Hi everyone Aaron here for Zollotech and i've been using the iphone 13 pro max as my main phone over
the past month or so and when i wasn't reviewing the 13 pro max that's the only time i wasn't using
it so maybe i was reviewing the 13 pro after that i found that i was generally coming back
to the larger size now in this video i'm going to cover everything from the durability to how it's
held up with scratches pwm the cameras and more so if you want to jump to any specific part of
the video with that information i always link the chapters or time codes in the description now the
first thing like i said i've been finding that i always come back to this larger size now that's
generally due to me just having larger hands and i can easily wrap my hand around the iphone 13
pro max or 12 pro max so this is probably more similar to say a 13 pro for most people but if
you have very large hands i find that this is a very comfortable size and that's typically why
i went with things such as the 11 pro max and then switched to the 12 promax and 13 pro max i
had really considered using the 13 pro this year but the pro max due to a couple different things
is why i stuck with it now it is a big phone it definitely is a little bit heavier than last year
but i really don't mind since they've increased some of the features with it now ergonomically
if you're coming from say an 11 pro max or any of the curved phones since the iphone 6 there's
definitely a difference in its overall size or feeling because it's squared off the squared off
edges make it feel a little more premium in my opinion but they also make it feel larger
because you don't have that edge that's rounded where your thumb can just sort of swipe over the
display easily there's definitely a difference so if you're switching from an older phone to
the newer phones it will feel a bit larger for a while because of it being flat to the side
you have less of a chance of hitting the display on anything so it's held up really well with the
ceramic shield i don't have a single scratch on the display there isn't anything on there and as
far as the display goes it's held up well no micro scratches at all so far and i'm not using a screen
protector or a case generally so this matte finish the sierra blue i think i like the last
year's color pacific blue a little bit better or graphite but sierra blues the new color so that's
why i went with it but you can see here it's held up really well i don't have any scratches on the
camera lenses some people i know last year were getting dust under them i haven't seen that myself
and it seems to be holding up well here and the frame being stainless steel although it's polished
i don't really have any scratches that i can see on it i know some people were having issues with
that mostly with the silver sort of iphone where it's a polished stainless steel that doesn't have
a coating on it or a color coating on it they tend to show a little bit more scratches but
in general if you're going to use it without a case it seems to hold up really really well
and being stainless steel it's very durable also now as far as the display goes the display looks
great it's got 120 hertz pro motion this year which makes scrolling and things very smooth
and as more and more apps add support for it which is really easy they just need to add it
the scrolling is super smooth and it helps with battery since it varies the refresh rate from
10 to 120 hertz so when you go into things such as settings and scroll it's just really smooth
overall when you're going back and forth just between apps apple's apps in particular are very
very smooth so if we go into say music we'll wait for browse to load there you'll see it's smooth
here now we're only recording at 60 frames per second so you're not going to see this 120 hertz
but it definitely makes a difference and it's noticeable and of course you could turn it
off but i don't think you'd want to do that as it's one of the advantages to this phone
now as far as pwm with this phone pwm doesn't seem to bother me at all while the display technically
still uses it to control brightness and for those of you not familiar with that what it means is
pulse width modulation it flickers the screen faster and slower to control brightness
it's typically how oled screens control their brightness now this one uses it i don't see it at
all even under 240 frames per second slow motion it's barely noticeable at all and as you bring the
brightness up and down it will flicker it faster and slower now you can't see this with your eyes
and it does seem to bother about one in 10 people however with the 13 pro and 13 pro
max series it's just not an issue for me where this would typically bother my eyes cause me
to feel nauseated or give me a headache i have zero issues with this display it looks great
no issues whatsoever so that's great news if you have that issue of course you could always
try this out for a few days and if it doesn't work for you you could switch to say an 11 where you're
not going to use that or have pwm because it's an lcd display but for the most part it really isn't
an issue now the speakers this year are even better than last year they're super clear and
they've boosted the volume of the top speakers so when you're watching content in landscape it
sounds great and gives you a better stereo sound than last year music played through this is nice
and loud and i wanted to have you hear this i did download a sample clip a royalty free sample clip
from epidemic sound so take a listen to this just so you can get an idea of what it sounds like
