If you want a bigger, better iPhone but your budget doesn’t stretch to the iPhone 13 Pro Max, the iPhone 12 Pro Max fits the bill. It’s the flagship of the iPhone 12 lineup, combining the highest specs with the biggest screen and a battery that seems to last forever. With top-end camera performance and buckets of storage, it’s the best iPhone 12 – but is that still good enough? Discover more in our iPhone 12 Pro Max review.

Cons

• Too big and heavy for mainstream tastes
  
• No longer the latest iPhone
• You can’t buy it new from Apple

iPhone 12 Pro Max – overview

iPhone 12 Pro Max – design

It’s comparatively easy to tell the iPhone 12 Pro Max apart from the rest of the iPhone 12 range. For a start, there’s that size – it’s more than a centimetre longer than the standard phone, and almost 3cm longer than the iPhone mini. Like the iPhone 12 Pro, the back panel is frosted rather than shiny, and there are three cameras rather than the dual setup seen on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini. You can have the iPhone 12 Pro Max in four colours exclusive to the Pro models – Pacific Blue, gold, graphite and silver.

Visually the iPhone 12 design survives the stretch to Max size. Its glass runs right up to the narrow stainless steel border, to sensational effect. The rear glass looks extremely classy in blue, but against lighter colours the dark camera lenses stick out awkwardly. In the hand, the phone’s smooth surfaces and size make it trickier to grip, and it’s too wide for comfortable one-handed typing.

Apple says its Ceramic Shield glass is four times tougher than the glass used on the iPhone 11, and practical tests have tended to back this up. Despite impressive drop resistance, we’d still recommend a case – phones don’t come any more expensive to replace.

iPhone 12 Pro Max – display

You could hardly accuse the iPhone 12’s 6.1” display of being small, but the iPhone 12 Pro Max is about a fifth bigger. Its 6.7” OLED packs in a useful 2,778×1,284 pixel resolution, at a density of 458 pixels per inch (ppi). What that means in practice is that the dots making up the screen image are so closely packed together that you can’t see them, so text, diagonal lines and all images look crisp and smooth. Add in typically vibrant colours and a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and the result is a superb, bright, large screen that really delivers for video and gaming.

It’s not unrivalled, though. Some high-end plus-sized Android rivals feature even bigger screens and higher ppi figures. As an example, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra’s 6.8” display manages 3,200×1,440 pixels, which works out at 515ppi.

While Apple’s distinctive notch housing the front camera takes up a smaller portion of the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s bigger screen, it still takes a nibble from the edge of full-screen video. You’ll find far less intrusive camera cutouts on far cheaper Android phones. Apple has managed to shrink this notch on the iPhone 13 Pro Max, which also gets a 120Hz refresh rate upgrade. On the iPhone 12 Pro Max it’s limited to 60Hz.

iPhone 12 Pro Max – camera and video performance

The iPhone 12 Pro Max has a significantly better rear camera than the standard iPhone 12. It’s a triple-lens system, which combines the standard phone’s wide and ultra-wide lenses with a telephoto one. It offers a 2.5x optical zoom in with a 2x zoom out, with digital zoom of up to 12x – that’s a narrow improvement even on the 10x found on the iPhone 12 Pro.

There’s also a LiDAR sensor not found on standard iPhone 12 models. This depth-mapping technology provides fast focusing even in poor light, and helps power a Night Portrait mode unique to the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max. In practice, low-light performance is one of this phone’s strengths. It can resolve surprisingly sharp portraits in the dimmest lighting, and grab relatively noise-free shots even in near-darkness.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max gets some subtle feature improvements over the standard iPhone 12. Most notably there’s support for Apple’s ProRAW image format, and you can record HDR Dolby Vision video at up to 60 frames per second (fps), double the standard phone.

This is a great camera setup, with strong low-light performance and powerful image processing to help enhance the results. Its wide zoom range also helps fill the frame with whatever you’re shooting. Even so, Apple has massively moved things on with the iPhone 13 Pro Max. If you’re considering an iPhone for photography and filmmaking use, it could well be worth saving for the newer phone.

iPhone 12 Pro Max – performance

Right up until the iPhone 13 replaced it, the iPhone 12 remained the fastest smartphone you could buy. It’s built around Apple’s own A14 Bionic chip, which can shred just about any game or benchmark you care to throw at it. The A15 in the iPhone 13 may now be faster, but this is still a seriously quick device.

We recorded a Geekbench 5 single-core score of 1,605, with a mighty 4,186 in the multi-core test – significantly quicker than a Samsung Galaxy S21. Things were even more impressive in 3D, with the iPhone 12 Pro Max notching up 8,588 in the 3DMark Wild Life benchmark – the highest score we’ve yet recorded.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max also managed a leading 2,407 in the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, but as with all iPhones this blistering speed comes with a catch. Running flat out causes the phone to heat up, after which it slows down to prevent overheating. Over the 20-cycle stress test, the phone’s score fell to 1,603, representing a one-third drop between the one-time maximum, and the fastest sustained speed.

iPhone 12 Pro Max – battery performance

Battery life (movie playback)*

Charge Time (0-80%)