Each year, the latest iPhone crawls closer to an ambitious goal: realising its full potential as a gaming device, and a possible replacement for PC handhelds. With the iPhone 17 Pro Max, Apple is closer than ever. It arrives as a fully-featured, robust gaming device with a games library to justify that label, and a scattered array of AAA adventures that function incredibly well on board, with only small cuts to overall quality and gameplay delivery.
True innovation has felt lacking over the last few years, and so the yearly releases of iPhones have become fairly rote. You know what to expect here: a bigger battery, faster processing, a better camera, and so on. The iPhone 17 Pro Max is not functionally different to the equivalent iPhone 16 Pro Max of last generation. But it is more than its predecessor, and noticeably so.
iPhone 17 Pro Max: Review Roundup
Testing the limits of the iPhone 17 Pro Max battery
Assassin’s Creed Mirage was the core game I tested on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, advancing the adventures of Basim in handheld form. This is one of the most demanding games for the iPhone, which is understandable, given it first debuted on consoles, and is a large open world game. The iPhone version is a small downgrade from its console equivalent, which is no surprise. Character models are slightly more rugged, with hair being crisply textured and eyes being a bit less lifelike. Desert vistas are also slightly less impressive, with some colours being less rich.
But movement in Mirage is very smooth, with performance keeping up, even in high density scenes. As you’re tearing through sandy streets, there’s no obvious or egregious latency. There’s no hitches, breaths, or tearing. Just good, clean fun (if you can describe ancient assassination that way).
So, how does the battery fare amongst all this hubbub? Last year, when I tested the iPhone 16 Pro Max, I found I could play Assassin’s Creed Mirage for around four hours untethered. The iPhone 17 Pro Max performs a bit better, getting closer to 4.5 hours before it bites the dust. This is on the extreme side for the phone’s capacity, it should be noted.
If you’re popping in for rounds of Hello Kitty Island Adventure via Apple Arcade (which remains a robust subscription service with an array of excellent games included), you’re more likely to get 8-10 hours of battery life while gaming. Testing Resident Evil 3 also produced longer-term results – it’s much less demanding than Assassin’s Creed Mirage, chewing less battery, and barely stoking the phone’s fire.
That’s another thing worth noting – depending on what games you play, the iPhone 17 Pro Max brings the heat. Playing through Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the phone became hot to touch in its upper chassis, and warm to touch in its lower half. I wouldn’t describe the heat as uncomfortable, but there were certain moments, brushing the top of the case, where I was concerned about the degree of heat being produced.
For this year’s iPhone, the ‘advanced cooling technology’ does help to diffuse heat buildup, and it never grew to unbearable levels – but this is still a phone that gets very, very hot while playing certain games.
Resident Evil 3, seemingly far less battery intensive than Mirage, produced only lukewarm temperatures, at least. (It appears Capcom’s port is very well-optimised). Most other games also rarely gave the iPhone 17 Pro Max trouble, with temperatures remaining lukewarm or relatively cool for Hello Kitty Island Adventure, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and my daily rounds of Jeopardy, Twisted Wonderland, and Pokemon TCG Pocket.
It’s not a trouble you’ll have often, but this heat buildup is worth keeping in mind as more high-spec AAA games land on iPhone systems in future.
Screen controls remain an issue
Regardless of this impressive gaming performance, which continues to improve each year, there is still one bugbear that troubles gaming on the iPhone system – touch controls. There’s no getting around it: it sucks to play a game that requires finesse when you’re relying on on-screen controls that are slippy and grippy at the wrong times.
Playing through Assassin’s Creed Mirage, you need a degree of precision, to land on exactly the right pole, climb exactly the right cliff, evade exactly the right guards, and kill exactly the right targets. So often, I failed in my missions because my fingers would slip off the on-screen directional button, or because I’d fumble finding the exact right button for leaping, running, or jumping.
