The iPhone 18 Pro Max Takes An Incredible Design and Just Makes It Faster

Every year there’s a new iPhone, and while the iPhone Duo is a huge departure from what Apple has done in the past, the iPhone 18 Pro Max is nearly identical to last year’s model. Apple didn’t do much to drastically change the Pro Max, but instead tweaked some things under the phone to make it a bit more useful.

The most obvious improvement is the A20 Pro, which is significantly stronger than the A19 Pro in last year’s phone. But the most useful improvement has been to Siri. The improvements Apple has made to its ‘Apple Intelligence’ has made Siri more useful than it has been since the company first tried revamping the assistant with AI back in 2024.

So, if you’ve already upgraded to the iPhone 17 Pro last year, there isn’t much reason to upgrade again. But if you’ve been on the fence and need an upgrade, you could really do a lot worse than the iPhone 18 Pro Max.

When I say that the iPhone 18 Pro Max looks just like the iPhone 17 Pro Max, I mean it. Even if I put the two phones on a table next to each other, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out which is which. They both measure 0.34 inches thick, even though the 18 Pro Max is a bit heavier, at 8.78 ounces, compared to the 17's 8.22 ounces. The only way I can tell my iPhone 17 Pro Max from the iPhone 18 Pro Max is that the Pro Max Apple sent me for review has the new Black colorway.

But while the phone’s chassis being unchanged might sound like a bad thing, it really is a case of not fixing something that’s not broken. The best part of the iPhone 17 Pro Max was its camera shelf, which virtually eliminates the phone wobbling when it’s put down on a table. For some reason, other phone manufacturers really haven’t adopted this design language yet, but I’ll just say every time I use an Android device lately, I miss the camera shelf, however absurd that may sound.

The rest of the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s layout is also unchanged. On the right side of the phone, you still get the power/lock button, along with the capacitive Camera Control Button. And just like on the 17 Pro Max, the camera button is extremely easy to hit on accident, so be mindful of it.

Over on the left side is the volume rocker and the Action Button, which I have set to enable or disable Do Not Disturb mode. You can go into the settings and swap it to one of 12 different actions, or just disable it entirely. But I like to keep it on DnD, so that I can make my phone stop blowing up when I’m overwhelmed.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max’s display is also unchanged, at 2868 x 1320, and with a gorgeous OLED panel. Everything I watch or play on the phone looks incredible, with absolutely vibrant colors. It’s also rated for up to 3,000 nits of brightness, which means it gets bright enough to use outside comfortably. The only other phone I’ve used that comes close is the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, but that shouldn’t be too surprising, given that Samsung manufactures a lot of Apple’s displays.

Apple has also shrunk the Dynamic Island on the display, so you have less of the display area blacked out at the top of the display. It is still there, and it’s still visible, but I don’t really notice the difference until I have the 18 Pro and the 17 Pro next to each other. There have been phones that have eliminated the need for a camera cutout, and the iPhone still isn’t there, but hopefully by shrinking it, Apple is getting closer to getting rid of it altogether.

I have had some problems with Siri for a few years now. For some reason, around 2022 or 2023, Apple's voice assistant stopped working for me most of the time I tried to use it. And it's not like I'm constantly trying to talk to the little robot in my phone or anything, but it got so bad that I couldn't even yell at my phone to skip a song on Apple Music reliably when I was in the shower.

But with the improvements to Apple Intelligence in iOS 27, Siri has dramatically improved. I am no longer asking it to set a timer, only to have it hang and then ask me if I want to query ChatGPT. It just sets the damn timer. I don't want to give Apple too many roses for this, because in a lot of ways, Siri has simply regained functionality that it had a decade ago.

Of course, Apple has also worked in a bunch of AI features, as well, which will let Siri scan through your messages or photos to help you plan events or find information. And, I'm sure that's useful for a lot of people, and it does appear to work well, but I'm old and too used to doing everything manually, and even this new version of 'Apple Intelligence' hasn't converted me to automating everything I do on my phone.

For the most part, the camera system in the iPhone 18 Pro Max is exactly the same as the iPhone 17 Pro Max, with the only real difference being the addition of a variable aperture. The aperture on the 18 Pro works just like it does on a regular camera, with a mechanical shutter that widens or narrows to control the amount of light in the shot.

For most people, this probably won’t make much of a difference, and the auto aperture setting is going to work fine. However, if you like to have more control of your photos, Apple has added ‘Pro controls’ to the camera app, that lets you dial in the aperture for your shot. It works extremely well, but I still don’t think I’m going to abandon my DSLR and rely on the iPhone cameras. Though, it should come in handy at events like CES, where I typically need to take photos on my phone in the interest of time.

The camera itself is still great, though, and photos look great without really needing to spend a lot of time finding the perfect shot. It’s just nice that Apple has added some finer control for anyone that wants it.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is powered by the A20 Pro, along with 12GB of RAM, and it is surprising just how much performance Apple was able to squeeze out of it. In every test I’ve run on the new Pro, it far surpasses its predecessor.

In GeekBench 7, the iPhone 18 Pro Max gets a single-core score of 3867 points and a multi-core score of 11,204 points, compared to the 17 Pro, which gets 2,865 and 7,120 points, respectively. That’s a massive 44% improvement to multi-core performance, and a 29% improvement to single-core performance.

Even compared to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra the iPhone 18 Pro Max is 24% faster, with the Android device getting 2,725 points for single-core and 8,786 points for multi-core.

When it comes to gaming, the GPU stapled to the A20 Pro is also impressive, with the 18 Pro scoring 8001 points in the Wild Life Extreme test, compared to 4795 from the 17 Pro Max and 5758 points from the Galaxy S26 Ultra. That makes the 18 Pro Max 33% faster than Samsung’s 2026 flagship.

Just like the 17 Pro, the 18 Pro Max is cooled by a vapor chamber, and it's even slightly larger this year. But, even though it has more surface area, the iPhone 18 Pro isn't more stable than last year's model, coming in at 66% in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Light stress test. That's just a bit worse than the 17 Pro Max, which got 69% in the same test last year, but with how much faster the A20 Pro is, I'll take it.

Apple also included a bigger battery this year, with 5,567mAh of capacity, compared to 5,088mAh in the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Apple claims that this battery will last through 30 hours of regular use, and while I don’t have a reliable way to benchmark battery life, I believe Apple’s numbers.

I have been pushing this phone for around three weeks now, and I usually only put it on the charger every other day, and the phone hasn’t died on me yet. Obviously, if you’re taking a lot of photos or playing a heavy game like Where Winds Meet, that number will go down, but even then I don’t imagine the phone dying in the course of a day.

Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She's been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra