The iPhone 16 Pro Max is everything that’s wrong with Apple

It's no secret that the iPhone is the very definition of the yearly, iterative, predictable, often boring hardware update in the smartphone world. Like clockwork, we get a new iPhone line every fall, we report on the differences between that and its predecessors, we usually do not find enough of those to justify an immediate upgrade and we just move on with our lives, waiting for another 12 months in order to find out if anything of note is different enough in the next iPhone line. It's been like that for half a decade now.

That's the main reason why yours truly was not supposed to publish yet another such piece about the iPhone 16 lineup. Not only is it pointless to keep on beating on a dead horse year after year (how many times does one really need to read that the newest iPhone is not a must-have for most people?), but he also did not intend on upgrading his iPhone 15 Pro Max to an iPhone 16 Pro Max and review it (he was planning on going straight for the iPhone 17 Pro Max or Ultra in 2025 instead).

But since the opportunity of getting the iPhone 16 Pro Max for very little presented itself recently — thus allowing every member of the family to upgrade to newer iPhones and migrate to iOS 18 — he ended up using Apple's latest flagship as his daily driver after all. Subtitle aside, though, it took yours truly less than 16 days to realize something depressingly obvious but nonetheless interesting: the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the very embodiment of what is wrong with Apple's current approach when it comes to its flagship models.

The iPhone has become the very definition of the yearly, iterative, predictable, often boring hardware update in the smartphone world.

There may be a point, then, in highlighting the 6 most important problems the everyday use of this smartphone draws attention to. Apple could even take this commentary — along similar ones already published by others — into account and decide to make a few changes in 2025… maybe?

The Camera Control button is poorly implemented

Let's not mince words here: yours truly hated this new physical button since day one, simply because its placement makes it too easy to press by accident in many situations. His first thought was to deactivate it altogether, but he persevered because he wanted to see whether the new button — which he had come across in past Sony Xperia phones and did not like it then either, by the way — would actually be able to improve the photo or video capture experience of the iPhone overall. Others seemed to like it, so why not?

Well, using it did not prove to be any more fun or helpful. It's faster at launching the Camera app — because it's bypassing the iPhone unlock screen, not because the app can't be launched in a second from the lock screen anyway — but it takes too much effort to master the various pressure levels and the exact amount of movement it needs in order to scroll through options or zoom.

Even after playing with its various settings it just proves to be too fidgety, while it's needlessly difficult to take a photo by pressing it without ever so slightly destabilizing the iPhone. What's worse, all this does not seem to be something that's easily fixable — or at all fixable — through software. Great.

No improvements in photo or video capture quality

This is not 16 Pro Max-specific but it does feel like it's particularly relevant because photography and videography are considered major selling points for the top iPhone models versus the top Android ones in any given year. Despite the more capable processor and graphics subsystem, the faster Neural Engine cores, the larger cache memory sizes and even a new image signal processor, Apple's latest flagship phone does not leverage any of that to deliver better photos or videos. All it does is take advantage of the improved encoder blocks in the A18 Pro so as to allow for higher framerates in 4K video recording — which is welcome but hardly game-changing.

It's not unreasonable to expect of Apple's software engineers to make at least some progress in terms of image processing in the span of a year, achieving higher-quality results in favorable shooting conditions and improved results in unfavorable ones, even based on more capable hardware alone. But when shooting the exact same subjects in the exact same conditions with the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the iPhone 15 Pro Max, one can't really tell which is which (yes — even on a computer screen). Yes, they are that close.

Since yours truly also owned the iPhone 14 Pro Max, he can attest to the fact that this was largely the case between that and the 15 Pro Max too. So all we got in 3 years, essentially, was a better lens setup and… photographic styles? Should Apple, then, just admit this is the best it can do for photography or videography when it comes to processing, even on its top smartphone sporting its latest mobile processor?

No difference in charging speeds, wired or wireless

This is such a long-standing issue that it can only be a conscious Apple choice by now. See, while Android smartphones have gradually supported faster and faster charging speeds, iPhones — even the latest models sporting USB-C — remain very slow to charge by 2025 standards. While Apple's smartphones support wired or wireless charging at 20–30 Watts, most Android flagship models support three or four times that or even more, seriously cutting down on the time they need to remain plugged-in or on a wireless charger.

Apple not supporting fast charging on its flagship iPhone models is a conscious choice that's simply unacceptable in 2025 terms.

It's widely believed that Apple is doing this because fast charging generates more heat, which can be detrimental to the overall health of a device over time (the batteries themselves aren't greatly affected by fast charging nowadays unless they are defective in some way). Apple enforces that choice, though, instead of leaving it in the hands of consumers: the company could just recommend the wired or wireless charging speeds it deems safe and appropriate for its smartphones, while still supporting higher speeds for anyone who needs them and understands the potential long-term risks involved.

At the end of the day, Apple chooses to pre-emptively deal with future PR disasters rather than offer its customers more flexibility and control over its products. Not a good look.

No meaningful increase in operating speed

This may be the most annoying iPhone Pro Max issue of all: the frustration of replacing a $1500 smartphone with another $1500 smartphone only to realize that the latter feels exactly the same in everyday use. Yours truly has upgraded from the iPhone 14 Pro Max to the 15 Pro Max to the 16 Pro Max in the span of 3 years and can confirm that iOS 18 performs identically on all three devices, despite their differences in main processor, graphics subsystem, amount of system memory, speed of system memory or speed of system storage.

