iPhone 13 Pro Max Review: undisputed battery champion

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Design, Size and Colors

The iPhone 13 Pro Max is unapologetically a big phone. With a flat screen and no tapered edges, it sits wider than most Android flagships too. It also has these flat shiny sides that give it extra style points, but are not quite ergonomic and it’s hard to comfortable grip unless you have a bigger hand.

While we love Apple’s push towards bigger batteries, this has also meant adding more weight to an already giant phone. Just take a look at the evolution of the Max series throughout the years, the screen size and weight have consistently grown only bigger:

• iPhone XS Max — 6.5″, 208g
• iPhone 11 Pro Max — 6.5″, 226g
• iPhone 12 Pro Max — 6.7″, 228g
• iPhone 13 Pro Max — 6.7″, 240g 

For all else, it’s a beautiful and solidly constructed device. The stainless steel body feels durable and premium, you have IP68 water and dust protection for a peace of mind, the front of the phone uses Apple’s Ceramic Shield, a fancy term for its extra tough glass, and on the back, the camera lenses are actually made of sapphire so they are far more resistant to scratches.

The back is still frosted glass that you can get in one of four colors: the new Sierra Blue, a very nice and pale shade of blue, then the Graphite that we have up for review, then the bright Silver and finally, the Gold model which is more like pale champagne and also looks quite good. This being matte glass means you don’t get fingerprint smudges on the back if you use the phone without a case, but we also find matte glass more slippery than a glossy finish that sticks to the hand a bit easier.

The 6.7-inch display on board now comes with a 20% smaller notch, which is now narrower but just a tad bit taller and when you watch 18 by 9 videos it gets in the frame just a tiny bit, a pet peeve of mine.

One improvement with the screen is that it now gets quite a bit brighter: while last year’s Max could reach 800 nits of brightness, this one goes to 1,000 nits, which makes for far more comfortable use outdoors on a sunny day (we actually measured a slightly higher reading of 1,050 nits). In the above chart, also pay attention to the Delta E numbers which show the average error from the ideal color reproduction, it’s tiny on the iPhone 13 Pro Max, this display is calibrated impeccably well!

Performance

Fast all around and an absolute beast for gaming

All four iPhone 13 models feature the same Apple A15 Bionic chip, but there are some slight details that you should know about. First, the A15 chip here is built on the same 5nm technology as last year’s A14, but it nonetheless manages to make some gains in both CPU and GPU performance. And compared to Android flagships typically powered by the Snapdragon 888, this processor is a step above in terms of performance.

We start measuring first the CPU performance where you will notice that the gains in single-core speeds are not quite as big, as the improvements in mulit-core performance:

GPU and Gaming performance

Here, we see that the iPhone 13 Pro Max not only starts at a much higher score, but after an initial drop that we see on all iPhones, it stick to its nominal speed far better. This phone is seriously impressive and features meaningful improvements over even the smaller 13 Pro, and even bigger gains of 20% to 25% compared to the regular iPhone 13. It also has more than double the scores of Android flagships like the Galaxy S21 Ultra. If you want the ultimate gaming machine, the iPhone 13 Pro Max seems like the perfect choice. 

Camera

While last year the Max model had a slightly more advanced camera system than the smaller Pro model, this year, the cameras on both the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max are exactly the same. Which is to say… great! 

You have a triple camera system, as before, but it’s much bigger and the initial reaction to just the look of it was… well, let’s just say that “ugly” was the most common phrase we heard. But all three cameras are new and better. Apple has chosen to stick with 12MP for the sensors, but the main camera now features a bigger size and a wider aperture, which makes it faster and more reliable with low light performance. The ultrawide camera receives a similar upgrade and is also more capable in low light photography with faster shutter speeds in night mode. Finally, the zoom lens is now 3X, up from 2.5X on last year’s model, which gives you more reach to zoom in.

If we had to summarize the differences, we would say that during the day the quality is very similar to last year’s model with only zoom shots getting a more noticeable boost, and some very slight variation in colors.

The selfie camera, however, has gotten a huge update and now captures much more dynamic shots and better exposes faces. Just take a look at the selfies above, the skies are completely burned out on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, while they are beautifully blue on the newer Pro Max.

