ROG Phone 9 Pro vs iPhone 16 Pro Max: 3 nm in the right direction

Intro

And look, the ROG Phone 9 Pro still lacks a bit in the camera department. But it more than makes up for that with amazing optimizations and lightning-fast hardware. Here’s how it compares to the big, mean iPhone:

Design and Size

Tech powerhouses, all dressed up

The ROG Phone 9 Pro now tries to look a bit more subtle than its predecessors, with more subdued accents and less overbearing elements. However, with a LED matrix on the back, you can still have flashy animations to showcase how special that phone is.

Therwise, it’s a glass sandwich device, with an aluminum frame and a matte finish over the back, which feels grainy and nice to the touch. The bezel around the display is quite thin and uniform, so it does feel like you are holding an all-screen phone.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max has also gotten a bezel treatment this year, as its frame shrunk furhter and the screen grew to 6.9 inches. The frame around it is covered in titanium for an extra premium feel, and the glass back is a smooth, fine matte.

Both these phones have specific buttons on top of the typical power and volume. The ROG Phone 9 Pro has the ultrasonic shoulder pads for gaming — emulating the triggers on a conventional controller or handheld console. The iPhone 16 Pro Max has the Action Button, which can be customized to open a specific app or do a task, and the new Camera Control button that opens up the Camera app and also controls it via taps, slides, and presses on the button.

For color options, you can get the ROG Phone 9 Pro in any color you want — as long as it is black. The non-Pro variant also comes in white, but that about does it. The iPhone 16 Pro Max comes in a selection of tame and muted colors — natural titanium, desert, white, and black. So, a bit more choice there, but they also aren’t flashy.

Display Differences

We have excellent OLED panels on both. The ROG Phone 9 Pro now goes up to 185 Hz refresh rate, which is honestly over the top. Scratch that, 165 Hz was already over the top, but hey — it can do it! It has a few color calibrations to pick from, whether you like warm and natural tones, or more punchy and contrasty screens.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max comes with a 120 Hz ProMotion screen with its own excellent color calbration. And both phones offer blue light filtering when the sun sets, for less eye strain, too.

They are quite sharp, the ROG Phone 9 Pro has an FHD+ resolution for 388 pixels-per-inch, Apple has a weird spread of 2868 x 1320 pixels, which results in 458 PPI. And both are HDR capable, the ROG Phone 9 Pro has a peak brightness of 2,500 nits, the iPhone hits 2,000.

One complaint about the ROG Phones that we have is that they don’t go low enough on minimum brightness, so they are not super comfortable for bedside viewing.

For unlocking the phone, Asus employs an optical fingerprint scanner under the display. It’s the optical kind and while it’s quick and mostly accurate, it can also be picky if you press too hard or light, if your finger or screen has a smudge. The Face ID on iPhones works quickly and flawlessly and only requires you to look at the phone.

Performance and Software

The Elite versus the Pro

The time for the Android processor to evolve has come. Apple switched to a 3 nm build process with last year’s A17 Pro, and Qualcomm now has its 3 nm answer — the new Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Is it a big deal? Well, no, 3 nm is actually quite small. On a more serious note, it simply means that there’s less gap between the components inside the chip. Meaning, it can stack more transistors for more power, all while being more energy efficient.

And yes, in real life, the Asus phone is unbelievably fast and snappy. It downloads and runs anything from the Play Store without missing a beat, it handles task switching and scrolling around almost like it’s moving a couple frames into the future.

The iPhone is, of course, incredibly smooth and fast in its own right. And, look, you may have the super-powerful hardware, but at the end of the day, we will ask “OK, what does it run?”. And this is where Apple still has the upper hand — the App Store has actually started getting actual console titles, ported to the iPhones and iPads. No, not the old shabby “ports”, which were low-grade remakes of the games. But the actual, actual games — Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil, Death Stranding. Apple’s push into the gaming space has us thinking that other partnerships may also be on the horizon.

The ROG Phone 9 Pro, while incredibly powerful and convenient to game on, is tied down to what the Android Play Store can give you. Thankfully, we have some major titles like Modern Warfare, Arena Breakout, Genshin, even the good old PUBG. But developers still seem to be wary with experimenting in the mobile space.

But hey, maybe these titles are enough for you, maybe you also like to fire upp the odd emulator from time to time. The ROG Phone 9 Pro provides that power.

These wouldn’t be 2024 phones if we didn’t mentioin AI, right? The ROG Phone 9 Pro comes with a couple of AI tricks. One is a summary function for your voice recorder, transcribing and summarizing meetings. The other is a live translator for bi-lingual phone calls, which is a bit clunky but quite rare — the only other phones that give us that feature are Samsung’s Galaxies for now. The third more general AI feature of the ROG Phone 9 is semantic search — whether in the phone’s photo album or in the settings, you can be more liberal with the seach terms, and the AI will try and figure out exactly what you are looking for, which is quite convenient.

