Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max

For the first time, the Pro Max is built around a heat-forged aluminium unibody — a single sculpted piece of metal that is light, immensely strong and far better at moving heat than the titanium frames before it. The front is protected by Ceramic Shield 2, which Apple says is three times more scratch-resistant, while a new Ceramic Shield layer on the back makes it four times more crack-resistant than the previous generation. At 233g it has real presence in the hand — this is unapologetically the largest iPhone Apple makes — and it arrives in three finishes: Deep Blue, Silver and the standout Cosmic Orange.

The 6.9-inch Super Retina XDR OLED is the brightest screen Apple has ever shipped, reaching up to 3,000 nits outdoors so it stays perfectly legible in direct sunlight. ProMotion drives the refresh rate adaptively from 1Hz all the way to 120Hz, which means buttery scrolling and gaming when you want it and barely-there power draw when the screen is static. A new anti-reflection coating cuts glare noticeably, and the always-on display shows the time, widgets and Live Activities without waking the phone.

Every rear lens is now a 48MP Fusion sensor — Main, Ultra Wide and, for the first time, a 48MP Telephoto. That Telephoto is the headline: it delivers a 4x optical reach and an 8x optical-quality zoom, with a usable 40x digital range on top. In practice you get genuinely sharp results from sweeping landscapes to faraway detail, plus 48MP ProRAW, macro and Dolby Vision video up to 4K120. Round the front, the new 18MP Center Stage camera uses a square sensor that automatically widens and rotates to fit the whole group in, no matter how you are holding the phone.

The A19 Pro chip pairs a 6-core CPU with a 6-core GPU featuring hardware-accelerated ray tracing and Neural Accelerators in each core, backed by 12GB of RAM. The bigger story is sustained speed: an Apple-designed, laser-welded vapour chamber filled with deionised water works with the aluminium body to pull heat away from the chip, so the phone holds peak performance for far longer during gaming, 4K editing and on-device AI. It is comfortably the most powerful iPhone ever made, and the gap over a two- or three-year-old Pro is enormous.

A larger 5,088mAh cell — the biggest ever in an iPhone — combines with the efficiency of the A19 Pro and the new display to deliver up to 39 hours of video playback, Apple's longest battery life to date and roughly six hours more than the standard iPhone 17. Over USB-C you can reach about 50% in 20 minutes with a 40W or higher adapter, and MagSafe plus Qi2 wireless charging top up at up to 25W.