In low light, however, it gets interesting. There are bigger changes, definitely, but don’t expect anything revolutionary. This year, Apple has tweaked its Night Mode software and the 13 Pro Max captures slightly darker photos for a more realistic “night” feel.

We feel like that’s a good change, and overall photos at night have cleaner detail and just look at the lamps and flare around them which is far better controlled. Some phones try to emphasize they can capture a ton of light at night and the resulting image is sometimes so bright it almost seems like day, so Apple introduces some common sense here which is good to see. It also usually takes less time to capture a night photo, with shorter exposure times.

The ultra-wide camera has gotten an even bigger boost. It’s a big improvement from the ultra-wide on previous iPhones as it captures far more detail with better clarity. 

On the video front, you still don’t have some of the bells and whistles of the Android competition, and things like 8K video recording are not available. On the other hand, those other competitors don’t offer professional video codecs like Apple ProRes that you get on the iPhone.

And while all other new features feel very solid, this one feels like a bit of a gimmick, or at least a work in progress. The switching is often a bit chaotic. The background blur, however, is the best of any phone that has attempted portrait mode video so far, it’s a big jump over Samsung’s or OnePlus’ solutions, but still far from perfect.

Battery Life and Charging

The Pro Max has the biggest battery cell that Apple has ever put in an iPhone at a massive 4,352mAh capacity, and that is great news for battery life. The 13 Pro Max just last on and on, and on. But first, just take a look at the evolution of batteries on Max-sized iPhones in the past four years:

That’s a 50% increase since the iPhone XS Max, and that’s great news as one of the most common complaints with the XS Max was about its sub-par battery longevity. My colleague Joshua Swingle who was first to get the 13 Pro Max says that battery life is “simply incredible”, measured in as long as 12 hours of screen on time with the majority of that spent on social media.

The iPhone 13 Pro Max is crushing it on the web browsing test and that ladies and gents is one of the highest scores among all devices that we have tested so far. Impressive showing!

But it is also great at our YouTube video streaming test where it managed to play back video non-stop for more than 10 hours, a first for an iPhone.

And last but not least, gamers will be happy to know that you get excellent battery life there too as the score there also breaks the 10-hour mark.

Compared to the iPhone 12 Pro Max, we have measured improvements of between 20% and 30%, making this a 2-day phone with average use. In fact, it’s actually quite hard to drain the battery on the new 13 Pro Max in just one day.

On the charging front, there is far less excitement: you don’t have a charger in the box, so prepare to spend a bit extra cash if you want one, and there is also no change in charging speeds, at least according to Apple. 

But we decided to check just in case and it seems that the iPhone 13 Pro Max secretly supports faster charging than the official 20W speeds.

iPhone 13 Pro Max charging speeds

Apple 20W charger vs Samsung 45W charger

You can definitely see that you get quite faster charging as a 30-minute top up with Samsung’s fast 45W charger gives you 53% recharge vs just a 41% top-up while using the official Apple 20W charging brick.

And a full charge takes just 1 hour and 40 minutes if you use that faster charger compared to a bit more than 2 hours with Apple’s own charger.

Overall, it’s nice to know that you have those slightly faster speeds, which are definitely appreciated with this bigger battery and it’s a bit perplexing why Apple itself is not selling a 30W fast charger to support those higher speeds (up to 27W we measured).

Even this way, though, with these higher speeds, the iPhone feels behind the pack. That might have counted as fast charging a couple of years ago, but is downright slow compared to Android flagship rivals that often charge fully in 30-40 minutes (or even faster in some extreme cases). Apple is obviously super conservative about this and doesn’t want a battery exploding on it, and that’s our only explanation.

iPhone 13 Pro Max: should you buy it?

At the end of the day, the iPhone 13 Pro Max is clearly one of the best big phones around. It is the world’s fastest phone, it has simply incredible battery life, and the camera system is more versatile now and captures better photos, while video recording remains the very best in the industry. Add to that the long anticipated 120Hz ProMotion display, and you have one very enticing package and the price has not changed either. But the real story for us remains about the incredible battery life, which is… just sublime! This is comfortably a 2-day phone with average use and that feels liberating.

Should you buy it?

So… what do you think about the iPhone 13 Pro Max: is it the update you’ve been waiting for?