Hands on with the iPhone XS Max

The iPhone XS Max is shocking in how ordinary it feels. Apple clearly got a little carried away with itself in naming its extra-large iPhone, possibly downing a few too many Red Bulls at the focus group meetings.

The XS Max, for all its screen inches (6.5, the largest iPhone by far) and extreme-lifestyle-inspired branding, feels like an iPhone. It’s impressively light; the iPhone has generally gotten heavier the past couple of years as Apple has labored to make it more durable, so this is a thankful change in the opposite direction.

Wielding the phone isn’t awkward — well, no more awkward than any other big-size phone — though pocketability is about on par with the iPhone Plus models. As I turned the phone with one hand several times to get a shot of it from all angles, i didn’t drop it once, and the glass exterior felt suitably grippy.

As I swiped up on the lock screen and started navigating various screens and apps, I quickly stopped thinking about how big the phone was and was just using an iPhone. Even with iOS 12, it’s still the same home screen you know, the same suite of Apple apps, and the same mostly intuitive interface.

Photos and videos really bring out the best of the new 2,688 x 1,242 OLED display. A deep green field of grass on a high-res demo pic popped, and the detail was crisp, even when I zoomed deeply in (your mileage will vary depending on the resolution of the material you’re looking at).

Checking out an action scene in Ready Player One, I instinctively held the phone a little farther from my face than I usually do (my personal phone is the 5.8-inch iPhone X), but then pulled it closer. The phone kept up perfectly with the action onscreen, no matter how complicated things got, although that was partly because the movie was playing from the Apple Films app (we’ll see how it does with Netflix or YouTube when we review it). I can’t deny the Dolby Vision HDR visuals looked amazing, though — they almost made me forget the notch sticking out from the left side.

Gotta give the speakers credit, too: They can pump out decent sound. Even in the crowded Apple demo room, I was able to hear the dialogue (not just the bass-heavy action) fine with the phone about 15-20 inches from my face.

I was anxious to try out the new Depth editing on photos, which uses the iPhone XS Max’s A12 Bionic chip to adjust the amount of bokeh blur in the background on portrait photos. I was only able to try it out on demo photos on the iPhone XS Max, but the effect was excellent. I looked closely at edges, and I couldn’t spot any obvious problems, like when the software gets confused about what’s in the background or foreground. Again, we’ll see how it does with complex scenes (like when you have things like multiple, separate locks of hair in the foreground), but from where I’m standing Apple’s Depth feature looks miles ahead of similar features from Samsung and others.

To check out speed, I fired up Safari and loaded a couple of web pages, including Mashable. I was on Apple WiFi, so it was predictably smooth. It was also a hair faster than my iPhone X, which is exactly what I’d expect. Not groundbreaking, but progress.

The new “gold” finish is really muted gold, at least compared to the gold finishes Apple does for its older aluminum iPhone models. Which actually might be a good thing for those looking for a little less of a “bling” look. The other finishes are basically the same as last year.

I also had a few minutes with the “regular” size (5.8-inch) iPhone XS. There’s not much to say other than this is an iPhone X with a few extras. It feels a little weird that we’re here, a year after the device that was supposed to set the stage for the “next 10 years of the iPhone” is the least interesting thing about the iPhone event, but here we are. It’s as fast and intuitive as you’d expect, though being about the same weight as the iPhone X, it doesn’t impress as much on first touch. 

Which brings me back to where I started: Throughout my time with the iPhone XS Max, I couldn’t get over the weight, or rather the lack of it. Apple specs the iPhone XS at 7.35 ounces, or just a hair more than the iPhone 8 Plus. That’s not surprising since the overall footprint is basically the same, but once you turn it on, you instinctively think a device with a screen this large has no right to weigh so little. If we grade our devices by how much they “disappear” when we use them, the iPhone XS Max scores extra points.