iPhone 13 pro max review
iPhone 13 Pro Max! When it comes to this latest iPhone update, I’ve been listening to a lot of people refer to it as the 12S even after Apple already gave it the 13 titles, with the main reason being that nothing actually changed.
And yes, on the surface, it doesn’t actually show that much different, because it’s got the same flat-sided design, the same camera layout, albeit larger this year, the same groove, which is a bit smaller, and not that many new major feature changes.
But I’d say that the true value of the 13 Pro Max is hidden beneath the surface, with changes that show complexity at first, but are hugely important if they were ever taken away!
But before I get into all of that, I want to refer back to the many important features of the iPhone 12 Pro Max that I’ve been using for the past year and talk about what actually changed my life, because if you think about it, that’s why people upgrade their iPhones! They want to feel that difference every day!
Life-changing features of last year's 12 pro max
. MagSafe magnetic charging
. iPhone 12 pro come with an extra 2GB of RAM compared to 11 pro
. Addition of the new 5G modem
MagSafe magnetic charging
Believe it or not, out of everything new with the 12 Pro, the MagSafe magnetic charging feature changed my everyday life the most since I don’t like using a case and the built-in Magnets allow me to mount my phone either at my office or even better, in my car! So I can use it with just one hand while reading notifications and everything else, all while charging the battery.
This alone is by far the best thing to ever happen to my iPhone experience and at first, it seemed like a very subtle or minor update. Now while it wasn’t that big of a deal, the new flat-sided design was still important because it made my daily experience feel fresh and those boxy sides also improved my grip on the phone more than ever before.
iPhone 12 pro come with an extra 2GB of RAM compared to 11 pro
The iPhone 12 Pro came with an extra 2GB of RAM compared to my old 11 Pro and this was a game-changer because all of my issues with apps closing on me went away instantly, making my iPhone even more reliable!
Addition of the new 5G modem
And finally, the last major life-changer was the addition of the new 5G modem, but it wasn’t necessarily for 5G itself, because regular LTE speeds because a LOT faster and more reliable, so all of the issues I used to have with bad service and YouTube videos pausing and buffering disappeared.
So if you didn’t already upgrade to the 12 Pro, you need to realize that those awesome features that impacted my life the most are also gonna be coming to the iPhone 13 Pro and they’ll likely be important to many of you as well.
13 Pro-Max Speaker Quality Improvement
But now that you understand what I mean by subtle yet very important features, it’s time to dive deep into the new features of the 13 Pro Max that are already starting to change my everyday life.
First up, the built-in speakers are incredibly important to me because I like to turn on YouTube videos while I’m getting ready and showering in the morning, as well as random times throughout the day when I’m not using my AirPods.
And this year, there is a massive improvement in terms of both the speaker quality and the volume compared to the 12 Pro Max, finally matching or even beating out the best speakers you can get on a Samsung flagship phone like the S21 ultra. Just hear it for yourself.
So this change alone is a nice little quality of life improvement, and even my friend instantly noticed the difference with her new 13 Pro which means that this is important for everyone, not just tech-heads!
New Display & Notch Updates
Another difference I really love is the ability to manually adjust the display brightness even brighter than on the 12 Pro Max, now up to 1000 nits instead of 800, and this is huge for me because I personally don’t like using auto-brightness and I love that extra boost of brightness when I’m outside and it’s hard to see the display.
And of course, while the notch isn’t that much bigger, it does feel a bit fresher and new compared to older iPhones, so I guess it’s a nice little touch.
New 120hz ProMotion Feature
Now the most controversial new feature is definitely 120hz ProMotion because of the unique way that Apple pulled it off, causing people to call it FAKE 120hz, which is obviously the wrong take. And even though it is real, many people are saying that it’s not really noticeable.
For example, Joshua Chang did an experiment with a few of his friends to see if they would notice ProMotion on the new iPhone, and out of 5 people, only one of them noticed the difference without receiving any hints from Joshua.
Now I also ran the same experiment on my wife with her 13 Pro and she honestly didn’t notice anything until I turned low power mode on which by the way limits the frame rate back down to 60hz to save battery life, and then only at that point, she noticed the difference in smoothness.
So just like my friend, were easily able to tell the difference when they finally compared 120hz ProMotion to their old 60hz iPhones. And that right there is the point I want to make about ProMotion! It’s something that’s very complex and hard to notice at first.. especially after you get used to it, but if your 13 Pro ever got taken away and you had to go back to an older iPhone, even the 12 Pro, it feels noticeably worse with very choppy animations and scrolling.
