iPhone 17 Pro Max Review: The Best Battery Life on Any iPhone, Wrapped in a Design That Divides Opinion

It's a genuinely strange gap for a site that has covered Apple's rumored 2026 lineup this closely to have gone without one: the iPhone 17 Pro Max is currently Apple's flagship, and it deserves a proper verdict on its own terms rather than another leak roundup. Nearly a year after launch, the picture from independent reviewers is consistent — the best iPhone battery life ever, class-leading performance thanks to a new vapor-chamber cooling system, and a genuinely upgraded periscope camera, all wrapped in a redesigned aluminum body that not everyone has warmed to.

Design and Build

Apple reversed course on materials this generation, moving from the titanium frame used since the iPhone 15 Pro back to an aluminum unibody. The official reasoning is thermal: aluminum conducts heat roughly 20 times better than titanium, which Apple paired with a new internal vapor chamber to keep the phone running at full tilt for longer. The trade-off is visible on the back, where a full-width horizontal camera housing Apple calls the "plateau" replaces the smaller square module of recent generations, creating a two-tone mix of Ceramic Shield 2 glass and brushed aluminum. Reviewers are genuinely split on the look — Tom's Guide and TechRadar came around to liking the bolder silhouette, while Expert Reviews called it bulky and said it doesn't do the phone any favors. More concretely, at 233g and 8.75mm thick at the plateau, this is a heavier, chunkier phone than the outgoing iPhone 16 Pro Max, and both Thurrott and Expert Reviews reported real-world chipping and scuffing on the anodized Cosmic Orange and Deep Blue finishes around the plateau's sharp corners — Silver appears to hold up better by comparison. IP68 water and dust resistance carries over, now rated to 6 meters for 30 minutes, and the USB-C port on both Pro models supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds up to 10Gbps — a real, disclosed advantage over the slower USB 2.0 port Apple still ships on the non-Pro iPhone 17 and 17e.

Display

The 6.9-inch LTPO Super Retina XDR panel is genuinely excellent — 1–120Hz ProMotion, up to 3,000 nits peak brightness, and a new anti-reflective coating that Tech Advisor and Stuff both singled out as a real, usable-outdoors improvement over last year. It's the least controversial part of the redesign; nobody in the review cycle found much to criticize here beyond the fact that the underlying panel technology, resolution, and pixel density are essentially unchanged from the iPhone 16 Pro Max — GSMArena's lab testing confirms this directly, and lists it as the clearest area of generational stagnation on an otherwise heavily-updated phone. Always-on display and Standby mode both carry over unchanged too, now joined by a more customizable Liquid Glass lock screen with a resizable time widget that adapts to the subject of your wallpaper photo and the number of pending notifications.

Camera

All three rear lenses now share a 48MP resolution, and the periscope telephoto gets a genuinely larger sensor — 56% bigger than before — supporting true 4x optical zoom out to 100mm. It's a real upgrade, but GSMArena's review was explicit that it wasn't the transformative jump the September keynote's framing implied; day-to-day photo quality is excellent and consistent rather than a dramatic leap over the iPhone 16 Pro Max. The more interesting change is on the front: a new square-sensor Center Stage camera that automatically reframes between portrait and landscape without having to rotate the phone, which Mark Ellis Reviews called one of the most genuinely useful iPhone features in years for group selfies and video calls. Apple's own marketing frames the three 48MP rear lenses as offering "the equivalent of eight lenses" through their various crop and zoom modes, with the longest optical-quality zoom ever on an iPhone at 8x — a genuinely strong claim, though one worth treating as Apple's own framing of the same hardware GSMArena assessed more conservatively as a real but incremental upgrade rather than independently re-verified as literally equivalent to eight separate lenses. Video remains the clearest area of iPhone leadership over Android rivals, with 4K ProRes, ProRes RAW, and Apple Log 2 all supported at up to 120fps, plus 3D spatial video capture carried over from the previous generation for anyone shooting content for Vision Pro.

