iPhone 17 Pro Max vs iPhone 16 Pro Max: Save your money

If you already own the iPhone 16 Pro Max –– or if you’re choosing between the two today –– the big question is whether the iPhone 17 Pro Max offers enough improvements to justify the upgrade. 

To find out, we put both phones through our in-house tests for battery life, camera quality, display performance, and raw speed. Beyond the numbers, we also spent time living with these devices to see how they perform in real life. In this detailed comparison, we’ll share our results and help you decide which phone is the smarter choice for your needs.

iPhone 17 Pro Max vs iPhone 16 Pro Max differences:

Design and Size

An iPhone with a new look

The large camera island at the back of the iPhone 17 Pro Max certainly makes it stand out in a crowd of older iPhones. If there is one comparison that comes to mind, it’s to the Google Pixel series, but those models typically come with a camera bar that is not as wide.

Compared to the iPhone 16 Pro Max, the cameras are still arranged in the same triangle formation, so the new model does not look completely foreign. Apple analyst Mark Gurman suggests that Apple is planning to change the looks of future iPhones much more often in the next few years too.

We are only curious that this new look does not change how well the iPhone weight is distributed. No one likes an unbalanced, top-heavy phone. 

The iPhone 17 Pro Max also uses different materials. Gone is the titanium body of recent models, replaced with a new aluminum frame. Apple’s explanation? Aluminum is far better at dissipating heat and works nicely with the new vapor chamber. Strange that the company did not have that realization earlier. 

The new 17 Pro Max body also uses less glass on the back and the frame itself is a much bigger part of the phone. Hopefully, this means the rear glass will break less often.

The Camera Control and Action Button remain a staple here, with no changes made to them.

In terms of colors, we have two new options a copper-like orange color and a deep blue hue. Surprisingly, we only have one other color option, the silver one, but no fourth (usually a black) model.

In contrast, the iPhone 16 Pro Max launched only in muted tonalities (Natural Titanium, Desert Titanium, White Titanium, and Black Titanium), so Apple is bringing some color back.

Display Differences

The iPhone 17 Pro Max features a 6.9-inch Liquid Retina XDR display with up to 120Hz ProMotion, the same size as the 16 Pro Max. Specs-wise, the two devices boast similar hardware specs, which was kind of expected and pretty normal given that last year’s iPhone 16 Pro Max scored a display size increase. 

While Apple does not say it officially, chances are this new screen uses a Samsung M14 OLED panel, which allows for much higher peak brightness. The 16 Pro Max can get as bright as 2,000 nits, while the iPhone 17 Pro Max can hit 3,000 nits when used outdoors on a sunny day.

Apple upgraded the minimum brightness to go as low as 1 nit on the 16 Pro Max, and this carries over to the 17 Pro Max as well. 

We also get a new seven-layer anti-reflective coating on the iPhone 17 series.

Performance and Software

Even better performance thanks to a third-gen 3nm chipset

The iPhone 17 Pro Max features Apple’s new A19 Pro chipset. This is the company’s third-gen 3nm chipset, so polish is definitely the right word for it.

While the faster processor might not be immediately noticeable in daily use, you could notice the 12GB of RAM inside the 17 Pro Max, a notable 50% increase over the 8GB of RAM on the 16 Pro Max. 

As you can see, the A19 Pro achieves another remarkable jump over the A18 Pro from last year. In single core CPU performance, the iPhone 17 Pro Max with A19 Pro scores nearly 20% higher than the previous model.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max comes with a new passive vapor chamber on deck that might greatly help with heat dissipation during intense tasks. The aluminum chassis also dissipates heat well. 

GPU Performance benchmarks

Respectively, the iPhone 17 Pro Max fares well in the 3DMark graphics stress test, where it edges past the iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

Software-wise, we get iOS 26, which introduces the Liquid Glass redesign. Here is a brief look at what iOS 26 looks like. 

The recurrent theme is the drastic “Liquid Glass” redesign, which Apple is touting as its most significant visual change in a decade. You can embrace the chaos and enable the “Clear Look” – a fully transparent, glassy theme if you wish, and you will get something that looks a lot like it crawled back from the Windows Vista days, or you can just stick with the more toned-down and traditional style.The most practical changes are aimed at communication. A new Call Screening feature arrives to save us from calls about our non-existent car accidents, a public service if ever there was one. This handy filtering will also apply to spammy texts.

Live Translate for calls is also making its debut on iOS. We are cautiously optimistic about this, but let’s wait and see if this becomes a game-changer for travel or simply a source of hilarious mistranslations.

Aside from looks alone, there are some genuinely useful-sounding updates. The Camera app is being decluttered to just photo and video by default, a quiet relief for the minimalists among us. And Apple is promising to finally sort out the Photos app mess, making albums easier to find.

The new aluminum unibody also helps the phone be more durable and there are other little cool tweaks such as the anti-reflective coating on the screen.

The new and faster chipset with better cooling is also great news for gamers.

Is this a “must-buy” kind of upgrade compared to the 16 Pro Max? Not really, but it’s not just a small change in looks either. And that is not a small thing in a mature smartphone market.

Should you upgrade? Well, no, no reason for doing that. However, if you’re presented with a choice as to which one of these to get right now, go for the newer model.