iPhone XS Max: Is Apple’s flashy new phone worth the epic price tag?
ANALYSIS: The iPhone XS Max’s whopping price tag might not be the only thing to turn buyers away. Its new features might fall flat for Apple’s tech-hungry fans.
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IT’S the most expensive mainstream smartphone ever to launch in Australia, and the equivalent of a 55-inch 4K Sony TV, two Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphones, or more than four iPad Minis.
Apple’s latest flagship device doesn’t just push the price boundaries for mobile phones, but destroys them completely.
Analysts say the $2369 handset could fundamentally change the Australian phone market, and lead to four-year contracts to give buyers more time to pay it off.
But is Apple’s most expensive smartphone worth that epic price tag? And is a bigger screen enough to justify an upgrade?
We fought crowds inside the company’s Steve Jobs Theater to get our hands on Apple’s new iPhone XS Max to find out.
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BIGGER CANVAS
If the name doesn’t give it away, one look at this phone will: the iPhone XS Max is a big one.
Apple might have been late to the big phone party, only supersizing its models four years ago, but it fully embraces the trend in this handset.
The Max delivers a 6.5-inch screen — the biggest ever featured in an Apple phone and one that even surpasses the size of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 9 handset.
In the hand, the Max screen feels just as big as promised and positively towers over the iPhone X that it supersedes.
The new phone isn’t actually bigger than a typical iPhone Plus handset, though. Its screen merely achieves a larger size by extending to all four sides, with the exception of a black bar, or notch, at the top.
It’s worth noting that Apple hasn’t just stretched out the pixels on this big screen. While it might be significantly larger than the display on the iPhone X or XS, the Max screen still features a crisp count of 458 pixels per inch, making even the smallest of text or the tiniest detail easy to see.
BETTER CAMERAS
Apple promises a bigger image sensor is at work inside the rear cameras of its new iPhone XS Max, and that should deliver greater detail and better low-light performance.
While that’s too difficult to test in a bright white room, another XS camera addition was more straightforward to try: Portrait Mode with Depth Control.
This addition cunningly lets you change the focus of portrait photographs after you’ve taken them. You can blur the background, or bring it back into focus.
It won’t fix a photo in which your main subject is blurry from movement, of course. Nor is this feature completely new to the smartphone world — Huawei and Samsung already offer similar features.
It is a handy addition that will make Apple’s excellent Portrait mode more useful, though.
Apple also promises to employ artificial intelligence in these new dual 12-megapixel cameras, allowing them to identify not only faces but facial features like a subject’s eyes, for example, and will combine photos in more intelligent ways inside Smart HDR mode.
These additions seem out of Google’s Pixel playbook and could make a significant difference to the photos you capture without any extra input from the photographer.
THINGS YOU’LL NOTICE AS YOU USE IT
The iPhone XS Max is full of important additions you can’t see from the outside.
Its facial scanner, for example, promises to be faster in this model, and its battery is said to last an extra 90 minutes over the iPhone X.
Its A12 Bionic chip promises unprecedented power, its storage has climbed to a peak of 512GB, and its glass front and back are reportedly made of the most durable formulation to date — something you don’t want to test if you can avoid it.
There’s no word yet on whether Australian carriers will support Apple’s dual-SIM iPhone models, but they would also be a first for Apple and a potential money-saver for travellers.
DOWNSIDES
This iPhone upgrade was not completely unexpected. It seems like a logical next step to bring out a larger version of the iPhone X, and some of its upgrades, while useful and important for users, are not groundbreaking.
This phone doesn’t smash the mould that Apple created last year — it simply lures more big-phone fans to its new flagship design and gesture-based software. There’s no flexible screen or bold camera innovation to be seen here.
Its high price, however, is potentially its biggest downside. No mainstream smartphone has ever looked like breaking the $2000 barrier, and even Australians, who have proven eager smartphone early adopters, may struggle to justify the cost of the top model.
VERDICT
The iPhone XS Max delivers a record-breaking screen size inside a body no larger than older handsets, and promises better battery life, potentially better photographs, will store more, and will do so at a greater speed.
Committed Apple fans who love big phones will no doubt cheer its arrival but its price, for others, is likely to make buyers pause before purchase.
Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson travelled to Cupertino as a guest of Apple.
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