The rest of the ROG AI features have to do with games — it can auto-record killstreaks, it can give you tips on when a booster has spawned (MOBA games), auto-running, auto item pickup, and other small assistive features while gaming. To be fair, most “hardcore” gamers (a.k.a. this device’s target demographic) would probably view it beneath them to use such assistive features, but hey — who knows.

Now for the bad news — the ROG Phone 9 still only comes with a 2 Android build update commitment, and 4 years of security updates post release. Apple’s iPhones are known to get at least 5 years of iOS updates. That number might go up, now that Samsung and Google are both committing to 7 years of Android updates, but Apple hasn’t said anything yet.

Camera

ROG falls behind

The ROG Phone 9 Pro comes with an upgraded main camera sensor — still 50 MP,  but now a Sony Lytia 700. It rocks a hybrid gimbal stabilizer for a 5-degree wobble compensation, it does work quite nicely. Other than that, there’s a 32 MP 3x telephoto camera, 13 MP ultra-wide, and a 32 MP selfie camera.

Impressive numbers, but putting them toe to toe versus the iPhone 16 Pro Max‘s cameras — 48 MP main camera with sensor shift stabilization, 12 MP 5x telephoto, and 48 MP ultra-wide — the iPhone produces better-looking photos. We did complain about Apple leaning into oversharpening its images a bit, ever since it started using a 48 MP sensor. But the Asus does more of it. The dynamic range and colors on the iPhone photos are also better, with more pop to them, and closer to reality:

Just as with the main cameras, the differences in the ultra-wide cameras show a wider dynamic range and more vivid colors from the iPhone shots.

Selfies

For selfies, the iPhone gives my face more livelier colors and the details and marks of time on my skin are more visible. I look quite pale in those ROG Phone 9 shots, thought the details are not too bad. In fact, nighttime selfies with the ROG Phone are a bit sharper.

Video Quality

We finally got to it, and you wouldn’t believe it, but video recording is where the ROG Phone 9 Pro truly shines. We get more vibrant colors, much wider dynamics, nice details, and that stabilization is doing great work! Compared to the iPhone — it is the Apple camera that is now a bit pale and overexposed by comparison. Though, we did get some weird clicking in the ROG Phone audio in this particular clip. Was that wind noise reduction gone wrong? I was definitely not eating popcorn or rubbing a zipper against the phones while recording.

Audio Quality and Haptics

The iPhone 16 Pro Max stereo speakers sound excellent. Surprisingly excellent. Deep bass, cleaned up low mids, plenty of musical detail, and really sweet presence. And they are almost as loud as the ROG Phone 9 speakers (may be just as loud, but the mids of the ROG 9 would make you feel like they are louder).

But, another win for Asus here — the ROG Phone 9 Pro still retains a headphone jack. Kind of wild that there’s room for it still, right?

For haptics, both of these phones are a pleasure to use. They click and clack with precise feedback, which is especially nice on the ROG Phone, where you get a reassuring vibration whenever you press one of the gaming triggers.

Battery Life and Charging

These just outlasted the Duracell bunny

The ROG Phone 9 Pro comes with an upgraded 5,800 mAh battery. That’s already a massive battery, but with Asus’ software optimizations on top, we were confident it would last for quite a while.

Conversely, the iPhone 16 Pro Max has a 4,685 mAh battery — the biggest battery an iPhone has had thus far. And hey, iOS is also excellent at freezing processes and preserving battery life. Here’s how they did on our tests:

Both of these phones will comfortably last you north of 10 hours on a single charge. For mundane, regular web tasks — almost 20 hours. Needless to say, when we daily drive any one of them, battery fears aren’t an issue.

In case you end up draining them to 0%, the Asus has the advantage here — the ROG Phone 9 Pro does ship with its own 65 W charger, which gives you 74% of power in half an hour on the wire. The iPhone is notirously refusing to adopt any form of fast charging for now…

Specs Comparison

And there you have it — the numbers look impressive. But really, the performance meets the expectations!

Summary

Will the ROG Phone 9 Pro pull people away from the iPhone 16 Pro Max? Probably not… it’s a niche device, an enthusiast phone — you need to be a gamer, be willing to spend quite a bit of cash on a phone, and you need to be feeling adventurous to step away from the Apple, Samsung, and Google brands.

So, in some ways, the people that would buy a ROG Phone 9 Pro have already probably set their minds to it. However, it’s always good to know how it compares to the other heavy-hitters out there, right?

Well, there you have it — it doesn’t budge an inch. OK, the Asus camera is still not amazing, but it’s above average for sure. And its video capabilities are surprisingly high. Is it a better all-rounder than the iPhone 16 Pro Max? No… Is it a fantastic gaming phone that you can use as a daily driver? Yes.