The iPhone 16 Pro Max
I have been an every-other-year adopter of the new iPhone since getting my first iPhone, the original 3G, with one exception:
- iPhone 3G
- iPhone 4
- iPhone 5
- iPhone 6 Plus*
- iPhone 7
- iPhone X
- iPhone 11 Pro Max*
- iPhone 12 Pro
- iPhone 14 Pro
- iPhone 16 Pro Max*
I was not due for the 11, but decided to get one in green because I liked the color.
This season, I decided to go, once again, with the bigger phone. The only reasons this year to get the larger iPhone are the size and the benefits that come with it: a larger screen and superior battery life. Gone are the days when the larger phone meant getting a camera feature exclusive to it.
Size
The iPhone 16 Pro Max is 6.9″ inches diagonally, where my previous phone, the 14 Pro, was 6.1”. (The non-Max 16 Pro is 6.3”.) This is nearly 75% of an inch more screen real estate. I will predictably vacillate between sizes in the future, as I always do. I like the pocket-ability of a smaller phone, and prefer smaller laptops, but I do enjoy using the larger screen on the Max devices. And the battery life? Always welcome.
The biggest limitation of the larger phone is one-handed use. I am a compulsive phone checker, and having the smaller phone makes it easy to peek at emails and other notifications with one hand. I’m signing up for another couple of years of stretching my fingers.
Color
I chose the Desert Titanium partly out of curiosity, but also because it was the fastest I could get a new phone. I don’t get choked up over my phone’s color, as I always put a case on it. I was thinking about trying the clear plastic Apple case, but I tend not to like them much. I ordered a Caudabe Veil, as I liked the Sheath on my 14 Pro so much.
The Veil is OK, but as you will read below in my discussion of the Camera Control button, there’s more to consider when selecting a case than size/bulk and color. As such, the Veil is not long for this earth.
Display
Spec-wise, the screens on the 14 Pro and 16 Pro Max are not terribly different (besides size); perhaps due to the age of the panel on the older model, the phone is incredibly bright and detailed (sushi picture) to my eye, and viewing pictures in the Photos app yields a more rich, visually satisfying experience. Both phones have the Super Retina XDR display, and both run 1000 nits (2000 max brightness).
Action Button
This is my first phone with the Action Button. Rhonda’s Pro 15 has one, but she doesn’t use it. I set it to the Flashlight, which I like but it will take a lot of getting used to. For years, the flashlight button has been on the bottom of the Lock Screen (which it still can be, but like my adoption of military time, I’m trying to go all in and retrain my brain).
I did flirt with setting the Action Button to fire off a Shortcut to create a new task in Todoist. And I might go back to that, if the Flashlight doesn’t stick. For sure, prior to iOS 18, it would have been the Camera button.
Camera Control and Camera
Camera
The iPhone 16 Pro Max continues to offer a 48 mexapixel camera, like my iPhone 14 Pro. I had been thinking about getting a new camera to replace my perfectly serviceable Olympus. I was looking for something in the 20 megapixel range, and considered both the the Olympus OM-D and Panasonic Lumix G87. This phone was a less expensive option than a new camera (and a new phone would be in the near future, if not now), so there’s a rationale. It does have a 5x telephoto zoom (vs the 3x on the 14 Pro), which I will get plenty of use out of. This episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast features a good discussion of the changes.
Photographic Styles
Photos offered a precursor to Photographic Styles on the iPhone, but the new Styles feature offers a bevy more Instagrammish options to change the style of the photo you snap. You can apply styles after taking a photo, as you could in iOS 17. One cool feature of Photographic Styles is that you can also remove or change them after taking a photo in one of the styles.
A Word About Cases
I’m too clumsy to go careless with my phones, so I always have something ready to sheath the new device. While third-party cases are always interesting to explore, the nature of the Camera Control button requires more consideration.
Camera Control, unlike the sleep/wake, volume, and Action buttons, includes a capacitive surface, meaning that in addition to presses (and half-presses), it registers swipes across its surface.
Having purchased and appreciated the excellent Caudabe Sheath case for my outgoing iPhone 14 Pro, I decided to order a Caudabe Veil case for the Pro Max 16. The Veil is a much thinner minimalist case than the Sheath. Your preference in protective wear may skew towards more robust cases, but this is a nice choice if you prefer something thin and light (I don’t know how much protection you’d get with a serious drop, and hopefully I won’t find out).
| case | Caudabe Sheath | Caudabe Veil |
|---|---|---|
| weight | 43.2 grams | 9.2 grams |
| with phone | 248.3 grams | 236.6 |
Among the possible downsides of purchasing the Pro Max vs the Pro is the weight of the device (the 14 Pro weighs 205 grams, while the Pro Max 16 is 227.2 grams). But as you can see, getting a thin case not only mediates the total heft, but with the Veil, my pocket is lighter with the Pro Max in the Veil.
Despite this, the Veil handles buttons by leaving open holes in the case. I do not prefer this to, say, the Sheath’s solution, which is to create buttons on the case that depress the iPhone’s physical buttons. This approach, however, won’t work on the Camera Control, due to the touch-activated capacitive surface.
The button works on the Veil, but you are having to squish your finger into the groove to make it work. That alone isn’t a great user experience, but it is compounded irrespective of which button you’re keen to press by the size of the Pro Max–unless you have large and dexterous hands, using the Pro Max requires two hands or a more planful approach to depressing buttons.
Nine to 5 Mac has a good article on the case situation in the era of the Camera Control, and it’s how I learned of the Beats cases. I had ordered a clear plastic Apple case last night, but I cancelled it in favor of trying a Beats case.
Apple Intelligence
The other reason I was keen to upgrade is Apple Intelligence. Sure, AI is overhyped, but I do find these early days flush with possibility. And I do very much appreciate the research and summarizing capabilities of the current crop of LLM-enabled solutions.
The idea that the Surface Pro and other Copilot+ PCs will be able to search and organize my digital existence is (in a bit creepy) enticing to me. In the same vein, what more personal device do we use each day than our phones? My phone is barely a phone; it’s a computer with email, to dos, research, files, and archived material. Why wouldn’t I be excited for the device to make some recommendations to me throughout the day, considering how much of my life I entrust it to manage?
Alas, it’s not here yet, but as Andy Ihnatko noted on the most recent episode of MacBreak Weekly, it’s quite possibly a deliberate strategy to separate the growing pains of AI in Apple devices from the release of the company’s most important hardware refresh, and the release of iOS 18 itself.
