The iPhone 17 Pro Max is a big, bright smartphone with all the bells and whistles you could want

 When it came time to buy a new iPhone, I decided to splurge for the iPhone 17 Pro Max (nope, Apple doesn’t provide me with review units). The purchase dinged my bank account, but I have no regrets. 

There are many improvements over my previous smartphone (the iPhone 17 Pro Max), but the ones most important to me are the camera improvements. I take a LOT of family photos and videos.

The Camera System

First of all, let’s look at a tweak to the phone’s form. There’s now a wide, sloped bump across the top third of the smartphone’s unibody design that serves as a home to three 48MP camera lens. 

A new 48MP Telephoto camera has a next-generation tetraprism design with a sensor that’s purportedly 56% larger than the previous generation. This enhances sharpness in bright light and brings more detail to darker shots. The new 4x optical zoom at 100mm offers a classic lens for portraiture, while the 8x optical zoom at 200mm at is the longest ever on an iPhone.

The camera does a great job in balancing lights and dark and excels at capturing accurate skin tones. Colors in the photos I’ve taken are strikingly vibrant.

One neat trick on Apple’s new iPhones is that you can now take portrait and landscape photos without turning the smartphone. 

The iPhone 17 Pro Max (and the and iPhone 17 Pro) introduce a Center Stage front camera that features the first square front camera sensor on an Apple smartphone. It offers a wider field of view and higher resolution: up to 18MP.

For group selfies, Center Stage for photos uses AI to automatically expand the field of view and can rotate from portrait to landscape to include everyone in the frame. The Center Stage front camera also enables stabilized video in 4K HDR. 

Another fun new feature: you can now record on the front and rear cameras simultaneously with Dual Capture. For example, I can provide a video commentary while filming various sports events — with both my mug and the sports action seamlessly integrated in the video. 

During calls over FaceTime or third-party apps, Center Stage for video calls keeps users stable and positioned in frame. What’s more, if you upgrade to the iPhone 17 Pro Max you’ll gain access to the next-generation Photographic Styles that debuted last year, and a variety of video recording improvements like a four-mic array, wind noise reduction, ProRes RAW, and more.

But let’s back up and talk a bit more about video. The iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Pro contains previous features like Dolby Vision HDR recording, 4K120 fps, ProRes Log, and support for ACES. However, they’re also the first smartphones to support ProRes RAW, Log 2, and genlock.

The latter is a technique used to precisely synchronize video across multiple cameras and inputs. Apple says it “helps creatives achieve accurate, professional-looking transitions and advanced creative techniques without hours of manual frame-by-frame alignment.” I’ll take their word for it because that level of video editing/production is beyond my area of expertise (or interest) when it comes to family videos. 

Display

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are available in 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch sizes. I went for the biggest size, and have no regrets.  The display boasts ProMotion up to 120Hz, Always-On, and 3000 nits of peak outdoor brightness (the highest ever on iPhone) and 2x better outdoor contrast

The iPhone’s Super Retina XDR display is protected by Ceramic Shield 2, which is purportedly tougher than any smartphone. The Shield has a new Apple-designed coating for what the company says is 3x better scratch resistance and improved anti-reflection to reduce glare. 

For the first time, Ceramic Shield protects the back of the devices, purportedly delivering 4x better resistance to cracks than the back glass on previous models.This makes me wonder if I truly need to spring for a protective case and screen protector for my new smartphone.

Design

The iPhone 17 Pro Max is made from aluminum instead of titanium. Why? Aluminum is lighter, and, I’m guessing, also allowed Apple to use anodization for some interesting colors (such as bright orange).

The iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Pro are powered by Apple’s new, custom-built) A19 Pro chip with 12GB of RAM. 

Apple says the 6-core CPU is the fastest CPU in any smartphone, and the 6-core GPU architecture includes Neural Accelerators built into each GPU core, a larger cache, and more memory than the A18 Pro. The GPU works in tandem with the new 16-core Neural Engine to power Al models, intensive graphics, and AAA games. 

To help deal with the A19 Pro’s heat, the high-end smartphones are equipped with vapor chambers that take heat from the processors and carries it onto the aluminum unibody, where it spreads out.

The iPhone 17 lineup also saw the debut of N1, a new Apple-designed wireless networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. Among other things, it’s designed to improve the overall performance and reliability of features like Personal Hotspot and AirDrop.

Last but not least, there’s the improved battery. It provides 39 hours of video playback and 35 hours of streamed video playback, the best battery life Apple has ever provided, thanks to its largest-ever internal battery.

Conclusion

The iPhone Air has gotten most of the attention when it comes to aesthetics. I find that it falls into Apple’s frequent mistake of form-over-function. On the other hand, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is a beast of a phone with all the bells and whistle you could possibly want. 

Pricing 

The iPhone 17 Pro Max is available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and for the first time, 2TB storage capacities. It comes in cosmic orange, deep blue, and silver. Pricing starts at US$1,199 or $49.95 per month.

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