APPLE

More performance at the expense of design: Verdict on the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max

The iPhone 17 Pro Max maintains Apple's familiar formula, but swaps titanium for aluminum, prioritizing lightness over luxury. The new body mixes glass, ceramic, and metal, with a good finish but small visible gaps. The design remains robust, with IP68 certification and pleasant ergonomics despite its weight.

The 6.9-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display maintains a high level of quality, with intense brightness, precise contrast, and a variable refresh rate up to 120 Hz. The anti-reflective coating improves readability in sunlight, and support for HDR10 and Dolby Vision ensures visual quality. The stereo sound remains balanced, but slightly less powerful.

The A19 Pro chip brings efficiency gains and thermal stability. With an improved GPU and a new vapor chamber, performance remains high during long sessions. The 12 GB of RAM ensures fluidity in multitasking and excellent responsiveness in demanding games, without noticeable drops.

iOS 26 introduces the new Liquid Glass design, with smooth transparencies and animations. The interface gained more customization options and better notification control. Apple Intelligence expands AI capabilities with live translation, context recognition, and automatic replies, making the system more dynamic and proactive in daily use.

VEREDICT: Apple's new Pro iPhones feature a striking design with a large camera bump. Aluminum has been revived as the casing material, which may not appeal to everyone, but it does have many advantages, including significantly longer battery life.

Unlike its predecessors, the camera bump on the Apple Phone 17 Pro Max and its little sister model, the iPhone 17 Pro, now extends across the entire width of the back cover. A look under the hood reveals why it has become so large.

The "camera plateau", as Apple calls the bump, not only houses the triple camera with its 48 MP sensors, but also the A19 Pro chip, the cellular modem and an antenna system. Apple uses the freed-up space to give the iPhone 17 Pro models larger batteries.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max's battery capacity increases from 4685 mAh in the iPhone 16 Pro Max to 4823 mAh, which goes hand in hand with a significant increase in runtime. In our tests, the XXL iPhone manages an excellent runtime of almost 29 hours when surfing the web, surpassing its predecessor by almost 8 hours.

The US model of the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max provides even longer battery life because, unlike the EU models, it no longer has a physical SIM slot. This means that a slightly larger battery with a capacity of 5088 mAh fits into the housing.

While the chassis of last year's iPhone Pro models was made out of titanium alloy, Apple has returned to aluminum for the iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Pro. The main reasons for this are better heat conduction, but also lower manufacturing costs. Furthermore, the current Pro models feature a vapor chamber cooling system for the first time.

In combination with the aluminum chassis, the iPhone 17 Pro Max dissipates the waste heat generated during operation more effectively than its predecessor. This is evident, for example, in stress tests, where the smartphone can maintain its performance for longer and also suffers less performance degradation overall.

mundophone