iPhone 17 Pro Max review: hello aluminum, my old friend

To be real, the iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t come in with a full arsenal of over-the-top upgrades that remedy all of these points. Max zoom has been upgraded a little, but nothing mind-blowing. AI features are still supposedly incoming, but Apple made sure to not make any huge promises this time around. Instead, Cupertino focused on what’s here, what’s now, and what functions.

In our PhoneArena Review Rating, the iPhone 17 Pro scores 7.9 points, a slight upgrade over the 7.7 score of the 16 Pro. A lot of that comes from just the boost in performance speeds and charging, while the camera changes have not affected the scoring much as colors and dynamic range remain largely the same.

Table of Contents:

iPhone 17 Pro Max Specs

Let’s get serious abour RAM

Here’s a quick overview of the iPhone 17 Pro Max specs and how they compare to the predecessor:

So, I don’t mind the plateau. Especially since, unlike the old iPhone Plus models, which simply inflated the size of a standard iPhone, warts and all, the new iPhone 17 Pro Max‘s proportions have been appropriately touched up. That is to say, that the Pro Max’s camera plateau didn’t simply get inflated with the size of the phone to a point where it gets comically large. It looks… appropriate.

Sure, maybe it’ll need a bit of adjustment, but rest assured that this bold new look is probably already deemed desirable by some. The best part about it — you can rest it against your finger while gripping the phone, and when you lay it on a table, it hardly wobbles. Yeah, hardly — unlike Google’s camera vizors, the camera plateau of the iPhone still has lens rings sticking out that kind of make its back uneven. Again.

So, big, unmissable camera hump aside, the rest of the phone feels very familiar. Slightly tapered edges make it soft on the palm, and the matte aluminum helps too. Oh yes, aluminum — the titanium frame came and went in just two years’ time. Apple did say that it was bad at heat dissipation, making it sound as if the aluminum build is an upgrade. Funny, when 6-7 years ago, aluminum was for the “cheap” iPhones, and the Pro models got stainless steel.

The thin bezels around the screen are as beautiful than ever, and those stock wallpapers complement the design so well — making it impossible to see where the screen ends and the frame begins. Oh, they also cleverly hide the Dynamic Island, too.

Apple also talked up a new anti-glare coating on the screen. My hopes were up, as Samsung’s S24 Ultra and S25 Ultra have this excellent anti-reflection glass that changed the game. Apple’s new solution isn’t as strong, but there’s a mild improvement for sure:

iPhone 17 Pro vs 16 Pro reflectivity (Image credit – PhoneArena)

For biometrics, it’s the tried and true Face ID. Fast, reliable, and quite improved over the years since release (which was with the iPhone X, back in 2017).

iPhone 17 Pro Camera

Is 4X telephoto a downgrade or upgrade?

OK, spoiler alert, the camera plateau is not there because of the cameras. Not really — it’s about having room for the internal hardware, better antennas, and the aforementioned heat management. So, does that mean the camera is not upgraded? Not really, no, it’s just not as massive an upgrade as the visuals suggest.

Now, all three cameras on the back are 48 MP “Fusion” cameras. This means that, for each of them, Apple uses sensor crop-in trickery to simulate “optical” zoom. It’s technically not, as cropping in a digital thing. On the other hand, it definitely produces sharper results than what we get if we try to inflate an image post-shutter.

But Apple likes to advertize that these three lenses can act as eight lenses in total, which is a little bit over the top. Look, we’ll settle at calling them “Fusion” cameras and not digital zoom, but we won’t go as far as calling them 8 lenses. 

The zoom camera also got a new 4X tetraprism lens. Yes, that’s less than the 5X we had in the past, and Apple can’t seem to settle on a number that’s equal parts useful but also sounds good on a specs sheet. Because, for portraits, you want something like 3X tops — that’s when you can be at a comfortable distance from a subject, and the photo comes out “honest” with non-distorted facial lines and good background compression. 5X was too much zoom to use Portrait Mode comfortably. 4X is kind of inbetween — you can work with it, but it’ll feel a bit too strong for some scenarios. Thankfully, you can compromise and use a 2X or 3X “Fusion” zoom from the main camera to get a shot.

Despite going down a notch with optical zoom, the new iPhone 17 Pro Max can now hit 40X digital zoom — a significant upgrade over the 25X of the iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

iPhone 17 Pro Max Camera Samples

The new zoom camera has the biggest upgrade, really — a 56% larger sensor, with better quality and less noise especially in low light. Its native resolution is 48MP, so when you start zooming, the phone aims for “lossless quality” (Fusion!) at up to 8X zoom (200mm). That’s when resolution drops to 24MP due to the crop-in. From there on, you go digital, for a maximum of 40X in photos.

The other huge upgrade is actually with the selfie camera. Yeah, who would’ve thunk it! But Apple did a very Apple thing here. The selfie camera now has an almost square-shaped sensor. Why? Because with the magic of cropping in — again — you can frame a selfie however you wish, without rotating your phone horizontally or vertically. In fact, the notion of “horizontal or vertical” kind of disappears here — you can either let Center Stage decide on the framing for you, or you can very quickly switch framing manually, with new buttons in the camera app.

There’s a hidden upgrade here. As seen in the above capture — when taking a “horizontal” selfie on an older iPhone, you inevitably have your face off-center, and maybe even end up not looking at the camera. Whereas holding the phone vertically means that the selfie camera is still centered as you’d expect it to be, and it’s easier to end up with the selfie you meant to take from the get-go. Also, the lens is wider, so you can fit more friends in.

Video Quality

For another year in a row, we did not get 8K video recording on iPhones. And for another year in a row — Apple actually gave us a meaningful upgrade for video recording that’s much more important.

