iPhone 18 Pro Max review: still the iPhone to beat, Duo or no Duo

• By Sanket Vijayasarathy
Published On: 7 October 2026 | 09:43 IST

Apple fans have to face two truths this year. One: iPhones, like every other phone that came out in 2026, got more expensive. Two: there is no base iPhone 18, which makes the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max the default new iPhones to buy. And let me sneak in a third truth: the iPhone 18 Pro Max is the most complete iPhone yet, even when the Duo comes out in October.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max (and its more compact 18 Pro sibling) is very much an incremental upgrade. Apple is presumably saving the big changes for its 20th-anniversary iPhone coming out next year. Until then, the new Pro Max offers a few nice upgrades to keep buyers satisfied, including a new 2nm chip, variable aperture, a bigger battery, faster charging, and a Burgundy colour that lets people know you’re rocking the new Pro Max.

Verdict

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is a brilliant phone but an iterative upgrade nonetheless. The A20 Pro chip, faster charging, and the variable aperture are all nice-to-haves, but you’d need to squint to notice most of them in daily use. If you own the 17 Pro Max, you can sit this one out, unless you’re getting a really good trade-in value at the Apple Store and really want that new Burgundy colour. If you’re holding a 15 Pro Max or anything older, this is the iPhone to buy, and that holds true even with the Duo lurking around the corner.

Design: same same, but Burgundy

Some brands look to make their phones lighter and thinner year on year; Apple isn’t one of them. If you want a thin and light phone, you can buy the iPhone Air. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max aren’t aiming to please with design, but with durability. Hence, the 18 Pro Max that we got for review looks identical to its predecessor. Apple hasn’t changed the measurements even in the slightest (both measure 163.4 x 78.0 x 8.75 mm). Moreover, Apple made this year’s Pro Max heavier by 18 grams (249 grams compared to the 17 Pro Max’s 231 grams).

So how does one tell the new 18 Pro Max from the old 17 Pro Max? Why, the colour, of course. Apple has understood consumer buying behaviour down to a science: bring in a brand-new colour that instantly lets people know you’re carrying the latest iPhone. Last year’s colour was Cosmic Orange; this year it’s Burgundy. This new wine colour is the one buyers were lining up outside Apple stores for on sale day. It’s the colour that screams, “Look ma, I’ve got the new iPhone!”

Glacier is another new colour – albeit less exciting for buyers – to tell the new iPhone from the old. And then you have the safer, less appealing options like Black and Silver. We got the iPhone 18 Pro Max in Silver. I know, I know, you’ll probably think “boring!” right? But here’s my unpopular opinion. I actually like this Silver colourway. I like it more than last year’s Silver. Because Apple has made sure this Silver is truly Silver on the back, including the rectangular glass portion, which was White on the 17 Pro. I like colours that don’t attract attention and can confuse people into thinking I own an older iPhone, especially thieves on bikes!

Display: same great screen, smaller island

On paper, this is last year’s screen. It’s the same 6.9-inch OLED with a 2868 x 1320 resolution at 460ppi, the same 1-120Hz ProMotion refresh rate, and the same brightness figures: 1,000 nits typical, 1,600 nits for HDR and 3,000 nits peak outdoors. If you were hoping for a brighter or sharper panel, Apple is probably saving it for next year. Everything else is still good: the screen is big, bright, colourful and buttery smooth, and the coating keeps fingerprints in check.

What has changed is the Dynamic Island. By moving the Face ID infrared camera under the display, Apple has shrunk the cutout by roughly a third, and the island can now run three Live Activities at once, up from two. Is that a reason to upgrade? Of course not. But if you’re the sort who follows a cricket score, a food delivery and a cab at the same time, it’s a quietly useful change, and the top of the screen simply looks cleaner. And while we’re talking about the display, the audio deserves a quick mention too. The stereo speakers are loud and well balanced, and the haptics remain the best in the business.

