Every year we get another slew of new iPhones, and 2025 is certainly no different. And while the iPhone 17 Pro Max isn’t as much of a new design as the iPhone Air, it does come in a shiny new chassis with a new approach to cooling – a built-in vapor chamber – even if it’s mostly fluff.
But to facilitate this new method, Apple changed up the chassis, switching back to an aluminum unibody design to better manage thermal performance. Apple claims that this, combined with that vapor chamber, helps the phone keep up its performance over long periods of time. This was moderately successful, but the new colorways and camera improvements are the actual star of the show.
Design and Software
While Apple has redesigned the iPhone 17 Pro a little bit, it’s still very much an iPhone. This smartphone has a clean aluminum unibody chassis, measuring 0.3 inches thick, 6.43 inches tall and 3.07 inches wide, and weighing in at 8.2 ounces. For such a powerful little phone, it’s an incredibly lightweight and portable device – but such is the way of smartphones in 2025.
Apple sent us the Pro Max in the Deep Blue colorway, but the phone is also available in a new Cosmic Orange hue, and also the more ‘traditional’ Silver colorway. But regardless of which color you go for, it’s not like the phone has one solid shade covering the entire chassis. On the phone I’m reviewing here, for instance, the chassis around the edges is a deeper blue, while the center of the back – coincidentally where the ‘vapor chamber’ is – appears to have a lighter shade.
On the top of the chassis is an evolution of the camera bump. Rather than having a protrusion that houses the three camera lenses, there’s an entire shelf, which the cameras only take up about a third of. This approach seems almost ridiculous at first. After all, the camera bump was one of the things I disliked the most about, say, the Galaxy Fold 7, so why make it even bigger?
Well, Apple says it’s to house critical components, so it could make the phone thinner, but the real result is that finally I have a modern iPhone that I can put down on a table without it wobbling every time I interact with it – that’s huge. If there’s any part of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max that get distributed to other phones, it should be this, we could end the era of wobbly phones.
The button layout is largely the same as the iPhone 16 Pro. You still have a lock button on the right, and the volume rocker and action buttons on the left. But returning from last year’s model is the camera control button on the bottom right of the device. By default, pressing this button will launch the camera app, and act as a shutter once you’re in there. But you can go into the settings and make it much more flexible. I have it set to allow me to do a double light press and bring up camera controls, which will let me zoom, change exposure and other such controls.
What I don’t like about this button, though, is that it’s extremely easy to press by accident. Often, when I pick up a phone, I’m holding it by the bottom third of the device as I unlock it and, well, use it. That means that through muscle memory, my thumb accidentally rests on the camera control button. And because the actuation is so light, I’m often opening the camera when I don’t want to, which is kind of a pain in the butt. This is a thing I’ve slowly been getting used to over the week or so that I’ve been using this phone, but it’s something that you’ll likely have to adjust to. Or you could just turn it off – that’s your call.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max also has an excellent display. At 2868 x 1320, it’s not the highest resolution display out there, but it has a dense enough pixel density that it looks great regardless. The OLED panel helps a lot here, delivering excellent color and brightness – in fact, with up to 3,000 nits of brightness, it’s one of the brightest displays I’ve ever seen on a smartphone. There are a number of times at night where I’ve turned up the brightness all the way and flashbanged myself with how bright it got. I love it.
And when the brightness is under control, watching videos or playing games on the iPhone 17 Pro Max is wonderful. Especially in bright, colorful games like AFK Journey, colors pop in a way that makes me not want to put the phone down. Luckily, the phone is powerful enough to play any game on the App Store, and do it well.
iOS 26
With a new iPhone comes a new iteration of iOS, and while last year’s iOS 18 debuted Apple Intelligence, it didn’t launch with the feature. Now, iOS 26 has Apple’s AI features working, along with some visual updates that are going to be divisive.
Just like with a lot of other modern smartphones, the suite of AI features here seem more like gimmicks than anything actually useful. You can have Siri query ChatGPT, of course, along with having a sometimes hilarious summary of your text messages in the Notification Center. There’s even an app called ‘Playground’ that lets you generate little images. Though, this isn’t as feature-rich as similar apps offered by Samsung or Google – but it’s an easy way to generate fun little images I guess.
You can also launch the ‘Visual Intelligence’ feature by holding down the Camera Control button. This will essentially take a picture of whatever you’re pointing the phone at, and then open a ChatGPT prompt where you can ask questions about what you’re looking at. This is probably the most useful AI feature that’s offered natively in iOS 26, but just be aware that because it’s based on an LLM, it’s not entirely reliable.
