The iPhone 13 Pro Max looks pretty much exactly the same as its predecessor, but what's under the hood, or rather, the Android catch-up 10 to 120 Hz variable refresh 6.7-inch display that switches between low power and smooth animations, matters.
Thanks to the new A15 Bionic chipset with two high-performance Avalanche cores that activate when it's pedal to the metal time, and four Blizzard energy miser cores for mundane tasks, and a bigger battery 4325 mAh battery (up from 3867 mAh in the iPhone 12 Pro Max), you get an Apple phone that'll easily go two to two and a half days between charges.
Long battery life is actually a more worthwhile upgrade than the relatively modest overall increase in system speed for the 13 Pro Max. Most people probably won't even notice it. The A15 Bionic is made with 5 nanometre process technology, just like the A14, which may be why the speed bump isn't greater. Further process shrinks, 3 and 2nm are coming up in the next few years, and it seems chip makers can go even finer than that, which is remarkable.
Graphics, however, are uprated in the A15, and tests suggest a solid, approximately 30 per cent performance improvement for games in the 13 Pro Max compared to the 12 Pro Max which is already faster than Android devices.
Then there's the camera system, powered by the faster graphics and neural chips for computational photography. The setup is pretty similar to last year, with an ultra-wide, wide and telephoto camera, along with the space-sensing light detection and ranging system.
Apple didn't capture the top spot in the DXOmark camera tests with the 13 Pro Max, but it did pretty well overall. The new automatic macro mode is fun for static objects, but I couldn't coax it into focusing on moving bees in a lavender bush (sorry neighbours, that was me standing in your greenery with a smartphone).
Some features like the useful Photographic Styles tone presets for stills and the upcoming ProRes video format look set to 13 series only; the latter Pro Max only in fact, and you'll need at least 512 GB storage.
ProRes will be for select videographers only, but the rest of us can use the great Cinematic video effect that blurs the background nicely - and you can change the focus point in editing as well. All looks very professional, but I wonder if the blurred backgrounds in Cinematic mode place a limit on what the current iPhone hardware can manage, because the resolution is limited to 1080p at 30 frames per second. No 4K Cinematic mode, and that, incidentally, is the max resolution for the iPhone 13 Pro: there's no 8K mode yet.
The DXOmark geeks weren't that impressed by the zoom performance in the 13 Pro Max which is now 3 times instead of 2.5 times in the earlier model, and the new telephoto lens is actually darker at f/2.8 instead of f/2.2. That said, big zoom ranges on smartphones are hardly ever usable, and it's better to have good image stabilisation which in conjunction with clever night-time exposure algorithms let you take pictures of stuff your eyes can't pick out after dark.
Apple and Android cameras seem to be diverging at the moment. Instead of crazy-high sensor resolutions that are over 100 megapixels on big sensors, Apple's sticking to a modest 12 Mpixel with large photo diodes on not such large imagers.
Well, if something measured in micrometers can be called large, that is. Either way, Android camera sensors use a technique whereby groups of pixels are combined into superpixels, 2 x 2, 3 x 3 or similar, and image sizes come out at 12-14 Mpixel in the end. Both approaches have their advantages, especially when coupled with computational photography, but the "pixel-binning" Androids I've tried out lately seem to provide better dynamic range than iPhones, which in turn work better in low light.
The price of the iPhone 13 Pro Max is about the same as its predecessor: the 512 GB storage model I had costs $2,599. Yes, it's super premium pricing still, but a 13 Pro Max will last a while, and that is where the value of the device lies. Don't upgrade every year please.
