The iPhone 17 Pro Max, One Year Later
October is here, and as such, it marks almost one year of the 17 Pro Max's tenure with me. As such, I wanted to write a bit about my impressions over the last year, especially since so many people told me the upgrade wasn't worth it versus the 15 Pro Max it replaced. To spoil it, sort of: This phone was worth it. Very much so.
Worth it such that I went back on something I said on social media, that I was done buying Apple stuff just because of Current Events. What broke me on that front was my 15PM getting ever worse at doing basic stuff without suffering a hot flash + looking across the aisle and realizing that Apple sucks ass, but good lord, Google is so much worse. Especially with how they're pushing AI garbage. Anyway...
I don't know what to say without just launching into a gushfest about this phone. The 17 Pro Max (which from this point will be intermittently abbreviated as "17PM" as I don't feel like typing the full thing out every damn time) is an excellent phone. 10/10, no notes. (But I'mma tell you anyway.)
An excellent, coherent starting point would be to talk about some of the big things I bought into the 17 for, and if I feel it lived up to those expectations. The answer? A resounding YES. I was initially drawn in because Apple talked a big game about the vapor chamber keeping things nice and cool. I was suffering with a 15PM that just loved to turn into a hot coal if I did so much as ask it to do something super basic.
If I tried to use it while charging? It was too hot to hold.
The 17PM was a sea change in this regard. While there have been occasions where it got more toasty than I'd like, it never, ever got to the hand-scorching highs that my 15PM did. Even while charging. Apple was NOT kidding about the vapor chamber, here. It puts in work. It keeps the phone nice and cool.
The battery life was also ridiculously improved alongside the thermals, and that shows in the battery stats. Due to the constant overheating, my 15PM wrapped its tenure at around 545 cycles, with 86% battery health remaining. Now, this was a two-year tenure, so it isn't a direct comparison, but I can tell you that the battery life began taking a hit mere months into owning the 15PM. The battery health was in the low 90s by the end of the first year.
The 17PM? One year in, the battery health is sitting at 99%, with 231 cycles on the battery. The battery life is still stellar, easily lasting the whole day for me without much difficulty. The battery is aging like a fine wine, and I'm sure not being trapped in an overheating chassis helps a ton.
Speaking of the chassis: I picked the orange 17PM, and boy howdy I'm going to miss this color.. It's such a lovely color. Very close to the spice orange colorway of the Nintendo GameCube. I think it would have been even cooler if it had been a redder shade of orange like some of the older iPod nano models, but you know what? Apple actually gave the pro users a fun color for once. I'll take what I can get. (It's just a shame that they then forgot this with the 18PM. I mean, burgundy is cool but it looks too dark, I think. Glacier kinda repeats the same mistake Apple made with the 13 Pro with the blue being too washed out and almost looking silver.)
There was a lot of pixels spilled over Apple switching to an aluminum chassis, claiming it was easier to damage and dent, and at least having kept my 17PM in several cases (a couple of Spigen ones and now an ESR one), the poor phone has taken a number of hard drops and yet I see no sign of the case deforming/denting when I take the case off to wipe the phone down periodically. Still looks as pristine as the day it left the box.
While yeah, if you roll caseless this is going to be a bigger problem, if you use a case with these phones I don't think you have much to be worried about unless it's a case that lacks any kind of shock absorption. Though I think those cheap plastic hellcases we used to buy purely for the cosmetics back in the day have all but disappeared, thankfully...
Moving on to the cameras, as is usual, they work. They work great. In fact, I recently took my phone to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (along with a Lumia 920 for giggles) and the 17PM just laughed at the dark areas of the aquarium, pulling off amazing shots that would have wowed me back in 2010 (when I visited the aquarium for the first time, Canon Rebel XS in hand, trying to get photos of something in that darkness).
I only have two gripes with the cameras, and both of them are carried forward from the 15PM: The first is that due to the main sensor getting a bump to 42MP, the minimum focus distance has increased, noticeably. For the pro phones, this is no problem, because they can hand off to macro mode to get a close-up shot. (But for the base model phones which lack a macro mode, this...is problematic.)
Which segues into the second gripe: Macro mode is still 12MP. I thought Apple upgrading the ultrawide to 42MP would have changed this, but I guess not. Maybe there's a setting I still haven't figured out, but I just find this weird because Apple's own spec page for the 17PM lists "42MP macro photography".
For the record, I know that MP does not equal quality. I mostly like having it for crop flexibility. That said, at least the sensor was upgraded. I remember this gripe being more significant back on the 15PM because the ultrawide sensor was similar if not the same to the 13 Pro I upgraded from, and due to the increase in minimum focus distance that came with the new-to-me 42MP main sensor meant a LOT of my photos were being handed to/assisted by the ultrawide camera...which didn't see significant improvement from the 13 Pro.
