I SWITCHED to the iPhone 17 Pro Max - My Review and Experience

So I've probably waited my entire tech career to get an orange iPhone and it was also the launch of my new kid which means this is even more special kind of getting them both in the same year. So many of you have messaged me about the launch of this color saying this is the official Carl Conrad edition. I wanted to take some time to get used to the phone to set it up in my orange theme to give it all of its glory so this is my review of the 17 Pro Max Carl Conrad edition. So we'll obviously start off with the design and the colorways first you can grab them in three this year which I know a lot of people have said that they're not really pro colors they're not neutral you can get it obviously cosmic orange which is the launch spec my favorite one the silver slash white as well as the deep blue I actually like that Apple is introducing some funky colors but it is the two-tone effect which kind of really throws me off especially when the light hits this glass panel it looks more like light pastel I love the aluminum I love the shade of this if Apple needs like a designer for figuring out the proper spec of like orange hire me that's all I'll say on that the two-tone finish is needed because now they've switched back to aluminum from titanium that's mostly to do with a thermal management the phone has gotten quite chunkier for a pro model the battery has gotten better which I'll get to in a second if we bring up my older 16 Pro Max you can actually see a big difference in the height it's thicker it's slightly wider and of course heavier and it also has a new design in the fact that it is quite rounded now on the edges for that aluminum unibody design because of this glass back so we need that for obviously magsafe for wireless charging it gives it I don't want to say like a cheap look but it would it be nicer if it was a bit more color matched in my opinion and to kind of address all the like scratch gate rumors or I guess I've seen so many things on reddit all the phones and like the Apple stores they're completely mashed up people are very rough on their phones for demo models I was on the fence about that but after using it for a while I can say that the anodization especially around this little camera plateau we can actually zoom up here there is a bit of orange that has chipped off aluminum is naturally a lot softer than glass and you can see right on that really sharp edge there a bit of wear and tear I even have a little nick on a corner and I can only imagine as this phone gets older than a month if I use it for a year especially without a case how this will get really really damaged and really dinged up so I typically say if you'd like to rock a phone like naked at least grab some like minimal protection that's actually where this full like color matched case comes in this is from ESR it's actually great because it's all completely uniform it actually protects the little plateau there it's one solid color of orange which once again orange expert you're talking to it's a very nice shade it also has this nice little camera guard which once again protects those three sensors and it has this little flip up so if you are watching content neither landscape or portrait it serves that purpose to prop up the phone which is really nice and the second thing that I will say I have installed a little screen protector on it once again 10 15 bucks protect your expensive phone I know that it has ceramic shield too which is three times better scratch resistance but because these phones have gotten more expensive especially the base pro model like not the pro max that's $100 more and the fact that you can now get these in two terabytes which will run you over 2,000 or if you're paying like Canadian pesos $3,000 which is absolutely mental just protect your device the last thing that you want is to scratch your phone after getting it for a couple weeks kind of breaks your soul on the inside so that is the overall design like I mentioned another reason for the aluminum is to help with heat management we also have gotten thicker to now finally have a vapor chamber in the pro model so that really helps with a lot of heat dissipation I've seen some other great content using like thermal cameras to actually see that heat dissipation at work I will say after using this you know for the past month it does not feel hot to the hand or it doesn't feel like warm the heat really seems to dissipate which obviously helps with performance you can keep up frame rates whether you're gaming whether you're doing hardcore like video editing which this phone can obviously do when I initially set this up in my like first week of using it I noticed it did get hot but after a quick little software update I noticed that kind of went away there have also been a couple glitches more so with iOS 26 some have been fixed some have not been there are some things that I love about liquid glass like the clear icons the uniformity but sometimes I find when even when I'm scrolling especially with really colorful backgrounds and if they're multicolored it gets really distracting but that's just once again personal opinion maybe I need to get used to it more but you know I am a fan of things like updating for example the photos into the main library that has been a welcome change but it's kind of like a hit or miss for me let me know your thoughts down below the screen which I won't even mention or talk about too much because it's pretty much the same as the 16 Pro Max it's still 6.9 inches it has gotten slightly brighter so the peak nit brightness is up now up to a 3000 it's great bezels are skinny it is a slightly more anti-reflective so I think Apple said that it has seven layers of anti-reflective coating still not as good as the Samsung like s25 ultra as an example it's gotten better at cutting them down but I think it once again can improve more for next year for the actual performance though like I said this is the best iPhone actually that they've made it has the new chip the a19 Pro coupled with that heat management I think this will be the best experience that you're gonna get but once again the performance on my 16 Pro Max was also really really good if I didn't have them side-by-side if I didn't compare benchmarks I honestly for what I do and I consider myself like a pro user I'm on my device a lot very very similar but honestly like the biggest improvement for me this