iPhone XS Max review: Bigger isn’t always better

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There is a moment when you’re holding the gold iPhone XS Max in
your hands where you’ll start doing the mental math. 

“How much is $1,100, anyway?” you’ll ask yourself.

“If I just financed it, it’s not that much money per
month,” you’ll think. 

You’ll start to imagine your life with the phone, mentally
calculating whether it will fit in your pocket or purse (it
probably won’t) and whether you actually need a screen that big
(you probably don’t).

You’ll want to own the XS Max, not because your life demands a
smartphone that costs as much as the average mortgage payment,
but because the gold iPhone XS Max is a stop-and-stare type of
product. It’s the type of thing that elicits squeals of delight
from people with good taste; the type of device people can’t
resist reaching out to touch, even though doing so automatically
deposits fingerprints all over its glossy surface. 

You’ll want to own the XS Max, because even holding the XS Max
feels luxurious.

But the thing about the XS Max is that it’s supposed to be a tool
to make your life easier. It’s not supposed to just look
amazing, it’s supposed work amazingly well. And after
spending a week with the device, I can say it does that —
mostly. 

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The large display wasn’t a bonus

There’s no getting around it: the iPhone XS Max is huge.

Its screen is outlandishly large, seemingly fit for the mitts of
a giant rather than regular, human hands. If you’ve owned one of
the “Plus” models of Apple’s previous iPhone lineups — the iPhone
6 Plus, 7 Plus, or 8 Plus — you’ll still notice a change. While
the XS Max is basically the same overall size as the “Plus”
models, it’s as if Apple stretched the screen at the top and
bottom to fill in the space previously occupied by the home
button and top corners. The result is a bigger screen in the same
general form factor, and that change brings its own challenges.

During my tests of the phone, there was never a circumstance in
which I felt comfortable even holding the XS Max with one hand,
and one-handed use is downright impossible — I’d estimate that my
thumb was able to reach less than a third of the screen.

For the record, turning on reachability — an accessibility
feature that shortens whatever app you’re using to half the
height of the screen — didn’t solve the problem. I still couldn’t
reach the entire screen, even with reachability enabled, which
literally defeats the purpose of the feature. 

For me, someone with smaller hands, this was a major downside of
the XS Max. There are so many situations where I need to use my
phone one-handed, and it’s neither possible nor smart to try to
do that with the XS Max. 

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Beyond not being able to reach all four corners of the screen, I
constantly felt myself wondering what the actual point was of
having such an enormous display. Sure, you can see more of an app
at a time on the display, and if you have poor eyesight, I
imagine having a large font on a large screen would be
beneficial.

But for me, the huge screen was just an annoyance. I could see
all the ways it would be cool to have a big screen, but none of
them played out during regular use. It would have been great to
watch a video that took up the entire display, but that’s not
possible — every video I watched had large black bars on the top
and bottom, and sometimes on the sides. The same went for games,
which never took up the entirety of the display. 

The huge screen didn’t help me be more productive, or creative,
or even more entertained — it just made me feel frustrated. 

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The camera really is that great 

It’s true: the camera on the XS Max is better than most other
phones on the market. 

For me, the bar for smartphone cameras is usually set by Google’s
Pixel lineup — I believe it has the best smartphone cameras on
the market, and I’ve never been disappointed. That remains mostly
true of the Pixel 3, which came out
last month.

But in a few situations while using both devices, I felt like the
XS Max actually performed better. We’ll have a full test of both
phones side by side coming soon, but for now, I can say that
portrait mode on the iPhone has definitely improved. I was
impressed by my portrait mode photos and thought they were better
than the Pixel for the first time, maybe ever. 

Let’s not get ahead ourselves, though — if you have the iPhone X,
and maybe even the iPhone 8 Plus, I can’t imagine the camera on
the XS Max is so much better that you need to upgrade.
It’s great, but it’s not life-changing. 

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The same old iOS

Since this was an “S year,” there’s so much about the XS Max
that’s identical to last year’s iPhone X.

The design is unchanged, apart from the new gold color, and
everything else has been refined rather than overhauled. The
battery life appears to be slightly better — I typically got well
over a full day, although the iPhone X already had great battery
life — and some minor features were improved, like less shutter
lag when you take a photo. Plus, it’s slightly faster overall,
thanks to a new chip. 

But so much about the XS Max is the same as the X, and the XR,
and even iPhones from two, three, or four years ago, and that’s
because of iOS. Once you get over some of the biggest changes of upgrading
to a fancy new phone, you’re left with the exact same
operating system that everyone else has. And no, you probably
won’t use features like Memoji and Animoji very often — you might
even forget about them altogether. 

That’s what makes Apple so great, and also so frustrating. If you
bought an iPhone 8, for example, you still have a fantastic phone
that mostly works like the brand-new phone. But that also makes
it hard for me to justify the XS Max’s high price tag — you’re
shelling out at least $1,100 for a beautiful design with
incremental improvements. 

So yes, go ahead and buy the iPhone XS Max (in gold!) if you’re
obsessed with design, if you have an old iPhone and now want the
very best and very biggest of what Apple makes, have big hands,
or you’re just super rich.

Apple’s biggest-screen iPhone ever commands its biggest price tag
yet for an iPhone, but it also demands the attention of everyone
around it — it will make you look very, very fancy.