Why is the iPhone 11 Pro Max so expensive
So the iPhone 11 Pro Max has been out for a bit over 9 months now, so at this point I’ve had a lot of time to thoroughly use this thing and hear my thoughts. I feel as if I don’t have any other choice than to start off with the cameras. We have the triple camera setup going on and there’s been lots of conversation and meme surrounding it. Personally, when I first saw the cameras back in the September review, I thought they were kind of. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And it stands out compared to other triple camera setups. The three cameras are in F1.8 standard lens, an F2 telephoto lens and an F2.4 wide angle lens as well. All the cameras are 12 megapixels. The standard and telephoto lenses have optical image stabilization, while the wide does not. And even though the wide angle also has slightly worse quality than the other lenses, I still love this thing. Having a wide angle lens on a phone is so much fun. The overall picture quality is amazing. There’s great dynamic range. Exposure is handled well, the colors all look nice. Pictures also tend to lean a tiny bit on the warmer side.
Low light performance is decent, but now with night mode you can get even better shots as long as you’re able to hold still for a few seconds. The video has all the great stuff that I listed about the pictures, and this thing probably has the best video quality out of any smartphone on the market, which is nothing new for iPhones. You can shoot up to 4K at 60 fps and also get some slow motion at 1080p at 244 fps, you have portrait mode which blurs the background of your subject to fake a shallow depth of field and I can’t say I’m as pleased with this as everyone else seems to be. There are occasions where you will get a very nice photo, but a lot of the time the edges of objects and people look very blurry. After you snap a photo or video, you can edit the exposure, highlights, shadows, all that stuff, and you can change the video settings within the camera app finally.
Before, we go on to anything else, I want to talk about one of my favorite things about the Pro Max the battery life. On average i get between 7 and a half to 8 hours of screen on time, which is awesome, considering I usually have the thing on a higher brightness and watch a ton of YouTube. The 11 Pro Max has a 3969 milliamperes battery and easily last me an entire day. This phone supports wireless charging and for the first time ever we get the new 18 watt USB-C to lightning fast charger in the box. It is so nice how fast the Pro Max charges with this you can get around 50 percent in half an hour coming from zero. The charging goes super fast beginning and then as it gets closer to 100, it slows down a lot. And this is of course, to preserve the battery and make it last longer. And while we’re here, let’s talk about the other internals. You’ve got Apple’s own A13 bionic chip, the U1 chip, 4 GB of RAM, and you can either get 64, 256 or 512 GB of storage.
I went with 256 GB and still have 225 GB left. So I don’t think I will ever run out. Web browsing, playing games, flipping through the Home Screen there’s pretty much never any hiccups in performance. And if you are coming from an iPhone that’s a few generations older, the speed boost is very much apparent. The performance on the iPhone 11 Pro Max is awesome in every area if we take a look at the front of the smartphone, you’ll see that large 6.5 inch display, which has a resolution of 1242 by 2688, giving it a pixel density of 450 API, the same as the smaller iPhone 11 Pro. Apple has decided to call this the Super Retina XDR display.
The display is very nice it has a maximum brightness of 800 nits which can occasionally peak to 1200 nits. You can see it nicely outdoors most of the time. There’s a lot of contrast between lights and darks and the colours look nice and vivid. Gone is 3D touch, though, and I don’t really miss it. It was nice for some games as you can have the 3D touch like another button, and sometimes it was cool to peek into stuff when you remembered it existed, but it’s been replaced by haptic touch, which works largely the same. You just hold down on something and it’s a bit slower, but it works. Before we move on, though. What about the notch? It’s a little bigger than most other phones ones or the alternative hole punch. This is the first phone I’ve ever had with one, and I don’t really mind it. Obviously, I would strongly prefer if there were no notch, who wouldn’t? But since the screen is so big, it’s not really in the way of anything.
Housed in the notch are three different sensors you’re forward facing speaker and your selfie camera, which is F 2.2 and has a 12 megapixel sensor. Now, standard selfies will be 7 megapixels, but if you switch to the wide mode, then you will get to use all 12 megapixels of that sensor. The images coming out of this thing do look very nice and it can even shoot 4K video or 1080p video at 120 fps for some slow motion selfies, if that’s your thing. Face ID has also received some improvements now, making it 30% more faster and it supposedly can work out more angles, although it’s not very noticeable. The build quality is absolutely solid. The whole thing has a good weight to it, coming in at 225.9 grams making it Apple’s heaviest iPhone ever. This year they have decided to make the iPhone a bit heavier and thicker to make space for more battery, which I am definitely a fan of.
Having a super thin phone is cool and all, but I’ll take a slightly thicker design for more battery any day of the year. The back of the phone is this nice frosted glass and you can see I have these space grey option, but it’s also available in silver, midnight green and gold. The sides are a polished stainless steel. The buttons are very clicky and feel good. It’s IP 68 certified, so if you drop it in the pool, it’ll be fine.
Currently running on this phone is iOS 13.3.1 and I am loving it. iOS 13, had lots of great improvements when it first came out and they’ve been making it better ever since then. For me, one of the main things pulling me to iPhones instead of Androids is the operating system. Well, I definitely do like the current version of Android. I like how simple, clean and for lack of a better word, nice. iOS feels to use the iPhone 11 Pro Max starts at £1,149 for the 64 GB version, £1,299 for the 256 GB version and £1,499 for the 512 GB version.
So this thing is not cheap. If you have an iPhone 10 or newer, I really don’t think it’s worth the upgrade. You should probably wait a bit more if you’re coming from an older iPhone or coming from any Android phone. This is a good option. The iPhone 11 Pro Max does a great job in the camera department, has awesome battery life, solid build, quality and design and like always make some incremental upgrades compared to last year’s models. Well, I think the standard iPhone 11 is the best option for most people. If you don’t mind spending more and what the absolute best of the best Apple has to offer. This is it. And I think it’s a great phone.
By Hassan Jamshaid
