iPhone 17 Pro Max Review: The New Best iPhone, With One Big Trade-off

Every iPhone Pro review for the last three years has opened the same way: titanium this, titanium that. This year Apple ended that streak by moving the iPhone 17 Pro Max back to an aluminum unibody frame, and it's the single biggest story about a phone that is, in almost every other respect, a genuine step forward.

Design and display

The iPhone 17 Pro Max carries a 6.9-inch LTPO Super Retina XDR OLED display running at 120Hz, with peak brightness rated at 3000 nits — enough to stay readable in direct sunlight, which is where most flagship phones still struggle. The aluminum build is lighter and manages heat better than titanium did, which matters more than it sounds during sustained gaming or 4K video capture, but it's a harder sell to anyone who bought into Apple's premium-materials pitch on the last two generations.

Cameras

The rear camera system is a genuine upgrade: a 48MP main sensor at f/1.6, a 48MP telephoto with 4x optical zoom at f/2.8, and a 48MP ultra-wide at f/2.2 — meaning, for the first time, all three rear lenses shoot at full 48MP resolution rather than defaulting to smaller binned outputs on the secondary lenses. The front camera moves to 18MP with multi-aspect capture, which noticeably helps selfie framing without having to rotate the phone.

Performance and battery

Apple's A19 Pro chip, built on a 3nm process with a 6-core GPU, is the expected generational bump — comfortably ahead of the A18 Pro in sustained workloads, and it's paired with 12GB of RAM across every storage tier.

The 4832mAh battery is the largest Apple has put in an iPhone, and 42W wired charging gets you to 50% in about 20 minutes. Wireless MagSafe charging tops out at 25W, reaching the same 50% mark in roughly 30 minutes. Neither number leads the industry, but real-world battery life through a full day of heavy use was consistently strong in our testing.

Price and verdict

Storage options run from 256GB up to 2TB, with US pricing starting at $1,199 for the base 256GB Pro Max configuration. That's a premium price for a phone that, materially speaking, is no longer using the most premium material Apple has offered on this line.

Taken as a whole, though, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is the best iPhone Apple has made: faster, better cameras, brighter screen, bigger battery. Whether the aluminum frame bothers you is a personal question — for most buyers upgrading from a two- or three-year-old iPhone, it won't be the deciding factor.