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Phones · Apple iPhone

Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max

13owners with an opinion
56%of verdicts positive
5/4positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for software.

What owners wrote

Likes it
I straight up returned my iPhone 18 Pro Max last week. This was infuriating. I was having the baseband lock up and drop to SOS Mode on Verizon, so I got an AT&T eSIM (spent money). Same issue, full loss of connectivity 5 times a day requiring a reboot. So I got a T-Mobile eSIM (spent money). Same issue, full loss of connectivity 5 times a day requiring a reboot. Then I read online that ONLY the Pro Max uses a Qualcomm modem and the Pro uses Apple C2. My wife's iPhone Air with C2 has great connectivity, better than my 17 Pro Max did before I swapped it for 18. So I returned the Pro Max, got a Pro, am on T-Mobile full time and my signal strength is good now in buildings that I had 0 or 1 bar before, for years. Fuck Qualcomm.
Doesn’t like it
My experience with the new Siri is objectively worse. I am on an Iphone 17 Pro Max and all searches are very slow, accessing utilities has slowed down quite a bit, lagginess when settings timers. Failure to make new notes or reminders. Stuff just not working. I've been using the OS since the RC. I give it a flat 0/10
Neutral
Is wireless connectivity a barrier there? My home WiFi goes about twice as fast as USB 2.0. My photos (I use Ente, not Google or Apple) sync in the background on WiFi, primarily while I sleep. It’s my understanding that Immich works the same way. For music syncing I’d probably set up Syncthing-Fork and then never manually transfer again. When I transfer ROMs to my Android gaming handheld I just use my local NAS and connect with CX File Manager. My handheld has USB 3.0 but I don’t find that plugging in a cable is particularly convenient, especially since the NAS box is in my closet. My iPhone 17 Pro Max has very fast USB-C but I’ve never used it for anything besides charging. I’m sure professional content creation folks know of a workflow where fast USB is helpful but for my smartphone user I can’t think of a reason to use it.
Neutral
I haven't noticed the battery life being bad or good. So I guess it is fine. My other phone is an iphone 17 pro max. I feel like the battery degrades at about the same rate on both phones, but I use the pixel more.
Neutral
I’m on iPhone 17 Pro Max, 27 beta 3. New Siri is impressive in that it answers satisfactorily now 80% of the time vs 10% with old Siri. But it’s slow as shit. GPT, Claude, and Gemini can answer me in 5-10 seconds. Google AI Mode can answer in 2 seconds. New Siri usually takes 25 seconds to respond to me. This morning it timed out (with strong network connection) when asked a simple multiplication question.
Likes it
I have recently upgraded to an iPhone 17 Pro Max from iPhone X (yes, I buy once a decade or so), and I also take photos with a A7-III. The latest iPhone takes shockingly good photos. It's not a full frame mirrorless by any stretch, but it's really in another league when it comes to mobile photography.
Likes 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.
Likes it
There are many things wrong with this. I have an iPhone 17 Pro Max and use it to capture HEIF 48 and ProRAW images for Lightroom. There’s no doubt of the extraordinary capabilities of modern phone cameras. And there are camera applications that give you a sense of the sensor data captured, which only further illustrates the dazzling wizardly between sensor capture vs the image seen by laypeople. That said, there is literally no comparison between the iPhone camera and the RAW photos captured on a modern full-frame mirrorless camera like my Nikon Z6III or Z9. I can’t mount a 180-600mm telephoto lens to an iPhone, or a 24-120mm, or use a teleconverter. Nor can I instantly swing an iPhone and capture a bird or aircraft flying by at high speed and instantly lock and track focus in 3D, capture 30 RAW images per second at 45MP (or 120 JPEGs per second), all while controlling aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Physics is a thing. The large sensor size and lenses (that can make a Mac Studio seem cheap by comparison) serve a purpose. Try capturing even a remotely similar image on an iPhone in low light, and especially RAW, and you’ll be sitting there waiting seconds or more for a single image. Professional lenses can easily contain 25 individual lens elements that move in conjunction as groups for autofocus, zoom, motion stabilization, etc. They’re state-of-the-art modern marvels that make an iPhone’s subject detection pale by compare. Examples: I can lock on immediately to a small bird…
Likes it
My Graf Castell Tiago fountain pen. My Barbour Kontiki jacket. My iPhone Pro Max 17/Apple Watch Ultra 3/Airpods Pro 3 ensemble. My Lapham’s Quarterly subscription. My LimeSDR/Raspberry Pi 5 16GB setup. My Pokit Pro. My Mathematica 14.3 license. My Oliver’s People reading glasses. My tailored suits.
Doesn’t like it
I don't like at all. My experience for iPhones is iPhone 6+ (which was amazing), then I've been at Android world (Sxx series), and now I have iPhone 17 Pro Max, and truly wonder what is the value proposition here. Feels really buggy, UI tries to be Jolla-like gesture-based, but fails to do that, default style reminds that it is made by/for a kindergardener. And there is no "home" button anymore, that resets my virtual position to something safe/familiar, now I'm trying to swipe up/down/left/right, and there is always some new screen layout. On the macOS side, it gets more locked and buggy and inconsistent with every release. This is just a general comment for Apple OSs today, not specifically version 26.2.
Doesn’t like it
Unfortunately autocorrect on iPhones at least has been garbage recently. It used to fix words as they were typed, and underlined in red if it couldn't guess, to completely rewriting more than one word going back and giving no visual indication that it happened. This is especially problematic when texting quickly/casually without perfect grammar and it ends up butchering lots of words. Oh and it's even worse than that if the keyboard is set to support more than one language, where autocorrect will just do whatever it wants. In the end I just turned autocorrect off on my phone. The correction bar is a bit better, but it likes to reorder words and often lags even on my new iPhone 17PM.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is? Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s! Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
>how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is.. Sadly most of that power is not working for you, most of the time, but working against you, by spying, tracking and manipulating you. Bet that was not include in your sci-fi dreams in 70s..