year has been the battery life so typically I mentioned I'm a pro user so say for example on the weekend I was on my phone for 8 hours and 45 minutes I'm typically over that 7 hour mark for screen on time I'm on my device a lot I use it to make content I found that on my 16 Pro Max the phone would die by the end of the day I can never last the full one obviously I use it for a full year the battery health wasn't the greatest this has 20% more battery than the 16 Pro Max which I think is a huge huge upgrade that comes in two parts the phone being slightly thicker as well as having the SIM slot removed so this is fully eSIM it's fine but that improvement for me has been a game changer it's also one of the big reasons why I can't recommend the iPhone air for a lot of people I'll leave my full judgment I made a separate video but at the end I'll kind of compare models which I think is best but for that reason alone the air for me doesn't work and the second big upgrade I would say for me is the camera once again used a lot as a creator the telephoto now has been improved so now we have 48 megapixel fusion cameras across all three so that's the main the ultra wide as well as the telephoto now you can theoretically get eight different focal ranges that ranges from you know 0.5 the macro all the way up to 8x the zoom has gotten a lot more impressive as I kind of took this out of being taking photos you know naturally in my day-to-day use obviously color reproduction is really good iPhone video is still completely unmatched their codecs are really good their color science is really good for most of the social stuff just uploading straight from camera that's what most people do anyway it looks really really good we now have the benefit of being able to shoot in raw as an example we've switched to it right now you have to create a bit of a rig on it you do need to connect it to an SSD but we have the option when you bring that footage into Final Cut you can change things like ISO white balance so if you are like a pro video user really great feature once again so many clips now are just being recorded on iPhone movies are shot on iPhone it's really great to have that extra flexibility another welcome upgrade surprisingly for me has actually been the 18 megapixel center stage camera which is across the entire iPhone 17 lineup so I'm just not on the pros but the fact that you can now change the orientation because the sensor is now like square you can choose to shoot between portrait landscape ultrawide without having to change the orientation on your phone welcome upgrade like that is super cool it also seems to be a lot more stable but if you're already coming from say like the 16 Pro which has the same sensors for the main and the ultrawide you know what camera you're gonna get you know the dynamic range is gonna be great you know that the performance is gonna be good like I said the big change to the 17 Pro is that telephoto and the battery especially for like daily use those are the two things that you'll notice the most if you don't care about those things and say you want like a slimmer phone you don't care about the thickness I think that's the reason why the iPhone air came out when I initially held this I was super impressed obviously you have those sacrifices it's super thin the battery definitely is not anywhere near as good that's why they sell their own little battery pack separately the fact that you only have one camera but if you are the person that just uses your phone I guess like a regular person not a pro user you just use it kind of you know normally you just point and shoot for your camera you only need that one focal range I think the iPhone air is great like as a real techie I would love to see pro features like great battery life one day maybe we might get that in an iPhone air body as battery tech gets better if Apple finally decides to adapt like a silicon carbon battery and just makes it a lot better but honestly most people the iPhone 17 like the base model this is still the best option to get the fact that we have promotion so that's obviously one 220 Hertz that's in the other two models the fact that you have still the two cameras for extra versatility and the fact that this still hasn't got a price bump I would still say that iPhone 17 best recommended one across the board if you really want something new shiny to use it's a very different lovely experience you don't care about those sacrifices the iPhone air and truly if you are a pro pro user if you need that versatility for the cameras if you care about that thick chunky battery if you really want this to last all day if you can really benefit from pro res raw if you really want those 12 gigs of RAM if you want that base storage option which this now comes at 256 gigs if you want that 2 terabyte version which this offers you obviously have to pay for it that's who the pros for and obviously if you are a big sucker for the color of orange you got stuck with one of the pro models this year so I hope you enjoyed my review I hope you enjoyed my actual time with it for most people if you just grab the 256 gig option and then if you are shooting say like pro res you can attach like an external SSD so that is $1,199 or $1,749 Canadian and before we finish I mentioned obviously about the battery lot but it also has an increased battery charging speeds now so up to 40 watts wired so you can go from 0 to 50 and around like 20 minutes that's another big thing that I've noticed but if you already own the 16 pro max and can live without those little additions those little upgrades honestly I still think this is a great device these will honestly be cheaper you can get them on discount even I think most of you can skip the upgrade this year and I think this is just me projecting Apple is kind of teasing us with the iPhone air this form factor I do believe I've seen some like leaks and rumors already that we will be getting some sort of folding device so you can imagine the iPhone air like two of these stacked together and that will be folding don't blame me if it doesn't happen but yeah that has been my iPhone 17 pro max review thanks again to everyone that has messaged me about this colorway honestly means a lot in the end I am super stoked we got an orange iPhone this will live on my orange tech wall till that no longer exists so hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and I'll catch you in one of my next ones peace