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Phones · Apple iPhone

Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max

28owners with an opinion
43%of verdicts positive
9/12positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for display and performance; criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Likes it
>Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD, My iphone 16 pro max can do 4K ProRes HDR or Log at 120 FPS when plugged into a SSD. If I had more builtin storage I could do it without the SSD. If you don't mind more dongling you can also have an external display along with the external SSD.
Likes it
My need for this new iPhone is driven by my declining vision. Twenty years ago, I had no problem with my first iPhone. Five years ago, I started to get acquainted with some of the visual accommodation measures in iOS. I do still use my (physically larger than I would like) iPhone 16 Pro Max, which I bought for the biggest screen. I'd love to do my stuff on my laptop or desktop, but smartphones are de facto The Computer these days. So I'll probably buy an iPhone Duo after I sell a kidney for financing. All that said, today's Apple presentation left me gobsmacked at the technology they've developed. I was born before civilian jet transports were in service, with all that implies for a long personal view of tech dev. The tech feels to me like a cut&paste from 2076.
Doesn’t like it
> Update on Feb. 1st: > Well, now it's Feb. 1st and I have an iPhone 17 Pro Max to test with and... everything works as expected. So it's pretty safe to say that THAT specific instance of iPhone 16 Pro Max was hardware-defective. nothing to see here.
Doesn’t like it
It also made my iPhone 16 Pro Max a bit laggier, but the worst offender is my Apple Watch Series 10 which has a big frame rate drop every time there is a Liquid Glass animation. It feels very sluggish now and the battery seems worse than before. Everyone is impacted to different extents, I don’t think it’s deliberately made to cripple older iPhones.
Neutral
I also don’t understand what people expect. Also it seems that everybody is constantly grilling their machines. Otherwise I can’t understand this need for even more power. I have the iPhone 16ProMax and upgraded from a 13ProMax. I didn’t really feel a difference. Mainly because I don’t use my phone for high performance applications or gaming. [edit] typo
Neutral
Okay you can already use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse on an iPhone and the USB powered portable monitor I have can be used with my USB C iPhone. Because of power constraints, it can only drive the display up to 50% brightness. But you can plug power up to the other USB C port on my monitor to power the display at full brightness and charge the phone. This is my iPhone 16 Pro Max with my external portable monitor. The phone is connected with a standard USB C cord and the Anker battery is plugged in with another USB C cord into the monitor. https://imgur.com/a/1Fv6Zc6 I had my Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with me. There is no reason I couldn’t pair them to my phone.
Likes it
I have my phone set to 80% max charging, but I only do it because it is convenient for me. My usage pattern is just fine with 80% charging. I would NOT do it if it was a hassle. I did have to teach myself to "be ok" with being below 40% but really my phone lasts a long time down there ... I do wish this article could quantify what differences you might see charging to 80% rather than 100% over time.
Doesn’t like it
In my hands the 16 pro max looks small. I only care about battery life really and it is really not great so I wouldn't mind a double thickness: larger dimensions all over in favor of battery and screen. Huawei used to have one (in 2016 or so?) that was perfect: massive slab, super battery. But then we needed all slimmer and smaller (after the asia phablet hype?). Battery life on iphones is not good if you use it a lot. I am in a coworking space and literally all iphone users have to plug in somewhere during the day as most use it all day and it conks out: I am on my chinese android all day and end of the day it's 60%+. I guess my hands are an exception, but I cannot stand dragging all kinds of crap with me because everyone wants the thinnest, smallest devices.
Doesn’t like it
That's been my experience, using iPhones primarily since the 6s. The .0 releases of iOS have been getting worse lately and are not great, but usually by .2 or .3 it's fine if not better on the older devices. I think the annual release schedule is too much for Apple to the point that now the .0 release is effectively a public beta. Especially if there are any big changes. iOS 26 RC is laggy on my 16 Pro Max, which without a doubt can absolutely handle it, it's just a buggy mess still. I'm sure that by .2 it'll be fine.
Likes it
The 13 mini didn't solve any of these issues for me plus the worse battery life. I upgraded to 16 pro max. My laptop usage also went down from there. Total screen time probably stayed, but now i carry most of the time just a phone instead of phone and laptop. If you want something less addictive there is probably the apple watch but you still need the phone to configure and now you're strapped to a device 24/7 just for the sake to be used less.
