Is this a mistake? iPhone 17 Pro Max Review

Porsche's video is sponsored by Lifon. This year, Apple made its pro iPhones thicker, heavier, subjectively uglier, and I think they might have been the best decisions that they've made in like half a decade. Apple finally stopped apologizing for making a pro phone actually pro. I think that changes everything. And I do know how that sounds coming out of my mouth. This thing has a massive camera plateau that looks like a stove top. It weighs more than last year's phone. It's made of aluminum instead of premium titanium. On paper, this is a downgrade in a ton of ways that matter, especially to Apple's marketing department. But after using this cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro Max the past few weeks, I've realized something. So for years, Apple's been trying to make the pro iPhone thinner, lighter, more premium feeling, kind of chasing this idea of what I guess they thought a flagship should look like. And in the process, they were compromising on the stuff that absolutely mattered to people who used the phones a lot. And this year, it appears they just said screw it, let's make the iPhone people actually need instead of the phone that looks good in like marketing photos, and the result is generally the most interesting iPhone pro iPhone in years. So I wanna start, I think the most controversial part of the whole thing, the design. When I first saw the renders, I think most people at that Apple lost their minds. After living with it though, I do kind of get it and it all made sense, which is a little bit surprising. The aluminum switch was strategic. Aluminum conducts heat about 20 times-ish better than titanium, and when you're building a vapor chamber cooling system, which I'll get to in a second, you actually need to move heat around. So from a performance standpoint, that makes total sense. But I don't wanna pretend that it is not a weird decision. Apple spent the last two years convincing us that titanium was the future. Premium, durable, aerospace grade. They made it like a cornerstone of the 15 pro and 16 pro marketing, and now they're just back to aluminum like titanium never happened. Does make you wonder though if they knew aluminum was better the whole time, just needed a premium story to tell for a couple years, or if they genuinely thought titanium was the move and then had to like backtrack when they realized they were wrong. Either way, it is a strange look, but I will take better thermals over consistent messaging any day. New location, new wardrobe, but same talk of precision engineering. This video is sponsored by Leifen and sent over, their two new shavers, the P3 Pro and the T1 Pro electric shavers, and Leifen's a brand that I know. I use their toothbrush, my wife and daughter who have big curly hair use their hair dryer, so we trust them in our house. So this is the P3 Pro, and it's got a dual drive linear motor system, but it's 12,000 cuts per minute. And what's clever here is they solved a vibration problem that plagues most electric shavers. If you shave electric, you know what that is when your hand shakes, you get those little micro cuts. Instead of one motor trying to drive multiple cutting heads and creating all that shake, they actually use two motors running in opposite directions to kind of cancel out the vibrations, you actually see the dual motors working. I thought it was kind of cool to look at and see. The T1 Pro is designed more like a traditional razor with a slim 12 millimeter handle. But unlike the portable shavers I've used, this one is all metal design. I think it feels really premium, which is not something I thought I'd say about a shaver. Both are IPX7 waterproof, so shaving in the shower won't be a problem, and when you're done, both have magnetic heads that you easily kind of pop them off and clean. Both will also charge with USB-C, so no weird proprietary plugs. Both models have smart power management. It gives you up to four months of battery life, which is absurd, and the engineering here, this is Lyfans bread and butter, is incredible. The components are incredible, the shaver actually works. This is a brand that I've trusted in my house for years. If you want to learn more about the shavers or any of our other Lyfans products, links are in the description down below. Last year's phone got warm, not like dangerously hot, but warm enough to notice. More importantly, when it got super warm, it would throttle. I had camera stutters. I had, especially, the screen would dim all the way down, and you kind of get that feeling that your phone was fighting you and needed it the most. The vapor chamber combined with the aluminum construction created a thermal management, again, that just works, and the thermal benefits show up everywhere, too. I think we've all probably charged your phone with MagSafe with an external battery, and it gets really warm, especially the 16 Pro Max and earlier phones. On the 17 Pro, it barely registered. Gaming sessions