The new operating system also has an entirely new visual design, called “Liquid Glass”. Essentially this makes many app icons, trays and options bordered in a semi-transparent border. This is going to be divisive, as it’s not as visually clear as previous versions of iOS. Annoyingly, though, there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn this off, so if you don’t like the way this transparency mode looks, you’re kind of stuck with it.
Liquid Glass has grown on me a little bit over the week or so I’ve been using this phone, but I would still prefer Apple’s old visual style – I’ll just have to get used to it.
Performance
The iPhone 17 Pro Max is strapped with the A19 Pro SoC (system on a chip). This processor is packed with 6 CPU cores and 6 GPU cores, and provides a decent step up in performance over last year’s iPhone 16 Pro Max.
For instance, in Cinebench, the iPhone 17 Pro gets a single core score of 3540 points, compared to 3375 points from the 16 Pro Max. That’s just a 5% boost, but the real winner is multi-core performance where the iPhone 17 Pro gets 9339 points to the 16 Pro’s 8237 points, making for a 13% jump in multi-threaded performance. What’s fascinating, though, is how much of an improvement this phone has over the iPhone 15 Pro, which will probably be a more compelling upgrade for most people.
That older phone, in the same test, gets 2639 points for single-core and 6717 for multi-core, making for a 34% and 39% lead for the 17 Pro Max, respectively.
3DMark has a similar story, where in the Wild Life Extreme test, the iPhone 17 Pro Max gets 4795 points to the iPhone 16 Pro’s 4144 points, making for a 16% boost in gaming performance. That’s not a bad performance improvement for just one year. However, the iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, which is using the Snapdragon 8 Elite, gets 8041 points in the multi-core test which trails even the iPhone 16 Pro Max. However, 3DMark tells a different story, with the Fold 7 getting 5141 points to the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 4795 points. That’s not a huge lead, but it still means the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is the better gaming phone as long as it doesn’t overheat.
The Vapor Chamber
When Apple revealed the iPhone 17 Pro Max at its September iPhone event, it made a big deal of the vapor chamber, and how cool it would keep the power-hungry A19 Pro. Well, the processor still throttles, but only a little less than previous iPhone Pro models.
Compared to the iPhone 15 Pro Max in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Lite stress test, the 17 Pro got a stability score of 69.1%, compared to 66.9% in the older phone. That’s not a huge increase, but one thing that was interesting was that it had a little spike on its 12th run, suggesting that the cooler is at least effective in bringing down the temperature a little bit in sustained workloads. What’s really interesting, though, is that even though performance on the 17 Pro does drop after the first run, performance flattens out over the course of the stress test, rather than continuously getting worse on the iPhone 15 Pro. And given that modern CPUs love to spike performance early and then even out over time, that’s to be expected.
Just don’t expect the new vapor chamber to sustain peak performance all the time. Instead, it’ll have an initial burst of high performance, then slow down until it hits a plateau of sustained performance – it just happens that the plateau is higher than it would otherwise be.
What I really love about the vapor chamber, though, is that it spreads the heat throughout the entire device. So, during a heavy game or photo editing session, the entire phone gets a little hot, rather than having one really hot spot on the back of the phone. That doesn’t sound like much, but it makes the phone much easier to hold during long gameplay sessions.
Camera
Apple’s little 3-camera silhouette has returned for the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and while the main and ultrawide lenses are still 48MP, Apple has upgraded last year’s 12MP telephoto to 48MP. This means that all three lenses are 48MP, which means image quality should stay relatively the same no matter what you’re shooting (or how far away you are from your subject).
The selfie camera has also improved, now with an 18MP sensor hidden in the dynamic island in the display. While the sensor upgrade alone is huge, what makes it better is some of the software enhancements Apple has implemented. The biggest of these is Center Stage, which keeps you centered when you’re in a FaceTime or other video call.
This is one of the first things my partner noticed, as she noted that my face kept moving to the center of the display when we were talking. However, during more pronounced movement, the software does struggle to keep up sometimes, making things look a little uncanny – something that’ll be updated in the future I suspect.
I’m not a big photographer, but even in the week I’ve spent with the device, I’ve noticed that photos are accurate and colorful without feeling like they’re altered too much by the software. Though, if you want more software enhancement you can use AI features to further mess with your photos.
Battery Life
Apple is claiming that the iPhone 17 Pro Max can get up to 39 hours of battery life. And while I don’t think it gets that far, I found that I only really need to charge the device about every day and a half. There were even plenty of times when I was laying in bed playing mobile games with the battery sitting at 10-15% – a dangerous gamble – and the device endured for an hour or so until I got the energy to get up and plug the phone in.
