks focus on gaming performance, which is a good indicator of how well the phone can handle apps with demanding graphics. The improvements range from 40 to 53 percent, which is very nice.

Compared to the iPhone marketing push last year, Apple didn’t say much in regard to AI and Apple Intelligence for the iPhone 17 lineup. Still, the future lies in AI, so we gauge AI performance using the Geekbench AI test. The improvement here is small, between 10 and 15 percent.

USB-C file transfer

Like previous Pro models. iPhone 17 Pro has a USB-C port that supports USB 3.2 file transfer speeds. That’s an advantage over the iPhone Air, iPhone 17, and other older non-Pro iPhones, which have a USB-C port that supports the USB 2 protocol.

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To gauge the difference, I performed a 19GB video file transfer between a M4 MacBook Pro with USB 4 support and the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the iPhone 16 Plus. The 17 Pro Max took 3 minutes and 22 seconds, while the 16 Plus took 8 minutes and 40 seconds, a huge improvement. For professionals shooting video and photos in RAW, the iPhone 17 Pro allows them to be more productive, since there’s less time spent waiting for those huge files to transfer over. You do need to use a USB 3 cable that’s capable of 10Gbps speed to take advantage of this feature.

iPhone 17 Pro Max: Everlong

The iPhone 17 Pro Max has a 5,088 mAh battery, the biggest battery ever in an iPhone. It took the crown from the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which had a 4,685 mAh battery–the iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t just beat it by a smidgen, but by 9 percent. The extra capacity makes a noticeable difference.

We ran the Geekbench 4 battery test until a full battery ran out, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max lasted nearly 26 hours, which is 7 more hours than the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Amazing. Apple states a 39-hour battery life based on video playback on the device, which is less strenuous than the Geekbench 4 test.

Suffice to say, for a vast majority of people, the iPhone 17 Pro Max will last all day, and then some. If you plan to use the phone as production equipment (video and audio recording, for example), or you’re a hardcore gamer, you might need to plug it in at some point, but you expect that as someone with unusual power demands.

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max support MagSafe wireless charging up to 25W, which requires a 30W adapter or higher, and this provides up to a 50 percent charge in 30 minutes. If you use a wired 40W or higher adapter, the iPhone gets up to a 50 percent charge in 20 minutes. Apple is offering a new 40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max ($39/not yet available in the U.K.), but you can use a third-party adapter.

Should you buy the iPhone 17 Pro Max?

The main reason why you should buy an iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max is the camera. You take your photography and/or videography seriously and demand the best tool for the job. Don’t settle for the iPhone 17, and definitely don’t get an iPhone Air. If your profession is on the line, or you take your content creation to heart, get the iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max.

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There is one specific reason for getting the iPhone 17 Pro Max besides the camera, and that is you need the longest battery life you can get. This phone has the biggest battery of any iPhone, and thus, the longest battery life. You can easily get through a full day of heavy use and probably closer to two.

For everyone else, the iPhone 17 has all of the Pro features you need, including Ceramic Shield 2 glass, an 18MP Center Stage camera, Dual Capture mode, and even ProMotion and an always-on display. It’s the iPhone for everyone, while the iPhone 17 Pro is the iPhone for production work. But if you’re the type of person who uses their phone for that type of work, the iPhone 17 Pro is exactly what you’ve been looking for.