that would sort of throttle after 20 or 30 minutes can run for almost an hour before performance starts to drop. If you push your phone hard, the thermal management alone might justify the upgrade. Everything I'm praising about this phone right now, vapor chamber cooling, prioritizing performance over thinness, actually caring about thermals, the big elephant in the room, and probably in the comments, is Android's had it for years. Samsung's had vapor chambers since, what, I think the Galaxy S7. Apple finally caught up to where Android was, and we're trying to act like it's revolutionary. It is absolutely not revolutionary. What I think it is is Apple finally admitting that physics matters more than marketing, but it's still great, and for Apple users, it's better late than never. The weight increase, 227 grams on the 16 Pro Max, 233 grams, you feel it. I know what you're thinking because I said this exact same thing in my 16 Pro Max versus 17 Pro Max video. People in the comments all over were like, what are you, human scale? There's no way you can feel six grams, and I'm not claiming to be some kind of weight distribution cyborg here, but to my end, I can feel it, and it's not about the raw weight number you feel. It's about how the weight is distributed and how it feels in your hand or in extended use, and six grams doesn't sound like much. When you're holding this thing for two hours shooting video, you do notice, and they fixed one of my biggest complaints about the 16 Pro, the sharp rails dig into my palm during long shooting sessions at baseball games. Had to take the case off during those sessions because I didn't want anything to contribute to the heat not being able to escape. Then, there's a plateau. People are calling it, you know, stovetop. That's me, I'm people. Others say it looks like a little metal shelf. I don't know, some say it looks industrial. I think it looks honest. Every other iPhone camera bump felt like Apple apologizing for needing bigger sensors. The plateau, to me, says we put serious camera hardware in here and we're not trying to hide it anymore. Polarizing, 100%, but at least it's not pretending. The weird thing, though, and subjective, I guess, but I think the design looks better in person than photos or videos, it's got this two-tone effect happening with the aluminum top and the glass bottom that does not translate well on camera. I think you have to hold it and see it to get a sense of it better. And I know, again, design is crazy subjective. You might pick this thing up and think it is the ugliest thing Apple has ever made, and that's fine, you can tell, it's your opinion, but for me, in person, it looks way better than expected. And the cosmic orange color, I love it. You might be alone in that, but after years of boring titanium shades, this actually has personality. It's vibrant, it's fun, it gets attention. My kids made fun of me and said it looked like a safety cone. I take that as a compliment, because I guess it is kind of safety cone-ish orange. It's weird that Apple didn't offer a black option. No 13th color variant of space gray, no midnight, like nothing. For a company that usually covers all the bases, leaving out black felt bizarre, but I don't know, just bear that in mind. So I have not talked about display yet, but there's one improvement I did not expect to care about until I experienced it in the real world. 17 Pro hits 3,000 nits of peak brightness versus 2,000 on the 16 Pro Max. And that 50% increase sounds like just a spec sheet bump, but the difference becomes really meaningful in a specific scenario that I encountered constantly. Using my phone outdoors during daytime games, the moment that you're trying to check something and the sun is directly overhead, 16 Pro Max would basically become unusable. You have to kind of try to do this and cut my hands around it, try to find shade, crank the brightness up, and then watch your battery drain and get even warmer. Without really seeing much on screen, 17 Pro Max cuts through that glare in a way that was genuinely surprising. It's not doing perfectly, no phone in direct sunlight really is, but noticeably and meaningfully better. Apple also added an anti-reflective coating that does work. It's not nearly as aggressive as what Samsung has on the S25 Ultra, but a big improvement over the 16 Pro Max. There's also a PWM flicker reduction toggle, which is weirdly buried in accessibility settings. If you're sensitive to screen flicker, and you know you are because you get headaches at low brightness, huge, huge quality of life improvement, which is not coming to the 16 Pro Max even with a software update. If this is an issue for you, that probably alone is reason to upgrade. I am not sensitive to it, but I know people who are and they've said it's a really big deal. Battery life. This one gets extra personal for me because I have a personality flaw where I get anxious and my phone drops below 40%. I'm not 20 or 10. I know it's irrational, my wife makes fun of me constantly, but that's how I'm wired. My 16 Pro Max, which was amazing and even had 100% battery health after a year, would sort of end heavy usage days around 30 to 35%. 