So while I do still gripe about it, at the very same time, I would be remiss if I didn't say it's something that has improved by moving to the 17PM.
Bringing the 17PM to its conclusion, though...I find it funny that people gave me crap for upgrading to it from my old 15PM. That phone was a turd in every sense of the word and if it wasn't for USB-C I likely would have thrown that lemon right into the ocean where it belonged. The 17PM was a night-and-day difference. No overheating. Very performant, with a fun color to boot? And epic battery life to the very end? Easily the best phone I've had since the 13 Pro. And I LOVED that phone.
Wait, "to the very end?" waddaya mean?!
This was a weird piece to type, because this is a phone that one year ago I said I'd be keeping for a long time. The one that would finally break the two year record. The one that I'd dig my heels in with. But yet, as I type this, an 18 Pro Max is on its way to me (and upon putting the finishing touches on this piece I've had it for a couple days), and the only and I mean the only reason I upgraded was because I need more storage and a friend actually poked me to ask if he could buy my 17 Pro Max because I had gushed about it so much and he was due for an upgrade. The numbers worked out for both of us, and thus...things happened. He gets a "new" phone for cheap, I get an upgrade for pretty much no change to my monthly bill. Win/win.
(Before this, I was kinda eyeing the Klarna lease thing but noped out because you don't own the phone. I mean, you can buy out your lease and keep it, but the way the numbers worked I'd have 6 months to pay down the remaining $600 or financially eat shit and given I had something similar happen with T-Mobile and that went horribly, yeah, I don't screw with leases if I can avoid it.)
The 17 Pro Max is an excellent phone. In fact, I wouldn't even be thinking about swapping it out for something newer if past me hadn't been a total dumbass and sprung for the 512GB model. But past me also didn't anticipate Apple Intelligence being kinda forced in iOS 27 + some parts of iOS 26, and it proceeding to consume 20 GB of storage onto itself. This...kinda pushed things into the danger zone.
I'm one of those Luddites who takes their media local. That means my music library (roughly 30 GB, give or take, and that's my curated, portable library) lives on my phone. There's also a bunch of photos. I use my phone as my primary video camera (because why bother with anything else? Dedicated 4K cameras that would match the quality of the iPhone are $$$$$$, and that's also another whole device I'd have to bring with me), and video footage chews through storage quick. iOS apps (and the system) also aggressively cache. There are times I'll see Discord, Bluesky, and so on consuming 15-20 GB onto themselves and the only way to clear this is to completely uninstall and reinstall the app.
(I know some have said regarding media: Just host a Jellyfin instance! Use the cloud! The problem with that is that my carrier has been getting steadily worse here such that depending on cloud services while out and about is increasingly untenable. Coupled with my ISP completely torpedoing my upstream bandwidth in the last year unless I felt like paying triple the price for it...yeah, I'm good. Plus I also don't want to keep my server powered up because as of right now, storage media is EXPENSIVE. If I suffered a failed hard drive right now, it would be catastrophic, so I'm keeping my use of my NAS/server to a minimum.)
People have said that iOS will eventually clean house if the storage fills up, but I'd rather not take a "trust me bro" approach to this, especially considering I'm planning to long haul it. My habits may change a year from now. Hell, this very thing happened to the 2020 M1 MBP I got many years ago! I thought 256GB was enough storage to get me by, and it turns out my needs changed and suddenly it was a huge bottleneck! That, plus with everything getting more expensive as time goes on...decisions, decisions.
Really, one of the last walls broke when I asked a group chat why everyone was absolutely losing their shit over the Steam Frame and rushing to buy it in droves even though the price seemed...a bit elevated. To which I got the response "because the forecasts are looking ever murkier, and we're buying stuff while we still can".
Looking at the prices for the 18PM, looking at the monthly cost (after the chunk of cash my friend would give me for the 17PM) for the 512GB model, I thought to myself: "If this is the last chance to do an upgrade for the foreseeable future, would future me from two years ago want to come back to this moment and kick me in the nads when he's having to restore his phone for the nth time because he began running out of storage?"
Looking at the prices for the 18PM, looking at the monthly cost (after the chunk of cash my friend would give me for the 17PM) for the 512GB model, I thought to myself: "If this is the last chance to do an upgrade for the foreseeable future, would future me from two years ago want to come back to this moment and kick me in the nads when he's having to restore his phone for the nth time because he began running out of storage?"
"Fuck it, we ball."
Thankfully, this was done in such a way it actually helped, layering everything such that it set me up pretty good financially for the next year. Some sacrifices were made to get here (being on a 36 month payment plan with 0% APR, thankfully, and having to deal with a locked phone for a year) but in the end, it worked out, and I'm pretty happy so far.