Our Rating:
4.9
Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max Review
Ranked #2 (Runner-up)
Best Phone in 2025!
Authors: Diana F, Sandy B, Kevin W, Shaun D
Introduction
The Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max is a great achievement in mobile engineering, a device that feels familiar in its excellence. It is a formidable powerhouse that combines state-of-the-art hardware with our favorite operating system, iOS. We have spent countless hours with this phone, integrating it into every facet of our daily lives, from professional work to personal creativity!
When we evaluated the top contenders for 2025, the iPhone 16 Pro Max consistently demonstrated a level of raw power and ecosystem cohesion that few can match. However, its most ambitious feature, Apple Intelligence, was only a promise of future greatness and has not been fully rolled out yet.
In the end, for Apple lovers, this is a device of immense capability, a practically perfect piece of hardware and software, that earns its #2 ranking by being just one step shy of being our top pick for it's lack of AI features in comparison to our rank#1 Samsung S25 Ultra Phone!
Design and Build Quality
Apple has once again crafted a device that feels impossibly premium and meticulously engineered.
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The Largest iPhone Ever: The first thing you’ll notice is the new, expansive 6.9-inch display, which makes the phone feel more immersive than ever. It's a noticeable size increase, but after just a day of use, we found our hands adapted quickly, and the larger canvas made every interaction, from watching movies to editing photos, feel more engaging and substantial.
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Record-Thin Bezels: Framing this massive screen are the thinnest borders Apple has ever produced. This design choice creates a stunning all-screen effect, making content feel like it’s floating in your hand. The screen-to-body ratio is simply breathtaking, pushing the display right to the very edge of the titanium frame.
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Build Quality: The Grade 5 titanium frame gives the device a satisfying heft and incredible rigidity, while the textured matte glass back feels soft to the touch and does an excellent job of resisting fingerprints. The new signature Desert Titanium color is a true standout, a sophisticated finish with pleasant bronze-colored sides and a back that is almost white, shifting subtly with the light.
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New Camera Button: The most significant new physical feature is the multi-functional Camera Control button, designed to mimic a traditional camera. In our landscape photography sessions, we found it genuinely useful for setting focus with a light press and adjusting zoom with a quick swipe. However, for everyday portrait-oriented snapshots—the way most people take photos—its low placement on the device's side felt ergonomically awkward and finicky. This ambitious new button, while brilliant in theory, feels like a feature that will need another generation to perfect.
Display
The Super Retina XDR display on the iPhone 16 Pro Max is, without exaggeration, the most beautiful and immersive screen we have ever seen on an iPhone.
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Super Retina XDR Display: The 6.9-inch OLED panel is a canvas of vibrant, perfectly calibrated color. With a resolution of 2868-by-1320 pixels, text is razor-sharp, and high-resolution photos and videos pop with incredible detail and lifelike depth. It’s a display that truly does justice to the amazing photos and videos this phone can capture.
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Smooth ProMotion: The adaptive 120Hz ProMotion technology remains a game-changer. Our hands-on experience scrolling through feeds, navigating the interface, and playing compatible games was one of absolute fluidity. The display intelligently ramps its refresh rate up for silky-smooth motion and down for static content to conserve battery, an effect that is both seamless and highly effective.
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Brightness: With a peak outdoor brightness of 2000 nits, this display is a joy to use anywhere. We tested it in the harshest midday sun, and the screen remained perfectly legible and vibrant, ensuring visibility is never compromised. It’s a practical enhancement that makes a huge difference in day-to-day usability.
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Loved Features: Apple continues to refine its software and hardware integration with features like the Dynamic Island, which cleverly surfaces live activities and alerts, and the Always-On display, which keeps key information available at a glance. These features make the phone feel more alive and come in handy more times than we could count.
Performance
At the heart of the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the new A18 Pro chip, a silicon powerhouse that enables a level of performance that feels instantaneous and endlessly capable.
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A18 Pro Chip: Built on a second-generation 3-nanometer process, the A18 Pro is ferociously fast. In our daily workflow, this translated to an experience of pure immediacy. Apps launch the moment you tap them, complex multitasking with multiple apps is handled without a single stutter, and the entire iOS 18 operating system feels exceptionally fluid and responsive.
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Mobile Gaming: The new 6-core GPU provides a massive boost in graphics performance, and with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the visual experience is on another level. We played some of the most graphically demanding titles available and were consistently met with high frame rates and console-level lighting and reflections, all in the palm of our hand.