Neutral
I’ve been using it for 2 days now, and the first thing I noticed is that readability took a hit. My background is a mid tone warm photo, not dark or light, icons got a white foreground that’s very hard to read against their translucent background. The second thing I noticed, is that when I’m scrolling a webpage, icons now switch color randomly (according to the bg dominant color) and that’s distracting. The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max. What I like the most about this design though, is that it become invisible and let you focus on what you are reading, watching. Perfect to focus on content, but the user interface has become sometimes unreadable and when you need to interact with it, put the flashlight in a hurry, you are scanning through instead of instantly recognizing stuff. But maybe that’s just new habits to make.
Likes it
> Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18 that makes both 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max randomly disconnect Bluetooth and all sorts of weird issues. My iPhone 16 Pro Max Bluetooth has been rock solid with everything I've used it with. Your comment is a good reminder that (1) it's impossible for vendors to test with all possible devices, and (2) at Apple scale there will never not be some customers who experience problems. I recommend reporting it if you haven't — I had glitchy audio with an earlier phone and an older Honda Odyssey's Bluetooth connection, and a few months after my report a subsequent OS update fixed it. (Correlation, not causation, I understand.)
Doesn’t like it
It would not be hard for them to do this, and some apps exist to emulate a desktop environment when you plug the iPhone into a dock and hook it up to a monitor, but it's pretty sad that Apple won't embrace something like this. Despite the fact that the largest iPhone and smallest iPad are less than 2" difference, the $130 Apple Pencil will not work with an iPhone Pro Max, and both devices run different operating systems with arbitrary features. One of the biggest complaints about their latest iPad was that it's so powerful yet limited by iPadOS. I feel the same way about my iPhone 16 Pro Max. Apple wants you to have an iMac as your desktop, a MacBook for your mobile device, an iPad to watch videos, and an iPhone to bring with you.
Doesn’t like it
I own almost every Apple ecosystem device, but I definitely wouldn’t call their mobile device RAM capacity as sufficient. It physically hurts me when my iPad Pro M2 and iPhone 16 Pro Max (earlier 15,14,13,12,11) start to swap out live apps - sure some apps retain state, but the majority still don’t. Even Safari randomly reloads tabs for me, while I’m just researching purchases across <10 live tabs.
Doesn’t like it
Bought an iPhone 16 pro max on launch day. Went to the Apple Store with my iPhone 15 pro max, and was encouraged to transfer my data in the store. I sat there for 7 hours, with both phones connected via hard wired Ethernet, and was still not successful. The only use case I can come up with for higher speed physical is direct phone to phone data transfer during these upgrade cycles. I’m appalled by how much doesn’t work on my new phone - passwords that need to be re-established, music that needs to be downloaded. It’s not a traditionally clean “it just works” Apple experience. I’d like to plug a USB cable into both phone, and within 15min, have my new phone exactly like my old phone - exactly the same. It was so bad, I may skip future refresh cycles - and the reason Apple may thing about actually fixing the experience.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
> Most appropriate length for what? Some iPhones have multiple focal lengths, ... Most appropriate length for portrait photography is well established to be somewhere between 50mm and 100mm (35mm equivalent). The lower end is often considered more "natural" for such photo type, while the longer focal lengths are considered more flattering. An iPhone 16 Pro Max has three focal lengths, 12, 24 and 120 (35mm equivalent). The first two are much too short unless significantly cropped, and the last one is excessive and requires stepping way back and has the worst image sensor and likely worst compromise of a lens - a lot of lens chonk is elements to manage chromatic aberration and distortion, which smartphone lenses have no room for. > ... just like some "real camers" have fixed lenses with a fixed focal length (Fuxji x100 and the medium-format one whose model I can't remember, Leica something-or-other, Sony R1). People using fixed lenses do so because they prioritize a particular type of image or style, and decided to get an even better (and lighter) lens for that instead of carrying around a compromise they don't need. > Plus, for what is a traditional camera "just better"? When it comes to getting the best picture , a chonky camera always wins - although they have had some catch-up to do on the software side, physics and our current technical limitations do not care about pocketability. But a less perfect picture is better than no picture because you left the "real camera" at…