You really do need an extra device to play games effectively, like a Backbone controller. But asking players to purchase an additional device, on top of an already expensive phone – as configured, my review model costs AUD $2,999 – is a bit much.
Should these phones ever be regarded as standalone gaming devices, Apple needs to consider an alternative control scheme, even if that means launching the phone alongside a dedicated handheld controller, to ensure a tightness and precision in each adventure.
Sure, you won’t always need the level of precision that Assassin’s Creed Mirage demands. In Hello Kitty Island Adventure and Disney Dreamlight Valley, you can get by aimlessly wandering, and taking your time finding the correct controls. But when you’re playing more serious games, you’ll need a more precise control method.
How the iPhone 17 Pro Max performs elsewhere
Even beyond this minor, fixable flaw, and even beyond its status as a gut-busting gaming machine, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is just a very good phone, period. Expensive yes, but for that money, it delivers plenty to justify this cost.
Everyday battery life
First up, battery life. Personally, I consider this one of the most important aspects of any phone. There’s so many devices to charge, all the time. You don’t want to spend each and every day having to charge your phone. To that end, the refreshed battery of the iPhone 17 Pro Max will serve you well. In what I consider daily active use – doing my gaming dailies, answering messages, browsing emails and social media, occasionally posting a video for work – I can get around two (or sometimes three) full days of use out of this phone.
It’s difficult to estimate exact battery rundown, but in practical terms, two full days is perfectly robust. If you’re not using it much at all, you’ll likely exceed this run time, as leaving the phone alone for a few days revealed great battery retention. While waiting for time to actually review the phone, I successfully left it alone for five days, and it maintained 80% of its charge.
Camera use
After battery, the next most-important thing to me is a phone’s camera. Apple promises the longest iPhone telephoto ever, and a range of other improvements to make sure you’re getting a top-of-the-range camera system that allows for unique, rich shots in any mode. In practical use, I’ve been very impressed by the phone’s camera, and its flexibility.
In selfie mode (I fear I’m getting older, because I use this far less now than I used to), there’s a very novel focussing system that allows you to expand the width of your photographs, based on system detection. If there’s more phases in shot, you get a very wide angle. If you stretch out your arm, the system detects you’re taking a selfie, and gives you more room to move.
I’m also extremely happy with the phone’s macro lens, and the clarity of its shots. Out of curiosity, I found myself zooming into my bed sheets, and discovered a gasp-worthy clarity in each individual cotton strand, rendered cleanly in my macro shots. You can see individual threads, and the dust that exists there – it’s wild.
Heading outside, I took shots of gorgeous flowers, and could see the unharvested pollen of the little buds, and the detail in each flower head. These were features that existed in the last iPhone I reviewed, but the camera shots delivered by the iPhone 17 Pro Max appear much crisper and brighter than in their predecessors. In a few shots unworthy of this review, I even managed to photograph insects flying amongst the flowers, in great detail.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max has a fantastic camera, and I can see myself having a lot of fun with it.
Overall verdict
With all of these elements performing well across the board, the iPhone 17 Pro Max arrives as a robustly-featured device with plenty going for it. If you’re upgrading from last generation’s model, you won’t find a plethora of transformative changes, but there are some notable upgrades that suggest there’s still room for Apple to go bigger and better in each new iPhone iteration.
While there are some elements that don’t work as well as others – I’m not particularly enamoured by the chunky top of the phone, where the innards are now housed, touch controls are still a significant bugbear for gamers, and the price is still difficult to swallow – this is a well-rounded and well-built phone.
Whether you’re popping in for some AAA gaming, or you’re just looking to make friends with Hello Kitty, this is a phone with the guts and intentionality to deliver a proper gaming experience. You might need to take it with a Backbone controller, or another alternative control device, but you can have some absolutely marathon gaming sessions with this phone, and have it serve as your everyday companion, to boot.
An iPhone 17 Pro Max and a 12-month subscription to Apple Arcade was provided for the purposes of this review.