And this is the exact same thing that I experienced when comparing the iPad Pro, which has had ProMotion since 2017, to every other 60hz iPad! The rest just feel slow and choppy compared to the Pro. So here’s a fair warning before we move on if you’re upgrading to the iPhone 13 Pro with 120hz, your iPad experience on every non-Pro 60hz iPad is gonna go WAY down, and you’re gonna be tempted to buy an iPad Pro… and I think that point alone speaks for itself.
Now in terms of how 120hz ProMotion actually works, I honestly think that Apple’s 120hz is better than the competition which has had 120hz for years already.
How ProMotion on 13 pro max Actually works
Just like the other phones out there like Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra, Apple’s ProMotion tech allows the display's refresh rate to dynamically and automatically adjust between 10hz and 120hz depending on what you’re doing. So if you’re playing a game at 60FPS, the display refreshes at 60hz to match it, or if you’re watching a 24FPS movie, the refresh rate comes down to 24hz to help save a ton of battery life.
But if you’re swiping through your home screen or scrolling through webpages, it can go up to 120hz. But Apple is doing something completely unique and innovative. It matches the speed of your
scrolling or swiping to the refresh rate. So if you’re scrolling at a regular pace while reading a page, it could only be refreshing at 70hz instead of the full 120hz.
And that is the reason why people are calling it fake, but Apple’s logic is that when you’re scrolling slowly, your eyes will only be able to notice a certain amount of refresh rate, so why waste battery life by refreshing at 120hz?
But then if you scroll super fast, the refresh rate can actually go up and hit 120hz because the text is moving so fast that 120hz can actually be noticeable. And of course, when 120FPS support comes to games, they’ll be able to run at a solid 120FPS with no issues. And even better, when everything slows down to a crawl, like let’s say when you look at a photo or you’re reading a static article, the refresh rate goes down to only 10hz in real-time, on the fly, within milliseconds, helping save tons of battery
life.
This is absolutely genius and it’s the #1 reason why the battery life on the 13 Pro Max is the best out of any phone ever made, and I’ll get into that in just a second.
Why 120hz on S21 ultra wastes battery life
Now technically, Samsung’s S21 Ultra’s display is advertised as being able to go down to 10hz, but I’ve been doing a bit of research, and apparently, S21 Ultra users have only ever seen the refresh rate go down to as low as 48Hz while watching 24hz videos on YouTube. But in most apps and situations like reading static articles, it’s still stuck at 60hz, draining 6x more battery life than the iPhone 13 Pro!
And apparently, the S21 Ultra only gets below 48hz when showing the always-on display at 10hz, so I’m gonna go ahead and confirm that Apple’s 120hz is miles ahead of Samsung’s 120hz!
Real-world battery life differences
Now speaking of the battery life, this is one of the changes that has already impacted my life, throughout this week, I’ve been constantly surprised whenever I looked at my battery percentage expecting it to need a charge pretty soon, but it just holds up so well!
This year’s 13 Pro Max has an 18% larger battery than last year, and it definitely shows because multiple YouTubers have noticed drastic battery life differences, like mrwhosetheboss who registered almost 10 hours of battery, which is over an hour more than the best he’s ever seen in a smartphone.
And uravgconsumer mentioned that he got 8 hours and 14 minutes of screen on time, which is something he’s never achieved with any other smartphone, ever! So I would say out of any feature you can have on a smartphone, the battery life is one of the most important ones because it allows you to use all of the other features for longer, and the 13 Pro Max is the best in the world for that.
And one little interesting tidbit I want to add is that the 13 Pro Max can now charge faster, at a peak of 27W, so I went and ordered this small and compact 30W GAN Anker power brick on Amazon to make sure I’m getting the fastest charging speed possible.
What my friends like about her iPhone 13 pro
Now moving onto a few of my friends experience with her regular iPhone 13 Pro model, he mentioned that he noticed a big jump in battery life when he went to plug her phone in before bed at 1 AM and he was shocked to see that it was still at 50% battery after a full day.
He also noticed that the new lower button layout is much more convenient to press, especially for the power button, since he has smaller hands. He also really likes multiple aspects of the new design, like the newly relocated earpiece a speaker which is now actually quite a bit louder and more convenient for phone calls and he especially likes the much larger camera bump since it looks quite more powerful and
professional.