Gaming aside — newer models handle that better, especially during prolonged sessions — it's almost as if one never upgraded to a supposedly faster, more capable flagship iPhone at all.

While there's a positive side to this (it's always great to see Apple's latest mobile operating system run so well on three- or four- or five-year old devices), it's highly discouraging for demanding consumers to know that, should they decide to buy a new flagship iPhone model, they won't notice much of a performance difference in the vast majority of everyday tasks carried out by their current one.

Sure, there are bound to be a few apps here and there — other than AAA games — taking advantage of the faster hardware, but they are so few and far between that they actually make the case for not upgrading any iPhone model in good working order… let alone a Pro Max one. Which is definitely not the kind of thought that Apple would like its most loyal customers to entertain year after year.

New features for new features' sake

While mentioning the Camera Control button, it's hard not to think of it as indicative of a broader issue with Apple's current iPhone approach. The company seems to be suffering from what some call "featuritis" and others "feature creep", both referring to Apple's tendency to introduce new features for the sake of it — that is, as marketing tools rather than thoughtful, genuinely useful additions to its devices' functionality.

When it comes to the iPhone, Apple seems incapable of introducing genuinely new features that deliver actual value to consumers.

Sure, there've been features that Apple implemented unsuccessfully in the past — like the MacBook Touch Bar and the iPhone 3D Touch — but it seems that the company is hellbent on introducing something new in every iPhone generation as of late, regardless of whether it adds any value to its smartphones' user experience or not. In 2024, it was the Camera Control button. In 2023, it was the Action button. In 2022, it was the Dynamic Island. And let us not forget about Apple Intelligence, which is going through the most unexciting rollout ever — especially for a "key feature" that's supposed to be a selling point going forward.

It's fair to say that apart from the programmability of the Action button — which can prove useful to people actually taking the time to reconfigure it extensively — everything else is a pointless novelty, an interesting idea poorly implemented or an outright failure. The fact that the most important, most useful addition to the iPhone lineup in recent years has been that much-discussed USB-C port (something many would consider a fix rather than a new feature) speaks for itself.

Is it really a new flagship iPhone if most people can't tell the difference?

Now, some people might skim through the above and get the impression that the iPhone 16 Pro Max is not a high-quality smartphone, which is obviously not the case. This is a very good device, worthy of its flagship status. The problem is that one can say the exact same thing about the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the iPhone 14 Pro Max or the iPhone 13 Pro Max… and mean the exact same thing. Which is just plain wrong.

This is happening because it has become more and more difficult to tell each iPhone Pro Max version apart in terms of everyday use. It's practically the same phone sporting what, in software, we'd most probably call "quality of life improvements" rather than "new features". Yours truly even had to make do with the iPhone 12 Pro Max for a few days recently — a four-and-a-half-year-old phone by now! — and was (un)pleasantly surprised to realize he was not missing all that much by not using the 14 Pro Max or the 15 Pro Max.

This speaks volumes. Just as many others have claimed in the past, Apple has basically released the same high-end iPhone for 5 years in a row, improving it here and there but not offering enough additional value — certainly not enough to justify its exorbitant pricing. Yes, the newest iPhones are better at consistent gaming and some aspects of photography or videography, thanks to advances in the tech that this functionality relies on. They also fixed actual problems, such as the lack of USB-C, adequate cooling and limited system memory. But that's about it… which is simply not good enough in the five-year timeframe we are talking about here.

People accusing Apple of essentially releasing the same iPhone for five years in a row are basically right when it comes to the Pro Max models.

In the same timeframe Apple did not improve on the overall user experience of iPhones (let alone the Pro Max) and did not relax most of the restrictions it's still imposing on them — so what 90% of the people are doing 90% of the time with a Pro Max model feels exactly the same as a result. At the same time, every actual new thing the company has tried adding fell flat on its face — including the aforementioned Apple Intelligence set of AI functions, which is still being slowly developed and rolled out, with consumers effectively acting as beta testers.

It's high time you made some changes, Apple

With all of that in mind, what Apple should be doing over the next few years is quite obvious. The company must take a long, hard look at its flagship smartphones and decide on what it can bring to the table in terms of new functionality that's actually valuable. That will probably be down to clever, intuitive, genuinely helpful software. Not untrustworthy, AI-infused, "smart" software of no real use and definitely not just boosted hardware.

Simply put: improvements in benchmark performance or screen brightness are all well and good, but if the latest flagship iPhones don't do anything worth of note that their predecessors couldn't, then they are not worth upgrading to. Consumers pay for what a device is able to offer them, not for tech specs per se.

In discussions that yours truly had with colleagues or other reporters in the past, he's heard a lot that "Apple is pretty much obliged to release new iPhones every year because of shareholder pressure" i.e. regardless of whether the company had something actually new to offer with its latest models or not. At the same time, he himself has always advised friends or family to not upgrade to the latest iPhone every year — as it's simply not worth it — but go for a new model every 2–3 years instead.

After his recent iPhone 16 Pro Max experience, though, yours truly will be offering a different piece of advice to people and asking fellow reporters a different question: the way things are going with Apple's choices, will its shareholders like it better if the iPhone upgrade cycle ends up settling on not every other year or every two years, but on four, five years or more? Exactly.

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