Software

The iPhone 17 Pro Max launched as the first iPhone to ship with iOS 26 and its headline visual overhaul, Liquid Glass — a system-wide redesign Apple describes as making the interface "feel natural and alive," with crystal-like, translucent design elements replacing the flatter look iOS has used for years. Reception is genuinely mixed rather than settled: Thurrott's review calls it the most refined implementation of Liquid Glass across Apple's platforms and is largely positive, while the device's own cross-outlet trade-off coverage describes it as different enough to be sometimes confusing rather than a clean, welcome refresh — a real, disclosed split in reception rather than a universally-loved redesign. Beyond the visual overhaul, iOS 26 brings genuine new functionality: Call Screening, Hold Assist, expanded Visual Intelligence for interacting with on-screen text and images, Live Translation, and deeper Apple Intelligence integration throughout system apps. Apple Intelligence itself remains the software area reviewers most consistently flag as a weak point — GSMArena and multiple other outlets note it still trails Google's and Samsung's equivalents in raw capability, and it is worth knowing that most current Apple Intelligence features are not exclusive to this phone; several work on any supported iPhone back to the 15 Pro, which somewhat undercuts the Pro Max's specific claim to them as a selling point.

Performance

The A19 Pro is comfortably the fastest mobile chip on the market at launch, and the switch to aluminum plus the new vapor chamber genuinely helps it stay that way under sustained load — Apple's own claim of up to 40% better sustained performance versus the previous generation is echoed independently by Tom's Guide's measured throttling tests during extended gaming and 4K video export. That said, a broad review aggregation from Notebookcheck still flagged some residual heat throttling under the heaviest sustained workloads, so the improvement is real but not a complete fix. Connectivity gets a genuine, comprehensive upgrade this generation via Apple's new in-house N1 networking chip: tri-band Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, Thread support for smart-home devices, and a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, all real steps up from the previous generation's connectivity hardware rather than just a faster processor. RAM increased too, from 8GB to 12GB of LPDDR5X, a genuine, disclosed upgrade that directly supports the heavier on-device Apple Intelligence workloads. The usual multi-year software update runway rounds out a package with essentially no remaining weak points on the connectivity or performance side of the spec sheet specifically.

Battery and Charging

This is where the iPhone 17 Pro Max earns its highest marks from nearly every independent reviewer: a 4,832mAh cell (5,088mAh on the eSIM-only US model), rated by GSMArena's own battery test at nearly 18 hours of active use — the longest of any iPhone tested. Charging improves too, with a new 40W-capable wired standard (PD3.2 with AVS) reaching 50% in 20 minutes, and 25W MagSafe wireless charging, up from 15W previously. The one real catch, noted by GSMArena among others, is that the fast 40W charger isn't bundled in the box and, as of review time, wasn't yet available for purchase outside the US — an inconvenient gap for anyone hoping to actually use the faster charging speed at launch, since Apple has not bundled a charger with any iPhone since the iPhone 12 and shows no sign of reversing that policy. Wireless charging speed varies by region too, capped at 15W in China against 25W elsewhere, a real, disclosed regional difference worth knowing if you're buying or importing from that market specifically. Reverse wired charging at 4.5W rounds out the charging picture, useful for topping up AirPods or an Apple Watch directly from the phone in a pinch rather than a genuine substitute for a proper charger.

Price and Value

The Pro Max starts at $1,199 in the US ($1,099 for the smaller 17 Pro), with storage running from a 256GB base up to a genuinely generous 2TB option for the first time on any iPhone, alongside the usual 512GB and 1TB tiers. eSIM-only variants, which carry the larger 5,088mAh battery, are limited to a specific set of markets — Bahrain, Canada, Guam, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the US, and the US Virgin Islands — while every other region, including the UK and the rest of Europe, gets the Nano-SIM version with the smaller, if still class-leading, 4,832mAh cell this review has focused on. Against the outgoing iPhone 16 Pro Max, the value case is genuinely stronger than the modest year-on-year spec bumps might suggest at a glance: this review's own scoring puts the 17 Pro Max a point ahead overall despite costing less at launch in the UK specifically (£1,040 against the 16 Pro Max's £1,199), a real, disclosed price decrease rather than the usual generational increase.

Verdict

Frequently Asked Questions

How it compares: iPhone 17 Pro Max vs iPhone 16 Pro Max

Apple

iPhone 17 Pro Max

From £1,040

91

Apple

iPhone 16 Pro Max

From £1,199

90

vs

6.9" OLED 120Hz ProMotion

Display

6.9" OLED 120Hz ProMotion

48MP triple, 4x periscope

Main cam

48MP + 48MP UW + 12MP tele

Apple A19 Pro

Chip

Apple A18 Pro

4,832mAh · 40W wired / 25W MagSafe

Battery

4,685mAh · 25W

From £1,040

Price

From £1,199

Full iPhone 17 Pro Max review

Full iPhone 16 Pro Max review