iPhone 13 Pro Max review: pretty big minor updates!
There is no doubt that the iPhone 13 Pro Max is an amazing device. Despite the differences over last years model seeming small at a glance, this really is the best Apple has to offer us right now and it ticks a lot of the right boxes. Now for the average user, this year is what a lot of people might call an ‘S’ model upgrade (remember something like the 6 and 6s), but if you’re the type of person that cares a little more about the phone you carry in your pocket, then you might actually notice that some of these upgrades are pretty damn cool!
The upgrades this year can be split down in to three different areas. Screen, Camera and Battery. Upgrades to the screen really does make the experience of using this phone feel a whole lot smoother, especially when coming from an earlier iPhone, or another device unsuporting of a high refresh rate. The cameras have all gotten pretty amazing upgrades (yes just like last year but better), and an introduction of modes like Photographic Styles and Macro mode, and the ability to shoot cinematic video makes you feel like a true photographer every time you open the camera app. Not to forget that you’ll find yourself charging a lot less during the day, if you have to charge at all, because the battery life on this thing really is insane.
TL;DR
The iPhone 13 Pro Max is an amazing device with an insane camera setup, a beautiful 120Hz display and super-long battery life that left me more than happy after 2 weeks of testing. I wish it had USB-C and maybe TouchID and a hole-punch camera cutout but these are just extras and overall this is one of the best phones you can buy right now for the price.
13 Pro Max Design, Specs and pricing
To kick us off, this year the iPhone 13 Pro Max comes in 4 different colours. Graphite, Silver, Gold and the new Sierra Blue (this is the colour I decided to go for).
The screen size for both Pro models is the same as last year, 6.7 inches on the Max, and you might begin to notice a theme because the device pretty much looks the same too! Unless you turn the phone around and compare camera sizes you won’t see any differences coming off the back of last years dramatic design change. I’m not kidding by the way these cameras are massive!
You will also find a slight increase in weight, with this years model weighing in at 12 grams heavier than last years model which doesn’t seem like a lot when you read it like that but this phone is BIG. This is likely due to the physical increase in battery size which honestly is a fair trade-off, and one I don’t mind at all, as you’ll find out later in this review.
Another noticeable change, and probably the only other one you can see on the outside, is the 20% smaller notch at the top of the display. Apple has done a bit of moving around up here and shifted the speaker grille right up to the top edge of the chassis to allow for all the same sensors and cameras, keeping things like Face ID present and working as they should do. It’s a little disappointing that this extra screen real estate hasn’t been used very much as it would have been nice to see something like a battery percentage number or any extra information up there seeing as there is now room without it feeling crowded.
The last noticeable change is probably the new A15 Bionic chip. Now on paper again this chipset isn’t all that much different in comparison to the A14 from last year but you can still expect super high speeds when doing anything on this phone. Apple is calling this their “fastest chip ever in a smartphone” and they’re probably not lying. Opening and closing apps, swapping between apps and multitasking, gaming and pretty much anything else you’re going to do is going to feel really nice and smooth.
The 13 Pro Max starts at £1049 here in the UK for the 128GB model and is also available in 256Gb, 512GB and a whopping 1TB model each with their own price increases.
You can check out a full list of specs and compare devices directly on Apple’s website by clicking here!
13 Pro Max Display
The display on the 13 Pro Max is huge. At 6.7 inches with super slim bezels, watching videos or scrolling socials on this is a great experience. It is super bright and super responsive and the colours are bright and accurate, it’s kind of everything you’d want in a display you’re probably going to be glued to for most of the day.
That’s not all though! The best upgrade to the display this year (and probably my favourite new feature overall) is what Apple is calling ProMotion, something that’s only previously been seen on the iPad Pro. The addition of ProMotion is allowing the new screens to reach a higher refresh rate of 120Hz, allowing everything you see on screen to happen a lot quicker and a lot smoother than it did before. If you own an iPhone right now the chances are you’ve probably not had any experience with a high refresh rate on a mobile device before, and until you see it for yourself it’s going to be a little hard to explain why it’s such a great feature.
Essentially what this all means is that as you’re scrolling through something on your phone, all the animations look much much smoother. For example, as you’re scrolling through text it is still readable and not turning to a blur as it whizzes up the screen, and It all feels a lot more instant and as though it’s responding to your touch input right there as you make the gesture.
Joshua Chang actually made a great video on people’s reactions when given the 12 and 13 Pro and asked if they noticed a difference. Check out his video above! Skip to 2:30 for the reactions!
The smart features Apple has packed into their ProMotion displays however is what makes this all a little bit cooler. Where the display can reach up to the high refresh rate of 120Hz it can also drop all the way down to just 10Hz when you’re sat reading what’s on-screen, before kicking right back up to 120Hz when you decide to scroll up or down. This is great and it helps to save a lot of battery life because if nothing is moving on the screen it doesn’t need to refresh what you’re seeing.
Now yes this is a premium feature and a lot of people might argue that the reason Apple has gotten away with not having a high refresh rate for so long is that iOS is already a super smooth operating system with very little stuttering. It’s very much one of them ‘try it to see the benefits’ moments and while it might be a bit of a gimmick for some people, I still think its a pretty cool feature that might have to be in every iPhone going forward, because once you switch to a high refresh rate screen, it’s kinda hard to go back.
13 Pro Max Cameras
This year the rear cameras on the 13 Pro Max got a pretty big upgrade both in physical size and in image quality. These cameras really have grown a lot and I remember thinking that when the 12 Pro came out that it had big cameras but the 13 Pro makes it look small in comparison.