How Apple Perfected the camera bump with the 13 pro
Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash
And you only need one look at iFixit’s teardown of the 13 Pro to realize why the camera bump is so large compared to last year’s 12 Pro.
And I myself absolutely love the huge camera bumps because I fully believe it’s one of the most important parts of a modern smartphones design, and Apple pulled it off perfectly since the camera bump uses a 3 step design, with a foundational bump with the etched glass going into three premium metal rings and then finally another bump on the lenses themselves, which honestly makes it seem more subtle compared to Samsung’s massive brick of a bump that’s so big you can literally hang the phone on one finger.
But before I digress any further, my friend says her MagSafe wallet seems to hold on better because the larger camera bump is close to it so it’s harder to move the wallet out of place. Now he also noticed a huge amount of camera differences, which I’m gonna save for the camera section of this review,
The new A15 Bionic chip is insanely fast!
But first, I want to go into one of the biggest improvements I’ve noticed with my 13 Pro Max, and that is the new A15 Bionic chip! Now while some people have said that it’s a pretty disappointing upgrade compared to the A14 chip if you compare the CPU benchmarks in Geekbench 5, there are actually some major differences if you dig in, so let’s do just that!
First off, the 13 Pro comes with the 5-core GPU version of the A15, which leads to a pretty huge jump in graphics performance which becomes even more impressive if you compare it to the 7-core M1 GPU in the MacBook Air. But the real game-changer is the efficiency aspect of the new chip since it’s built on TSMC’s 5nm+ process node.
How the iPhone 13 Pro fixed display dimming
Both mine and Max’s iPhone 12 Pro Max suffered from overheating issues which lead to annoying display dimming issues while doing things like wirelessly charging it or even while using basically any intensive app or game outside in the sun, especially with 5G enabled.
But now, with the 13 Pro max, wireless charging doesn’t heat it up nearly as much, so maybe there are newly redesigned charging coils for heat management that were rumored but never confirmed by Apple. On top of that, using cellular and 5G doesn’t heat it up as much anymore.
Most likely due to the Snapdragon X60M modem which is built on a more efficient 5nm process node. And playing many common games no longer makes it dim down like crazy, apart from a couple of very intensive games like Genshin Impact and Pascal’s Wager which now supports 120FPS on the 13 Pro and heats up like crazy while at maxed-out settings.
But in reality, using a ton of GPU power is the ONLY case where we’ve to notice any display dimming at all on the 13 Pro Max, and it’s so much better than before like we showed you guys in an Antutu stress test benchmark test where the 13 Pro Max dimmed down to around 80% brightness while the 12 Pro Max went all the way down to 40% which is obviously a huge difference!
So overall, not having the display dims in common everyday situations like before has been a game-changer in everyday life!
In-depth A15 chip graphics & gaming test results
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Now I actually did a bunch of research on the A15 chip and I discovered an in-depth wattage test is done by Geekerwan, who discovered that Apple’s 5-core GPU in the A15 was 35% faster in the GFXBench Aztec Ruins benchmark while using slightly less wattage, 7.91 watts instead of 7.97.
So I found a Genshin Impact gaming test by Dame Tech on YouTube and he showed that the 13 Pro Max scored a higher average of 59.2FPS compared to 58.7 on the 12 Pro max while actually being .6 degrees celsius cooler due to only using an average of 76.7% GPU usage compared to around 90% on the 12 Pro Max, which shows that the new one has more power to spare!
13 Pro low power mode gaming secrets revealed!
But the really awesome new discovery that Geekerwan found is that if you turn on Low Power Mode, the power usage drops down from 7.91 to a very low 3 watts while being barely any slower than the A14 at max power usage, and actually being 17% faster than the Snapdragon 888 while using 3x less wattage!
So I ended up trying out a few games like Call of Duty Mobile and League of Legends Wild Rift, using Low Power mode, and I honestly forgot that it was enabled because I was getting perfect 60 FPS the entire time without any display dimming at all.
And part of this is because according to DisplayMate, the display on the 13 Pro Max has a 25% higher power efficiency than the one on the 12 Pro Max, so the display no longer adds nearly as much heat as it did before, leading to less dimming!