Cameras: variable aperture, limited drama

Apple left the camera hardware alone this year, with one exception. You still get the same trio of 48MP cameras (main, 0.5x ultrawide and 4x telephoto) and the 18MP Center Stage selfie camera, but the main camera now has a mechanical variable aperture. Six blades open and close to give you four settings: f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4.0. For context, the widest setting is a good deal wider than the fixed f/1.78 on the 17 Pro Max.

During the keynote, I was quite intrigued by the mechanical variable aperture. It seemed impressive that Apple managed to introduce a tiny physical aperture that mimicked a dedicated DSLR or mirrorless camera lens. But not every setting felt extremely useful to me.

The wider f/1.48 is the part that actually earns its keep for me, letting in more light for impressive low-light photos and video. It also creates a shallower depth of field, blurring the background for a more pronounced subject separation. Stopping down is mostly for fun: close the aperture to f/4 and bright lights turn into proper starbursts, and slow the shutter to half a second and you get motion blur straight out of the camera, no Live Photo workaround needed. But the sensor is tiny, and the main camera can’t focus all that close, so the difference between f/1.48 and f/1.8 is barely there, and stopping down helps only in the odd close-up.

Lens Aperture is part of the new Pro controls, which add shutter speed, white balance and a histogram to the Camera app, and they work in video too. It’s a welcome step for Apple, but the execution is clumsy. The controls are tucked away in the camera drawer, hard to reach one-handed, can’t be rearranged or mapped to the Camera Control button, and you set (and reset) each one separately. There’s still no manual ISO either. Honestly, the more useful addition is Smart focus tracking: double-tap a subject and the camera stays locked on it across all lenses, which is a gift if you love to capture your pets or kids. Apple Reference Image is a smart idea too. It lets you save the raw sensor data as a sort of digital negative, so you can prove a photo wasn’t altered later. A good start against AI fakes.

I enjoyed using the new Photographic Style 3.0, which now adds Texture and Grain modifiers to pre-existing styles. So you’ll find new presets like Quiet + Film and Cool Rose + Soft Skin rather than simply Quiet and Cool Rose. You can also customise these presets further to adjust the intensity of soft skin, glow, film, or grain. I mostly used the presets as is and never really found enough time to customise them before a shot, and I absolutely loved Quiet + Film and Cosy + Film, which added grain to make images look like they’ve been taken on old-school analogue cameras.

Cozy + Film style

Quiet + Film style

Strip all that away and what you’re left with is last year’s excellent camera system. The main camera is superb in daylight and low light, with wide dynamic range and restrained, natural colours, and the 2x crop stands out. The 4x telephoto is good, and portraits look a little better than before. The ultrawide is the weakest of the three, especially in the dark, where Night mode rarely kicks in, and you often end up with grainy shots (not the nice kind of grainy I spoke about earlier). Against the Galaxy S26 Ultra, the iPhone 18 Pro Max delivered pleasing colours, good detail, and the best portrait performance of the three, especially in subject separation and the bokeh effect. But the S26 Ultra came out as the overall winner, with the Pixel 11 Pro XL coming in second in our three-way comparison.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max’s video capabilities remain the benchmark, with rock-solid stabilisation, Dolby Vision across the board, and Cinematic mode now going up to 4K at 60fps. If zoom is what you care about, though, the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s dual telephotos and the OPPO Find X9 Ultra’s 10x lens are still worth a look.

Performance and software: fast, but you won’t feel it

The A20 Pro is built on a 2nm process and packs a 6-core CPU (two super cores and four efficiency cores), a 7-core GPU with Neural Accelerators and a dual 16-core Neural Engine. It’s among the fastest chips you can put in a phone right now, and you can see this in its Geekbench single-core and multi-core performance. The catch is that last year’s A19 Pro was already fast enough, so apps open and animations flow at roughly the same pace as before. Think of the A20 Pro as an investment for years four and five, not a reason to upgrade today.

Gaming is where the extra muscle and the larger vapour chamber (the reason this phone is heavier, remember) make sense. Heavy games run without stuttering, and the phone only warms up noticeably when downloading huge game files or charging. Under sustained stress, CPU performance holds up well, though the GPU does throttle like every other phone’s.

