iPhone 16 Pro Max vs OnePlus 12: now that’s a comparison

Intro

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.

Design and Display Quality

Apple doubles down on titanium

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.

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).

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

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 comfortably last you two days with casual use. We’ll be checking its measurements against the iPhone 16 Pro Max when the latter comes out!