Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max review

Apple iOS 27

All new iPhone 18 models come with Apple iOS 27 out of the box. It brings a refined Liquid Glass interface, Siri AI, faster performance, XL widgets, and more.

Apple doesn't promise any specific number of years of updates. Still, seeing how you can install iOS 27 on the iPhone 11, which came out back in 2019, we think there is a good probability the iPhone 18 lineup will enjoy at least 7 major OS updates. That's at least what we've seen so far from the company.

The first major change is the refined Liquid Glass interface. Apple has listened to user feedback and addressed the issues with the previous implementation. First, you now get a slider that lets you adjust the level of transparency to your liking, rather than having just two fixed options as before. Apple has also made the UI recognize when there is complex content behind toolbars and menus and provide clearer separation instead of the colorful mess we sometimes got before.

Finally, iOS 27 brings redesigned icons with a sharper, cleaner look.

You can customize the look of iOS from the new Appearance section in the Settings app.

Appearance

Lockscreen

Always-On and StandBy always-on (when charging) options are available on all new iPhones. The iOS 27 Lock Screen follows the familiar logic - it's integrated with the Notification Center and houses your notifications, along with shortcuts for the torch and camera.

Every wallpaper, widget, and shortcut can be customized in various ways, allowing you to really make the whole thing your own.

Lockscreen

Homescreen, notifications and Action center

Beyond the Lock Screen, the iOS interface is still based on homescreens populated with apps and widgets. You also get the App Library (app drawer) for apps you don't keep on your homescreens, as well as the Notification Center and Control Center. There is also a dedicated Spotlight search page.

iOS 27 homescreens

Your apps and widgets usually populate the homescreen(s). There are also two dedicated screens - the leftmost is the Today page, while the rightmost is the App Library.

You can hide specific homescreens - you may have a page full of games and hide it when at work, or hide a page of work or school apps when on vacation. You can't opt out of the Today page or App Library, though.

The homescreen supports plenty of icon customization - you can enlarge app icons and hide their names, choose an accent color for all icons, switch between light and dark themes, or go for the new monochrome look with a liquefied opacity option.

Icon customization

The widgets have seen some updates and can be stacked as before. iOS 27 now supports Extra Large widgets, which can take up an entire homescreen page, for supported apps such as Calendar. XL widgets were previously exclusive to iPadOS.

XL widgets

The Notification Center is summoned with a swipe from the top-left corner or the Dynamic Island itself. The pane has been unified with the Lock Screen since iOS 11, while iOS lets you use different wallpapers for the Lock Screen and homescreen.

The Control Center supports multiple pages and offers a ton of different toggles and widgets. Some of the toggles are expandable, as before.

Notifications • Controls • Task Switcher

The Task Switcher hasn't seen any updates - you still get the familiar app cards, which you can swipe up to close. You can also swipe along the gesture line to quickly switch between apps.

Finally, the functionality of the Dynamic Island hasn't changed much, though it can now display up to three Live Activities at once. It is still an enlarged black pill that makes multitasking more convenient when using timers, music players, the Phone app, Focus modes, and more.

Dynamic Island

Apple provides an app for pretty much everything, with many of them integrated with the company's subscription services, should you choose to use them - Photos, Music, TV, Maps, Notes, Weather, Wallet, Files, office apps, and more.

Music • TV • Photos

Apple Intelligence

The next generation of Apple Intelligence is here, complete with the long-awaited revamp of Siri, now called Siri AI. There is a catch, though - it's currently a waitlist-only beta and isn't available in the EU yet.

Siri and Siri AI

Let's start with Siri. Siri AI is based on Google's Gemini models; it's much more conversational, features on-device processing, and can also use Apple's Private Cloud Compute when it needs to access servers, ensuring that your personal data isn't stored or made accessible to Apple or anyone else.

There's a new Siri app that remembers your past chats,and in iOS the new Siri is also available through the Dynamic Island. On iPadOS 27 and macOS 27, it will additionally be integrated into Spotlight.

The on-device Siri AI model offers "even more expressive voices" and "a major boost in accuracy with systemwide dictation". The expressiveness and pace of Siri's voice are customizable, while dictation automatically handles punctuation, capitalization, and formatting as you speak.