Software-wise, iOS 27 is a polish job done right. The Liquid Glass design now has a transparency slider, so it’s far less of a readability headache than last year, and the system feels snappier, with extra-large widgets and more icon customisation thrown in.

The big addition is Siri AI, which is built on Google’s Gemini models, apparently (yes, the irony is rich). It’s far more conversational and capable than the old Siri, understands what’s on your screen, and has its own app. It’s still in beta, available in English to start, and works best with Apple’s own apps for now. Here’s the thing, though: none of this is exclusive. iOS 27 and Siri AI also come to the 17 Pro Max, so software alone isn’t a reason to buy the 18 Pro Max. Apple doesn’t put a number on updates, but with iOS 27 reportedly running on phones as old as the iPhone 11, you can expect many years of them for the 18 Pro Max.

Battery and charging: a little more juice, a lot more speed

The 18 Pro Max gets a bigger cell, thought to be around 500mAh larger than last year’s, and Apple claims up to 43 hours of video playback, up from 37. In real use, the gain is modest at best, somewhere between nothing and an extra hour or so of screen time. Either way, a heavy day is no problem, but this isn’t a two-day phone. I found it closer to 1.5 days on a single charge.

Charging is where I became happier. Apple says you’ll get 50 percent in around 15 minutes with a 60W-capable adapter, compared to 20 minutes with a 40W adapter last year, and the claim largely holds up, with the device taking under an hour to charge from 20 to 100 percent. That makes it one of the quickest-charging iPhones yet. The catch is that Apple still doesn’t bundle a charger, and you need to buy a 60W adapter separately to get those speeds. Wireless charging, meanwhile, is more or less the same. MagSafe is still capped at 25W, and with a bigger battery to fill, it won’t feel any faster than before.

Final verdict

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is one of Apple’s most incremental updates in years, and I still think it’s the best iPhone you can buy. The build is tough, the screen and camera system are among the best around, video is unmatched, performance is unrivalled, and charging is finally quick. The gripes are fair, though: it’s heavier, it costs more with a starting price of Rs 1,79,900, the camera hardware barely changed, and the headline variable aperture is more novelty than necessity.

So who should buy it? Anyone coming from an iPhone 15 Pro Max or older will find this an easy upgrade, as will video shooters and tinkerers who’ll make the most of the new camera controls. If you’re on a 15 Pro, check your battery health first, because a battery replacement may be the cheaper fix. And if you own a 16 Pro, 17 Pro or 17 Pro Max, it might be wise to wait for Apple’s 20th anniversary iPhone next year. But if you’re getting a really good trade-in value for your old Pro Max, don’t let me stop you. For everyone else, last year’s 17 Pro Max is still a smart buy, and you can still find it at authorised resellers, while Android fans should look at the Galaxy S26 Ultra, Xiaomi 17 Ultra and OPPO Find X9 Ultra.

Where does that leave the iPhone Duo? On paper, it’s the more exciting phone, but it starts at Rs 2,99,900, a full Rs 1.2 lakh more. For that, you give up the telephoto camera, Face ID and the Pro video tools, and get a shorter battery life. The Duo might be the iPhone everyone talks about, but the 18 Pro Max is still the more complete one, in my view.

Editor’s rating: 8.7/10

Pros:

• Noticeably better battery life and wired charging speed
• A20 Pro delivers stellar performance, and the larger vapour chamber keeps the phone mostly cool
• Improved cameras across the board, especially in low-light scenes
• While it comes with a familiar design, the build is as sturdy and durable as it can get

Cons:

• At Rs 1,79,900, it is more expensive than its predecessor with not a lot of significant upgrades
• At 249 grams, the iPhone 18 Pro Max is heavier than ever, and wrist fatigue is a real thing
• Camera Control is something I still find myself not using much, and it doesn’t allow you to adjust the new Lens Aperture