17 Pro Max, that's for the most part a limit of that. I'm constantly ending those same days around 40 or 45%. 10% battery life. To most people, probably sounds like whatever, but someone with my particular neurosis about being battery prepared, 10% is massive. Last week, I was at a baseball tournament with my boys I could talk about earlier in Yucaipa, California. Four games in like 12 hours. Tons of photos, videos, texting updates to family, pictures, live streaming on Game Changer. And normally with my 16 Pro Max, I have to bring a MagSafe battery pack because I knew I would need it by game like three or four. 17 Pro Max, figured I'd try to leave it at home and I didn't even think about battery. End of the day, I was lower than it made me comfortable, 20-ish percent. But that is huge real world battery life improvements. And again, battery life is super subjective. Your third party apps are gonna matter more than mine might. But the improvements do come from several things. Bigger batteries, obviously the giant one. 5,088 million hours versus 4,676 on the 16 Pro Max. But it's not just capacity. The more efficient A19 Pro chip and better thermals, the phone wasn't wasting energy, fighting heat or throttling performance. I do find it weird that we didn't get silicon carbide batteries finally in iPhones, but it's something for the 18 Pro. In real world, I'm seeing seven and a half to eight hours max screen on time on heavy days compared to about seven on the 16 Pro Max, which does not sound dramatic. 30, 60 minutes though, constantly sort of pushed me over my anxiety thresholds and have changed how I use the phone. When I do have to charge it faster too, Apple at long last bumped wire charging to 40 watts, which is about a 50% increase in about 20 minutes versus 30 minutes need on the 16 Pro Max. Cameras. If we just compare two photos side by side of any recent pro iPhone, they all look honestly pretty similar. They're sharp, they're bright, kind of classic iPhone processing. When you zoom in, actually use the system day to day, improvements become obvious, if not subtle. Apple finally fixed, I don't know what else to call it, a consistency problem with their cameras. All three rear cameras now use 48 megapixel sensors. So your main, your ultra wide and telephoto, they're all really high resolution. They capture tons of light and they produce similar quality. You're no longer kind of gambling on whether your chosen focal length will give you a clean shot, which was annoying with previous generation iPhones. A 17 Pro Max really nails it with image quality. No matter which of the three lenses you are using. And we saw the first hand of photos taken at Mount Wilson. So look at these photos, beautiful Mount Wilson, everything from the super wide 0.5 X shot to the eight times zoom on the observatory looked super sharp with colors that popped in really good dynamic range. What's impressive is how clear the quality stage from such a wide view all the way to extreme view. You can even make out individual steps on the observatory ladder, which is crazy when you zoom out and see how far that thing was. The ultra wide got a big upgrade. 48 megapixel sensor has dramatically reduced noise when the light's not perfect. But that 4X telephoto, I think that is the star of the camera system. Apple's decision to go from 5X to 4X probably seems like a downgrade on paper. Why would you reduce the zoom? I think in practice though, it works perfectly. So for most of the photos for this review, I took them at my kid's first travel ball tournament. It was like an hour and a half away. It was a 12 year old game. My youngest son, Zachary is nine. So here's a shot of him playing second base next to the largest 12 year old I have ever seen in my entire life. But you can also see how good that eight times zoom is. It's moments like this that are why I always go for the best zoom that I can get. Your use case might be completely different and it's ultra wide or bust. But for me, the more zoom, even if it is just a crop of the 4X is so important just to my family and just being a dad. And when you want a camera that's just gonna capture those little moments quickly, you can get it. My kid's just playing piggyback around the house. We also live 20 minutes from Disneyland. So this is obviously where I go to test most photos. And when you want photos of your daughter meeting princesses and you wanna capture that perfect shot, this is the camera for you. Or you wanna capture her just living her best life. If I could come back as anybody else in the world, I'd wanna come back as her. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max cameras are perfect. You can see the detail in the background. The castle looks clear. She looks sharp. Everything about the photos, I thought just looked generally very good. I do wanna show you the front facing camera too that also got a really big upgrade. The selfie camera, I think went from really usable to actually really good. Like I would legitimately use this for content now. Phone automatically expands the field of view and then rotates to fit everybody in. For video, the improvements also carry over. The 48 megapixel sensors across the board mean video looks cleaner, more consistent, no matter what lens you're using. Also dual capture mode, which lets you record the front and rear cameras simultaneously. So I said Apple, I think added this sort of built into their own hardware instead of using sort of third party stuff to make it work. One thing to bear in mind though, it is going to burn in that selfie image into the actual video file. So you can't sort of take it out after the fact. But awesome for content creators just wanna capture your reaction to something. And if you're serious about video, like really serious about video, 17 Pro takes a bigger step than any previous model. ProRes RAW, Apple Log2, Open Gate Recording, Genlock support are here as well. So here's the thing though, Apple calls this a pro phone. How many people buying the iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max are actually shooting ProRes RAW? How many are using Genlock to take multiple cameras? I'm guessing not many, 2% maybe less. Most people buying this phone just want the best iPhone. They want the biggest screen, the best cameras, longest battery life, and that is completely fine. But you find it kind of hilarious that Apple finally added generally pro features that the vast majority of pro users will never touch. The name has always been marketing. This year they made it technically accurate for the fraction of people who actually use it like a pro tool. All right, so on to performance. The 17 Pro, like every iPhone that came before it, is ridiculously overpowered for normal tasks. The A19 Pro, spoiler, is fast, like really fast. But unless you are gaming, editing video, running demanding apps, you will not notice the speed difference scrolling through Instagram or checking email. It is way more power than most people need. I tested it with graphic intensive games, things like Genshin Impact, stuff that usually pushes the GPU hard for extended periods. 17 Pro Max maintains consistent performance way longer. I think due to vapor chamber and aluminum working together, keep the A19 Pro chip running at peak speeds without throttling. Also a benefit, extra RAM, 12 gigs versus eight is probably guessing more about future proofing than current performance. But I've noticed apps stay in memory longer. The camera app watches slightly faster. Safari tabs don't reload as often when switching between them. Multitasking feels fluid. That's very subtle, but you might notice it over a period of time. For Apple Intelligence features that are still rolling out or coming at some point, extra RAM and processing power should help with performance for on-device AI tasks. But right now, most of those features are still being phased in gradually, so can't really judge the impact yet. I think we'll see how it develops over the next few months. Should you buy it? The 17 Pro starts at about $1,100, 256 gigs. Pro Max at $1,200 for the same storage. Both phones do come with double the base storage versus last generation, which I thought was really meaningful if you shoot lots of photo and video. You're not immediately running out of space. For most people, upgrading probably doesn't make sense. 16 Pro Max is still really good. It's still a great phone if you're a heavy user or someone who pushes their phone hard at video recording. Gaming all day, constant use, 17 Pro Max offers real improvements and enhanced daily experience. If you are coming, though, from an older phone, anything from the 14 Pro or earlier, the jump is massive. The camera system alone is worth the upgrade. Factor in battery life improvements, better thermals and display. It is hard to argue against it. Apple's trading gives you 200 to 700 bucks for older phones, depending on model and condition, and carrier deals get you up to 1,100 bucks in credits for iPhone 13 or newer. Those deals make upgrading, I think, more accessible if you're willing to commit to a carrier plan for two or three years. For me personally, the decision came down to two really specific things. The 4X camera and the 8X optical quality zoom was huge. I shoot so much at zoom that it mattered to me, and having that reach with clean images opens up shots that I couldn't get before. I've been doing this long enough, I think, to know when a phone is a spec bump, when it's something more. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max feel like something more. Apple didn't just make a phone faster and add an extra lens. They rethought the fundamentals of a pro iPhone should be, and the result is a phone that genuinely feels like a significant step forward, and that is not something that happens every year.