Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max Review: The best large screen phone for professional creators?

Summary

The new iPhone 18 Pro Max adds important new camera features, but otherwise focuses on delivering a solid productivity device for professional creators

The iPhone's Pro Max variants are used to sitting at the top of the Apple pecking order. This year though, the iPhone 18 Pro Max is playing second fiddle to the iPhone Duo. With the expensive foldable sucking up most of the oxygen around Apple's latest launch, and no regular iPhone 18 to provide a sensible counterpoint, the iPhone 18 Pro Max finds itself in the unusual position of having to prove that refinement can still be exciting.

Last year's big design changes, topped off by that unmistakable Cosmic Orange, felt like Apple signalling that its Pro iPhones were finally putting function before form. The iPhone 18 Pro Max doubles down on that decision, retaining the exact same dimensions (and case compatibility) to the point that it's hard to tell them apart.

Except for the new colours, of course: a classy Burgundy, a relaxed Glacier and a stealthy Black, all with colour-matched backs this time. At 249g, it's chunkier in the hand, with the same premium build quality and dust-water resistance rating as the 17 Pro Max that I've carried this past year. A case is highly recommended; the unibody aluminium design may be great at dissipating heat, but it's all too easy to bruise.

Display and OS

The 6.9-inch display remains one of the biggest reasons to opt for the Pro Max in the first place. Packing in 3000 nits maximum brightness and 120Hz refresh rates, the display is plenty bright, vibrant and responsive, and remains perfectly usable outdoors. What has changed is the pill-shaped Dynamic Island, which is now about 25% smaller and can accommodate three Live Activities at once. The reduction is thanks to Apple moving the Face ID infrared sensor underneath the display, into the upper-left corner. If this is how we get to an all-screen iPhone sans notches and Dynamic Islands, I'm here for it!

At the heart of the iPhone 18 Pro Max's upgrades is Apple's new 2-nanometer A20 Pro chip, powering everything from the cameras and sustained performance to snappier on-device AI processing through its dual 16-core Neural Engine. Couple that with a significantly larger vapour cooling chamber for better sustained performance, the extra horsepower on the A20 Pro makes everyday tasks on iOS 27 fly.

From having the phone render iOS 27's Liquid Glass effects to playing UnGodly at the highest settings or generating images on-device, the 18 Pro Max handled it with consummate ease. Siri AI, which has come a long way with iOS 27, benefits too, surfacing information across your apps and answering queries faster, with noticeably shorter response time. Even final-boss level tasks, such as recording 4K/60fps video in the oddly warm September Bengaluru have been a breeze, with the phone running cooler and for longer than previous generation iPhone Pros.

Battery life and cameras

Battery life is equally impressive, with the phone ending most 12-14 hour days with over 30% left in the tank. The only day I managed to get anywhere near the 20% low-battery warning was on a dawn-to-dusk day out, shooting video, running maps over 5G, streaming music to the car stereo and generally doing my best to wring the battery dry. For most folks, the 18 Pro Max could easily last a couple of days without charging. And when you finally do run it down, the iPhone 18 Pro Max supports 60W charging, with roughly 0-45% charge in 15 minutes.

The iPhone Pro camera setup has been a reliable quantity for years now, and that remains the same. Photos remain bright, detailed and natural-looking, with the new 48-megapixel Fusion Main camera producing a subtle but noticeable improvement in detail and low-light performance. There's added control over the texture of images with expanded Photographic Styles (including some gorgeous retro effects).

But the headline addition is the new variable aperture -- mechanical blades that control the amount of light hitting the sensor, giving the camera more flexibility across lighting conditions -- which moves between f/1.48 and f/4.0.

Leave it on Auto and it quietly does its thing, but that's wasting a Pro camera setup, at least in the right hands. Manual mode is but a tap away, with pro controls to adjust shutter speed, white balance and exposure. You can trade more light and a creamy background blur for greater depth of field, and the difference is most useful at night and with close-up subjects, while the wider f/1.48 aperture can shorten Night Mode exposures. More control in the hands of the user is always a good thing, and variable aperture plus pro controls nail the brief, giving photographers the sort of control they have long wanted right in the Camera app.

Video remains best in class, and you can now add Cinematic blur after shooting, along with 4K Dolby Vision timelapses, better low-light video and manual video controls. More importantly, the iPhone 18 Pro Max continues to make shooting genuinely good video feel almost ridiculously easy.

Who is it for?

With each passing year, the Pro Max is increasingly a phone for creators like photographers, videographers and vloggers -- people who shoot, edit and publish from the same device. The variable aperture, better sustained performance and vastly improved battery life all make a difference when the phone is doing duty as a production tool rather than just a communication device.

The jump in price, though, is impossible to ignore. Apple has held the line longer than most smartphone makers as component and memory costs have risen, but it has finally caught up, with the Pro Max starting at a rather eye-watering ₹1,79,900 -- a full ₹30,000 more than the launch price of the 17 Pro Max. That makes the price hike a significant part of the upgrade equation this year, and the 256GB and 512GB variants will be the sweet spot for most.

Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator, and tweets @2shar.