Genshin impact low power mode gaming test
This is a massive improvement compared to not using low power mode where the display would dim to 40-50% after only 5 to 10 minutes! So basically the conclusion is that everyone should be using low power mode when playing 60FPS games on the 13 Pro because it undervolted the A15 chip which saves battery life and keeps it from overheating as fast while not sacrificing much performance at all!
What my friend loved about the new 13 pro camera system
Now with the A15 chip heat management improvements out of the way, let’s finally get into the camera upgrades and this year. They’re huge! According to my friend, he loves the new macro mode that lets her get super close to subjects, and he also noticed that there is less flaring from the sun in many photos, which is actually something that both Max and I confirmed in our own camera testing.
My friend also noticed more detail with the ultrawide lens which he used to avoid because it would be noisy, and he also loves the really natural colors on portrait photos, especially with the 3x lens that makes it look more like professional portraits.
He says night mode photos turn out much better with the 13 Pro, and even though I personally don’t care about the new photographic styles feature, my wife loves it because she used to always have to edit her photos and make them more bright and cool-toned before posting them on social media, but now, he can customize the preset and forget it.
And finally, he really enjoyed the cinematic video mode because it’s fun to play with, making her feel like he has a professional camera on her all the time.
Why the 13 pro has the best camera out of any...
But now, 5 years later, Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro takes by far the BEST portrait photos out of any smartphone in the world with the new 3x lens and most accurate background blur that actually takes the depth range into account, as well as giving you the most natural colors and glow from sunsets, and very natural looking bokeh balls, even though the cracks of trees and things like that.
And the ability to combine Night Mode and portrait mode thanks to the LIDAR scanner makes nighttime portraits absolutely destroy other phones like Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra!
What Apple is trying to achieve with Cinematic mode
And even right now, it’s already an awesome solution for beginner YouTube creators who don’t have the cash to spend on an expensive camera.
Other great improvements to the 13 pro cameras
But moving onto the rest of the cameras, we’re getting improvements across the board in terms of the sensors, with even the regular wide camera giving us better detail, highlights, and dynamic range, especially for shots of the sun! As well as an awesome improvement for night mode photos.
The 3X telephoto lens is also very impressive compared to the previous generations, giving an awesome amount of background compression and finally making 10x digital zoom shots somewhat usable. But don’t try and use it at night because the 3x optical lens also comes with a slower F2.8 aperture that takes in much less light, causing low light detail to get worse than it was before, but thankfully you can now use night mode with the telephoto lens to make things look a lot better!
Now just like my friend mentioned, the ultrawide camera is much better this year since the faster aperture lets in more light, so it does a much better job in lower light scenarios, and it’s still by far my favorite camera to use for 4K video recording in the daytime since it’s just so sharp and detailed.
Now while the front-facing selfie camera hasn’t changed hardware-wise, Apple’s new software updates like Smart HDR 4 make a HUGE difference for a high dynamic range like not blowing out the bright sky in the background, and it also seems like they’ve drastically reduced sun flares, even in a front-facing video!
So when Apple went on stage and said this is the biggest improvement in iPhone camera performance ever, I’m actually starting to believe them! In fact, the 13 Pro Max absolutely destroyed the S21 Ultra in our unbiased camera comparison which was surprising because it was the exact opposite with last year’s 12 Pro Max which got killed by the S21U!
And this year, one of the biggest differences I noticed was just how well the new iPhone handles glowing signs at night, giving you excellent color reproduction while maintaining the natural gradient, making it look basically like it does in real life!
Who should upgrade to the iPhone 13 pro max?
So I’d honestly say that the drastic camera improvements alone are worthy of the 13 titles instead of 12S as everyone’s calling it. But on top of that, you also get MUCH better battery life, you get much better speakers, you get the 120hz ProMotion feature, you get the smaller notch, faster 27W peak charging speed, and a brighter display that doesn’t suffer from daily dimming issues due to better heat management and the awesome new A15 Bionic chip, all for the same $1100 price tag for the Pro Max!
And those are just the differences compared to last year’s model. So I’d say that if you ended up skipping the iPhone 12, then upgrading to the iPhone 13 Pro or Pro Max is a no-brainer!
What if you already have a 12 series iPhone
But if you’re already one of the iPhone 12’s like the 12 Pro, then I would only upgrade if you’re currently not happy with either the battery life, the display refresh rate, display dimming issues, or the camera system on your current iPhone, since those are the main game-changing features this year!