If you can afford it, the iPhone 13 Pro Max is one of the best smartphones Cupertino has ever made. It has a gorgeous display, a powerful camera, and incredibly robust battery life.
Apple introduced three major upgrades to its 6.7-inch screen this year: a smaller notch, ProMotion, and a 120Hz refresh rate.
Display
The iPhone 13 Pro Max features a high-resolution 2.8K 2778×1284-pixel OLED display with 458 pixels per inch, providing excellent image sharpness. It supports the whole DCI-P3 wide color gamut and features an HDR peak brightness of 1,200 nits, along with perfect blacks and an infinite contrast ratio.
The iPhone features a Night Shift Mode that enables you to reduce the amount of Blue Light emitted from the screen, making it easier to view in low to dark ambient light. This also helps to improve sleep quality and reduce eye strain.
Apple’s new ‘ProMotion’ display technology provides a smoother screen experience for videos and scrolling apps. It automatically adjusts the refresh rate between 10 and 120 Hz, depending on the picture content being displayed, so that you don’t experience any lag or motion blur.
The iPhone 13 Pro Max display is one of the top-tier smartphone displays that we have tested, and it receives our highest DisplayMate Best Smartphone Display Award. It has excellent textbook-perfect calibration, superb Absolute Color Accuracy that is Visually Indistinguishable from perfect, and is considerably better than any mobile device or UHD TV on the market.
Camera
The most significant, and probably the most noticeable, upgrade to the iPhone 13 Pro Max is its camera system. The main and ultra-wide cameras have larger sensors with wider apertures, allowing them to capture more light.
The result is that photos and videos are more explicit, with improved detail in low-light conditions. Both models also benefit from faster autofocus in portrait mode and better edge detection when capturing faces and bodies.
Apple’s software also helps improve image quality with features like Night Mode and Smart HDR. The latter utilizes machine learning to automatically bracket photos, resulting in a higher-quality version with enhanced detail in both shadows and highlights.
Finally, there’s Cinematic Mode, which is essentially Portrait mode for video and significantly enhances the home movie experience. It blurs the background behind a subject, and with a tap, you can focus on a specific face or body. Perfect for grabbing antsy kids or filming that birthday cake.
Battery
Despite its enormous screen, the iPhone 13 Pro Max boasts impressive battery life. In our battery test with looped video playback on Airplane mode, it lasted over 22 hours. That puts it far ahead of its competitors, and even further than the OnePlus 6T (our current best in this category).
We can’t attribute Apple’s topay to which depends on what happens. There is activity, so the lay rate can drop down to 10 Hz to conserve power. When things pick up, the display will automatically increase the refresh rate to 120Hz.
Other contributing factors are its excellent software and hardware efficiencies. The iPhone 13 Pro Max also outperformed its older sibling in our DXOMARK battery autonomy score, evaluating battery performance based on robot-based typical usage scenario testing, outdoor mobility testing, charging evaluation, and power measurements. Its score of 68 hours puts it in the ultra-premium segment, alongside the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G and the Oppo Find X3 Pro.
Performance
Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro Max strikes a superb balance between quickness, battery life, and camera quality. It’s big and expensive, but if you want a phone that can do anything you want it to and last for days on end, then this is the one to go for.
In terms of performance, this is the best iPhone Apple has ever made, and it feels incredibly responsive. This is thanks to the new A15 Bionic chip paired with a 5-core GPU, which unlocks excellent cameras and genuinely great gaming experiences.
This year, the Pro Max also gets a boosted telephoto camera, which significantly improves macro photography. The OLED display has been tweaked to deliver a bit more black detail, but it doesn’t compromise the overall OLED purity that has made Apple screens famous. Play Swerve City by Deftones on an iPhone 13 Pro Max, and you’ll hear the drive and attack that the band is known for, with no distortion or muddiness. The sound is simply fantastic. The only thing missing is the addition of a 1TB storage option, which would have made this the perfect choice for budding video editors.
Design
The iPhone 13 Pro Max is slightly heavier than its predecessor and has a somewhat different appearance as well. It still features flat edges and a classic ring switch, but it’s now slightly over a quarter of an inch thicker to accommodate the extra battery and camera technology. The notch on the front is smaller, and the screen now refreshes at up to 120Hz, which should make apps and games run smoother.
But it’s the cameras that set this phone apart – the Pro’s most significant camera system upgrade ever means you can shoot stunning videos in Cinematic mode, choose your Photographic style, and get super close with macro photography. Plus, it features a brighter display, blistering performance, and epic battery life.
We haven’t tested the new phone in depth yet, but our benchmarks suggest it should be faster than the Samsung S21 Ultra when it comes to processing photos, saving videos, and running demanding games. It will probably also have the advantage of receiving more frequent and timely software updates than an Android phone.