Siri can also draw on your personal context, including messages, emails, photos, and more. This will of course work with Apple's own apps, but the company promises that personal context understanding will extend to third-party apps when developers integrate with Spotlight.

Siri AI can answer questions about what's on your screen or search the web for up-to-date information using what Apple calls "broad world knowledge". Your conversations with Siri AI are also synced via iCloud across your Apple devices.

The Camera app will soon get a Siri mode, which lets you ask questions about whatever you see in front of you. This includes the ability to split a bill with friends using Apple Cash or even get "nutritional insights about a plate of food".

Siri AI also comes with integrated Writing Tools that are available anywhere you type. You can describe what you need and have it generate a draft, or ask it to refine and edit something you've already written. In Mail and Messages, Siri AI can even adapt to how you usually communicate with each recipient, including the punctuation and tone you typically use. It also automatically proofreads as you type across the system, including within "most" third-party apps.

One feature that is immediately available to all users is advanced image editing, which includes new tools such as Extend and Reframe, as well as a smarter Cleanup tool.

AI photo editing

Apple A20 Pro, performance, throttling

Every new iPhone brings a new Apple chip, and this year the 18 Pro models employ the brand-new Apple A20 Pro. The next-gen chip may sound like another small incremental upgrade, but there's more to it than the usual 10% performance bump from higher clock speeds. Let's dig in.

First, the A20 Pro is built on a 2nm process. Apple touts its desktop-class CPU cores, a more powerful GPU, twice as many Neural Engine cores, and a 50% increase in memory bandwidth.

The chip also introduces a new side-by-side memory architecture, with the DRAM now placed next to the processor die using advanced wafer-level multi-chip packaging. This should improve heat dissipation and sustained performance. The redesigned cooling system helps here, too, with a vapor chamber three times the surface area of the one cooling the A19 Pro inside the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Together, these improvements should reduce thermal throttling.

The A20 Pro features a 6-core processor with 2x Super Cores clocked at 4.93GHz and 4x Efficient Cores clocked at 2.64GHz. The Apple GPU now has a 7-core design, with Apple promising up to 40% faster performance compared to the A19 Pro.

The Neural Engine now has 32 cores, up from 16 in the A19 Pro, promising a substantial boost to AI performance.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max has 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM on a 96-bit memory bus, up from 64-bit, resulting in 50% higher memory bandwidth.

The phone is available with 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB of storage. Apple uses NVMe storage with TLC (triple-level cell) NAND for the 256GB and 512GB versions and, new this year, cheaper QLC (quad-level cell) NAND for the 1TB and 2TB models. With memory prices on the rise, QLC helps keep the cost of these higher-capacity options in check, but it comes with a caveat - once the storage is more than 60% full, write speeds can drop to about 40% of those of the TLC-based chips, so that's one tradeoff worth considering when choosing your storage tier.

And now, it's time for benchmarks.

The Apple A20 Pro is the new king of Geekbench. It offers about a 10% improvement in multi-core performance over the A19 Pro, but the single-core jump is a much more impressive 22%. Single-core performance plays a major role in everyday responsiveness, including app launches, and together with the new cooling system, the A20 Pro delivers an incredibly fast and fluid experience.

GPU performance gets a massive increase, too, with an over 30% boost compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max and its A19 Pro.

Interestingly, the iPhone 18 Pro Max AnTuTu 11 score is 48% better than the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

We also tried GeekBench AI with the NPU backend, and the iPhone 18 Pro Max scored 70,681 versus 49,000 on the iPhone 17 Pro Max - an improvement of about 44%.

It's clear that Apple has made quite the chip this year, with notable upgrades across the board.

Thermal throttling

The final and probably most important part of our testing is sustained performance.

First, we ran APSI Bench for 30 minutes, and the CPU retained 84% of its peak performance - that's a solid result under sustained load.

Then we tested the GPU with the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test. It retained 57% of its peak performance - not quite as impressive, but not bad for a flagship chipset either.

CPU test • GPU test

Overall, the Apple A20 Pro is a solid update and obviously one of the best chips on the market right now. It offers incredibly fast CPU, GPU and AI performance, along with a major increase in memory bandwidth. And it's definitely not a minor incremental update over the A19 Pro - quite the contrary.