We can now record in ProRes RAW, which gives you the maximum dynamic range you can get. This allows you to color-correct footage for yourself after the fact and has already been praised by videographers and influencers who enjoy applying their own LUTs to achieve a cinema camera look. This will likely be the most talked about feature, but there’s also another new one — GenLock. It allows you to easily sync multiple cameras on a big production (think Matrix-style bullet time freeze shots).

iPhone 17 Pro Performance & Benchmarks

New vapor chamber is what the A chips needed

The iPhone 17 Pro Max has a new A19 Pro chipset, built on a 3 nm process. And, like its predecessors, it gets hot. Unlike its predecessors, it has an adequate cooling solution, which should finally take care of that tiny little throttling issue we’ve been seeing over the past 2 years.

But let’s not make it sound like it’s a small upgrade. The A19 Pro is a very big leap for both CPU and GPU performance. The manufacturing process is upgraded to TSMC’s new N3P note, vs the previous N3E. N3P is smaller — not small enough to be called 2 nm, but small enough to give us 5% performance gains 5-10% improvement in energy efficiency. Then, the type of RAM is also upgraded. The iPhone 17 Pro now uses LPDDR5X 9600 RAM with faster bandwidth of 76.8GB/s (up from 60GB/s on the previous Pro model), and it gets 12 GB of it instead of 8 GB.

GPU Performance

But the true upgrade seems to lie in GPU results. On 3D Mark’s Solar Bay Extreme test, which is heavily focused on ray tracing, the A19 Pro GPU on the iPhone 17 Pro Max beats the one on the M3 iMac!

Vapor Chamber cooling

A good chunk of the iPhone 17 Pro’s upgrades actually come down to how it’s built. Apple has moved to an aluminum unibody that does a far better job at spreading the heat across the frame, and paired it with a vapor chamber cooling system that whisks that heat away from the chip in no time.

Thermal imaging tells the story pretty clearly. Push the phone through some heavy benchmarks and you’ll see the 17 Pro glow evenly across its body. Compare that to the 16 Pro, which used to flare up with one angry red hotspot right around the processor — a clear sign that heat was bottling up where it shouldn’t.

Numbers back it up too: the iPhone 17 Pro levels out at around 42 °C, while last year’s Pro crept closer to 45 °C. Even against the regular iPhone 17 with its glass back, which lands at roughly 44–45 °C, the Pro shows a cooler, more balanced approach.

iPhone 17 Pro Max Software

By now, iOS 26 with its Liquid Glass design is hardly news — it’s the same sleek interface you’ll find on any modern iPhone, so there isn’t much to dwell on here. Well, we were kind of hoping that public iOS 26 will have less bugs than the beta. There are still some visual issues that pop up and need ironing — some of them requiring you to restart the phone (like all of your app icons disappearing).

We did get a new Live Translate for phone calls or even in real life — if you happen to sport AirPods Pro with your iPhone, you can get translations straight into your ears. And, you can speak in your language and have translated text appear on the phone screen to show to the other party. Seen on other phones, yes, but good to see it come to iPhones with the typical Apple touch.

That said, there was one subtle but important nod to the future. The new A19 Pro chip comes with neural accelerators baked into every GPU core, a clear sign that Cupertino is laying the groundwork for bigger AI announcements down the road. Maybe not this year, but the stage is definitely being set for the next.

Our lab battery tests showed numbers that are both satisfying, yet underwhelming. On one hand — 8+ hours on the gaming test is great! On the other, the iPhone 16 Pro Max achieved 12, so that’s a step back. Numbers are down across the board, and it’s probably due to that new processor being that much more powerful — as mentioned, even the efficiency cores have been bumped.

In real life, the iPhone 17 Pro Max feels like it has solid endurance, but we can definitely see those battery percentages melting away just a bit faster than we were used to. The iPhone 16 Pro Max just spoiled us too good.

One thing you notice right away — the new 40 W wired charging makes a world of difference. Apple says the iPhone 17 Pro can go from zero to 50% in just 20 minutes, compared to 35 minutes on the 16 Pro. In practice, that claim holds up.

Wireless charging, meanwhile, stays put at 25 W MagSafe — same as last year, with no surprises there.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max speakers feel just a tad downgraded if anything. They still sound wide, have a surprising amount of bottom end, and sparkly highs. However, compared to the iPhone 16 Pro Max, they are ever so slightly quieter. And while the 16 Pro Max has a pleasing, somewhat balanced sound to it, the 17 Pro Mas has a slight grating upper mid frequency to it.

Should you buy it?

The iPhone 17 Pro Max is a big upgrade for enthusiasts. The performance jump is actually tangible and will improve your experience if you want that iPhone to be your mobile gaming console. The new ProRes RAW for video will unlock new possibilities for current or aspiring videographers or influencers that are looking to up their game. The new selfie camera is plain cool.

But let’s be real. Another year — another iPhone. Predictable, solid, well-performing and well-enduring. Those things were true for the iPhone 16 Pro Max and 15 Pro Max before it. And they still ring true — they are not suddenly bad phones because there’s a new shiny toy out.

In other words, if you are happy with your current iPhone Pro Max and don’t feel like something’s bogging you down in performance or battery — maybe you can skip the upgrade for another year. Even though that Cosmic Orange may look tempting. And, if you are just now coming to the iPhone world — don’t be shy to look for an iPhone 16 Pro Max at a discount. It has the Camera Control button, Action button, and all the fancy bells and whistles.

On the other hand, if you simply desire the new iPhone 17 Pro Max. Yeah… that’s a justified craving to have. Go spoil yourself!