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Better Thermals & Performance: To sustain this incredible power, Apple has implemented a redesigned thermal system. This does a phenomenal job of dissipating heat, ensuring the phone remains comfortable to hold and avoids performance throttling, even during our extended gaming marathons and 4K video editing sessions.
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Built for Intelligence: Beyond raw speed, the A18 Pro’s significantly faster Neural Engine and enhanced memory bandwidth were engineered from the ground up for one primary purpose: to efficiently run the demanding on-device computations required by Apple Intelligence, setting the stage for the phone's smartest features.
Camera
The camera system is the crown jewel of the iPhone 16 Pro Max, representing a monumental leap forward that will delight casual photographers and demanding professionals alike.
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Upgraded 48MP Main Sensor: The new, physically larger custom sensor for the main camera is a marvel. It captures an incredible amount of light, producing breathtakingly detailed and vibrant photos. Our nighttime photo tests consistently yielded images that were bright, crisp, and full of color, with remarkably low noise.
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48MP Ultra-Wide: For the first time, the Ultra-Wide camera has been upgraded to a 48-megapixel sensor, bringing it to parity with the main camera. This not only results in stunningly detailed landscape shots but also provides a massive improvement to Macro photography, allowing for true, high-resolution close-ups that are rich with detail.
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5x Telephoto: The advanced tetraprism telephoto lens provides a 120mm equivalent optical zoom, allowing you to capture sharp, clean images of distant subjects. It’s an incredibly powerful and versatile tool for everything from sporting events to wildlife photography.
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Videography: The ability to record video in 4K at a staggering 120 frames per second is a revolutionary achievement for a smartphone. During our testing, this feature unlocked a new level of creativity, allowing us to capture incredibly high-quality, cinematic slow-motion footage. Combined with ProRes Log video for professional workflows, this phone is a formidable tool for any content creator.
Battery Life and Connectivity
The iPhone 16 Pro Max is engineered to last all day and beyond, with modern connectivity options that keep you ready for the future.
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All-Day Battery: The combination of a large battery and the efficiency of the A18 Pro chip delivers phenomenal endurance. For us, the iPhone 16 Pro Max consistently powered through an average day of use; mixed hours of screen-on time, photo and video capture, video editing, scrolling through apps, and light gaming. This resulted in us getting ~17 hours of total daily use!
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Future-Proof Connectivity: With support for Wi-Fi 7, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is equipped with the latest wireless standard. This ensures the fastest possible speeds, lower latency, and a more stable connection on compatible networks, making it ready for the next generation of wireless technology.
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Fast Wired Transfers: The USB-C port now supports USB 3 speeds of up to 10 Gb/s. This was a lifesaver for our workflow, allowing us to offload massive 4K ProRes video files to an external drive in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously.
Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence is the phone’s most ambitious feature, a deeply integrated system of personal intelligence that promises to redefine how you use your device.
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Powerful and Practical Writing Tools: The system-wide Writing Tools are immediately useful. Having the ability to rewrite an email to sound more professional, or get a concise summary of a long article right in the app you’re using, proved to be a genuine time-saver in our daily work.
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Fun, Creative Image Generation: Features like Image Playground and Genmoji offer a fun and surprisingly intuitive new way to express yourself. Creating a custom emoji on the fly to perfectly match the moment in a conversation is a small but delightful experience.
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A Smarter Siri: Siri is now more capable, with a better understanding of natural language and on-screen context. Being able to ask it to act on something displayed on the screen makes the entire experience feel more seamless and intuitive.
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Still in Beta: It’s crucial to note that during our review period, Apple Intelligence felt like a public beta. Many of its most exciting features are being rolled out in phases throughout the year. While the potential is immense and exciting, the experience at launch isn't fully realized, which holds the device back from feeling perfectly complete today.
Conclusion: The Runner Up
The Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max is an extraordinary smartphone and an undeniable titan of technology. It is a device where Apple's relentless pursuit of hardware excellence is on full display. The stunningly immersive 6.9-inch ProMotion display, the ferocious power of the A18 Pro chip, and the revolutionary capabilities of the professional camera system all work in perfect harmony to deliver a truly premium experience!
It falls just shy of the top spot because its most forward-looking promises are not yet fully delivered. Apple Intelligence is clearly the future, but at launch, it’s a future you can only glimpse. This, combined with the divisive ergonomics of the new Camera Control button, gives our #1 pick a slight edge in delivering a more complete and better experience for now. Even so, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is a triumph of engineering and a spectacular choice for anyone seeking one of the most powerful and capable devices on the planet. 🎉🎉🎉