These size increases haven’t all been for nothing though. All 3 cameras on the 13 Pro and Pro Max have the same upgraded specs as each other this year, which is nice to not have to fork out that extra couple hundred to have the best camera available on the larger model device. They’re all 12mp and are still accompanied by the mic, LIDAR and flash on that rear camera bump. The main wide camera has larger sensor-shift stabilisation for that larger sensor featuring 1.9μm pixels and is now at f/1.5 aperture, which basically means any image that you shoot on this thing is going to look great! Seriously any photo I’ve taken using this lens has looked incredible. Now I don’t claim to be a photographer by any stretch of the imagination so these features are truly being used by the average customer but the addition of the Photographic Styles that let you choose from things like a richer contrast or a warmer tone with every shot, help to make you feel like you’re shooting some high-quality images without any of the training. This main sensor though really does feel upgraded and can shoot the image that you learn to expect from it in various lighting conditions and scenarios.
One of the more impressive upgrades this year was to the Ultra Wide camera. It too got an upgrade in more light-capturing but the cool feature here is the addition of Macro Photography. Now, when you bring your phone up to around 10cm away from an object you will clearly notice that behind the scenes the camera switches to using the Ultra Wide, cropping the frame to make it look like it’s still just getting closer. This can be a little annoying when trying to take a normal photo and focus yourself but Apple has said quickly after launch that there will be a software update to allow you to select and deselect this mode. The level of detail this mode allows you to capture is quite amazing and it could help take that instagram feed to the next level with no more blurry shots of up close objects, the clarity is really sharp. This is another one of the cool features you should definitely try out for yourself to see just how neat it is.
Im sure you’ve figured out the pattern by now but the new telephoto lens also got an upgrade. The quality of the image is where you can see the major bump here with the images you shoot using the telephoto looking ever closer in quality to that of the main wide camera. It has been set to a 3X zoom which is around the equivalent of a 77mm focal length. Don’t expect to go shooting something crazy far away and keep that detail because Apple isn’t matching Samsung here with a crazy 100X optical zoom. Instead, they’re sticking a little closer and retaining a little more detail, which isn’t a bad shout seeing as the 100X zoom is often used for gimmicky purposes. Anything past that 3X optical will just be a cropped down version that is shot and zoomed in. There’s also a really nice natural bokeh effect around the outside that helps to focus in on that sharper detail being shot by the camera, adding a little more to the overall structure of the image.
Cinematic mode joins the Photographic Styles as the other so-called Pro feature this year. This mode is for the people that shoot a lot of video on their phone and want a little more cinematic effect. The mode seeks to blur the surroundings of whatever the focus point is in the video at any given time. Say you’re shooting a video of someone talking and they turn and look at someone or something else, the focus will shift from that person to whomever or whatever they look at. It’s a pretty cool feature but I found it’s not quite perfect. While yes it works most of the time, if you’re shooting this in low light or even sometimes in what I’d call a decent environment, it can’t quite grasp focus on what I want or the edges look a little blurred. This might be to do with it not utilising the LIDAR sensor and is instead just looking for faces to focus on. One of the better things about this mode however is the ability to jump into the shot post-production and edit the focus points and depth effect after its already been shot, that’s pretty cool.
All in all, I feel its needs to be reiterated that the cameras on this phone are no joke and it is probably the best camera system on any smartphone right now!
13 Pro Max Battery Life
The battery life on the 13 Pro Max is probably going to be the thing that the majority of people notice over everything. Every day for the past week or so I have been shocked at the performance I have pulled from this device and still be making it to 9-10 o’clock at night with at least 20% battery from a start in the early morning. Now I’m a pretty heavy user of my phone and while testing out all the features on this device last week I averaged around 7 hours of screen on time. To still be finishing the day with a pretty decent chunk of battery left after that kind of screen on time and not have to worry about charging is a very nice feature to have.
Apple claims that this increase in battery life is down to things such as the adaptive display saving power or the A15 bionic working in a more efficient way, but it’s likely down to the whopping 18.5% increase in size over last years model. Apple is saying that these things combined help to provide around two and a half hours of extra battery life over the 12 Pro Max, which already had insane performance. Like I said before, using this phone for around a week had honestly left me looking at the percentage indicator and wondering why I’ve only dropped a couple of per cent in around an hour.
It really has surprised me the performance I can get out of this thing and not have to worry about bringing along a portable charger, and I think that this will become one of the things I appreciate the most on them days when you really need every last per cent you can get!
The bottom line
The iPhone 13 Pro Max is a phone packed full of features and one that if you own it you’re going to be very impressed at the things it can do. It has an amazing display that leaves you satisfied every time you use it - a fantastic set of cameras capable of shooting an insanely high-quality photo and video - crazy performance out of the A15 Bionic chip and a huge battery, capable of keeping you powered on all day long.
The list of changes over last years model remains pretty short but these iterative upgrades come packed with a punch and they hit the spot perfectly. Coming from a 12 Pro device you may have to dig a little deeper to notice the differences but I think any model device earlier you’re really going to feel the added benefits.
Iterative upgrades are what brings us ever closer to the extra features we demand from our phones and if it weren’t for the so-called ‘S’ model upgrades then we wouldn’t be sat here with the devices we have today. Some advancements can take years, and you’re likely to see more of an upgrade and feel more compelled to spend the money if you’re someone who updates your contract every 2-3 years instead of upgrading year on year, but that still doesn’t take away from the slight increases in performance and enhanced features we can see from a yearly upgrade.
Don’t get me wrong there for sure are things like USB-C, fast charging and a hole-punch display that I’d love to see come to the iPhone and I know for sure there are android users ready to tell me they’ve had it for a while (I used to own a Samsung myself and I loved these features). But the lack of these features doesn’t mean this isn’t still a great device to own. Every phone has its trade offs.
All that said, if you decide to pick up this phone, expect to be impressed as it’s clearly one of the best devices on the market!
