New & Refurbished Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max

Why buy an Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max?

The fastest large phone you can buy
Incredible battery life, camera, screen, and processing power
Strong and stylish

Not convinced? Try one of these alternatives to an Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max:

iPhone 13 Pro - smaller, but every bit as good
iPhone 13 - smaller and much cheaper
iPhone 12 Pro Max - last year’s model, still worth having

Introduction

If you absolutely need to have all the iPhone you can get, the iPhone 13 Pro Max is for you. With a 6.7” OLED screen it’s the biggest of the iPhone lineup. It’s also got the best battery life - up to an amazing 28 hours of video playback.

The iPhone 13 Pro Max gets the most powerful version of Apple’s A15 Bionic chip, giving it world-beating performance. It also has an all-new camera system, along with up to 1TB of storage - enough to cope with supported pro formats including Apple ProRAW photos and ProRes video. Yet despite its size and power, the iPhone 13 Pro still looks every inch as classy as an iPhone should.

Design

The iPhone 13 Pro Max is essentially a larger version of the iPhone 13 Pro. It’s built around a sumptuous 6.7” screen that sits flush within a thin metal border, formed by the phone’s stainless steel chassis. The effect is an almost borderless screen, protected by a side bumper - along with Apple’s super-strong Ceramic Shield front glass. The phone’s straight sides might not be as comfortable as the curved ones Apple used up to the iPhone 11, but they still look great.

The back of the iPhone 13 Pro Max isn’t quite so successful. With a new camera system featuring three larger lenses, there’s more clutter. Even so, the frosted rear glass still sets this phone apart - it’s a classy touch.

Overall, this phone is almost exactly the same size as the iPhone 12 Pro Max - it’s just ¼mm deeper. It weighs in at a portly 238 grams, though, an increase of 12g over the old model.

Camera

Apple has redesigned the camera system for pro-level iPhones, increasing the sensor and lens sizes to allow more light in. That has the twin effect of letting you shoot in lower light, and reducing the amount of noise you get when you do. It’s a significant improvement, with the new Wide camera able to capture 1.5 times more light than even the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Apple says that the Ultra Wide camera is 92% better, too.

Another major change is that the Ultra Wide camera can now focus objects as close as 2cm, allowing macro photography for the first time. The iPhone 13 Pro Max also retains sensor-shift image stabilisation, helping banish blur and shake, even for dim scenes and high zooms. Unavoidably, the improved lenses take up more room: the iPhone 13 Pro Max has a bigger camera mound to house three wide lenses, an LED flash and the LiDAR sensor.

Apple hasn’t just improved the photo hardware. The flagship iPhone 13 can shoot in Apple ProRAW format, and offers new Photographic Styles - essentially a set of smart filters that selectively improve your pictures.

Video

The iPhone 13 Pro Max’s upgraded camera hardware makes it an even better video platform than before. It can film 4k video at up to 60 frames per second (fps), even when using HDR Dolby Vision. There’s support for shooting, editing and sharing in ProRes, a video codec that offers higher colour fidelity and less compression.

This phone offers an impressive 3x optical zoom in and 2x zoom out, coupled with up to 9x of digital zoom. And the new Cinematic Mode captures video with a shallow depth of field, so you can emphasise the subject with sharp focus while blurring the background. You can even edit the focus and blur after shooting, giving you the creative control to get exactly the scene you want.

Display

Look at the headline figures and the iPhone 13 Pro Max display seems identical to the 6.7” OLED used in the iPhone 12 Pro Max. It’s the same size, with the same 2,778x1,284 pixel resolution - a pixel density of 458 pixels per inch. Apple says it’s all-new, though, and it packs a few useful upgrades.

First up there’s a long-overdue move to what Apple calls ProMotion - an adaptive refresh rate extending up to 120Hz. Long a feature on some rival phones, the change makes the screen more fluid and responsive, improving the user experience. Secondly, Apple has managed to shrink the trademark ‘notch’ housing the front-facing TrueDepth camera. It still takes a nibble out of the screen, but it’s less intrusive than before. Finally, there’s a small boost to the typical maximum brightness, from 800 to 1,000 nits.

Overall this remains one of the finest screens you can get on a phone, with acres of space for games, media and creative projects. It’s bright and very crisp, too, making it perfect for monitoring filmmaking and photography.

Processor

The iPhone 13 Pro Max gets the same A15 Bionic processor as the rest of the iPhone 13 range, but with a twist. Like the iPhone 13 Pro, this phone gets an extra graphics core, lifting its 3D performance even further over the competition.

Even without the fifth GPU core, the A15 is fearsomely quick. It picks up where the A14 left off, with a six-core CPU comprising two performance and four efficiency cores. There’s also a new 16-core neural engine, further accelerating machine-learning applications.

And if you didn’t understand any of that, don’t worry. The iPhone 13 Pro Max is basically the quickest smartphone you can buy. It will tear through any game, app or benchmark you care to throw at it - the competition still hasn’t caught up with the iPhone 12.

Battery

Among all the updates to the iPhone 13 Pro Max, Apple has managed to sneak in a major battery upgrade. This, along with efficiency savings in the screen and processor, have boosted the battery life to an incredible 28 hours of video playback - the iPhone 12 Pro Max could manage only 20 hours. The improvement is even more impressive for streaming video playback time, which more than doubles, from 12 to 25 hours. The new battery should prove especially handy for anyone making the most of the phone’s high-end photography and filmmaking features.

As with the rest of the range, the iPhone 13 Pro Max supports both Qi and MagSafe wireless charging, along with wired charging through the Lightning port. However, with a bigger battery, Apple says it will take 35 minutes to charge to 50% using a 20W charger- most other iPhones since the iPhone 8 have reached this milestone within 30 minutes.

Colours & Options

There’s a choice of four colours for the iPhone 13 Pro Max: silver, graphite, gold and Sierra Blue. As with other Pro-level iPhones, the rear glass is frosted rather than shiny. The four storage options range from 128GB to a colossal 1TB - which may be overkill for a photo library, but is likely essential for filmmakers who want to shoot in space-hungry ProRes.

Apple’s launch pricing suggests you won’t get the iPhone 13 Pro Max for less than £1,049, and the 1TB model weighs in at £1,549. If you want an iPhone 13 Pro Max deal, however, you’re in the right place.

The iPhone 13 Pro Max doesn’t come with any headphones or a charger, just a USB-C to Lightning cable. There’s no 3.5mm audio port, so if you want wired headphones you’ll need a pair of EarPods with Lightning connector.

You can accessorise the iPhone 13 Pro Max with a range of easily attached MagSafe cases, or grab a MagSafe charger to simplify wireless charging. Be warned that with the new phone’s bigger camera hump, iPhone 12 Pro Max cases won’t fit.