now over time they haven't distorted or anything after using them for a month i
don't keep it at the the highest volume or the full volume but it still sounds great
now the speakers sound really good and at the highest volume they do distort a little bit so you
bring the volume down as you saw in the clip there i brought it down just a little bit to take that
edge off and it doesn't sound as distorted it sounds nice and clear and they've done a really
great job of making them louder and getting a lot of performance out of tiny speakers this year
and hopefully you could hear the difference that it didn't change much when i brought
the top speaker to the microphone as compared to the bottom they sound very very similar this year
now as far as overall performance well with the new a15 bionic you're probably not going to notice
a huge difference between last year's and this year's however if you're coming from an iphone
10 or an older phone you will see a difference with speed and performance just going into apps
is super fast and we're just waiting for the internet connection here but going into apps is
super fast if we're playing something like call of duty you'll see we can resume pretty quickly
it connected to the server and now we're back in if i go back out we can maybe switch between
that and shortcuts or use something else and you don't really see any lag whatsoever in the
the overall experience everything's just super fast and fluid ram management seems to be great
and like i said going between different apps whether it be call of duty or it be something else
if you're playing a game online you're playing maybe call of duty or maybe just some other game
could be pubg or more the experience is just great overall no problems whatsoever super fast
and one great thing this year i've noticed a big difference with is heat overall the phone does not
seem to get as hot as last year so that goes for the display outside as well so when you're using
the phone last year the display would dim if it got really hot so you'd be at high brightness
you're outside on a hot day it would have to cool the phone down and dim the display back down i've
experienced that far less with this phone in fact not at all with this phone and the phone is not
nearly as warm on the back if we go into something such as geekbench
within geekbench i ran this right before filming this video you'll see it has great scores 1712
for single core 4700 for multi-core and i'm even on a beta ios 15.2 betas as i run a lot of those
and even with a beta it performs great there are some bugs from time to time with ios software
we'll talk more about that in just a moment but in general it's just really fast and fluid
the camera is great when you're using the camera it is an improvement over last year although some
people will appreciate the improvements to things such as macro if you get really close and we snap
this photo you can see the dust on the camera lens and you can get really nice and close of
course you've got 4k hdr video dolby vision and also apple prores this year on the pro model so
that's something that really you can use this as a regular youtube camera
most of the time i'll film outside using an iphone and if you use prores i bet very few people could
tell the difference unless you know specifically what to look for there's a lot of things you could
film with this no problem even indoors but outdoor as well just the quality overall is amazing so if
i hit record now you'll see now i'm recording with the iphone 13 pro max as opposed to the
the sony camera that i have above me i'm using an fx3 to record this video above here and you
can see there's an fx3 above me and the quality is amazing so the forward-facing camera they didn't
do a whole lot with this year but other features such as if we go into photo we'll spin it around
here with cinematic mode i don't find that i use that very often cinematic mode's not something
that i would personally use unless i was filming a lot of people but within photos we have those
new modes where you can sort of optimize the photo to look like you want between different standard
or rich contrast or vibrant cool and modify as needed or you could just use raw altogether and
modify it afterward how you'd like so the cameras are amazing it's great to use these just to snap
photos or if you want to get a nicer photo so i'm really impressed with cameras overall on these
they're just a little bump up from last year of course with video modes and pro res
again you could use this as your daily camera for youtube if you wanted to do that you could film
the entire channel just like this one using this camera now as far as my daily use i'm typically
using this for social media managing youtube this channel things like that and occasionally
photography and games and things so not too much game playing on here and if we go to battery
we'll let it load here battery health will be a hundred percent on a phone this new
and it degrades over time it's just normal 80 after two years is normal according to apple
but battery life on the 13 pro max is hard to beat from any phone out there yesterday i had
three hours and eight minutes of screen on time five hours and 41 minutes of screen off time
with everything from background activity from safari and facetime and setting up different
cameras and messages and more and some of these things shouldn't be running in the background but
it just gets great battery life by the time i go to bed with a 13 pro max i'm still over 50
typically i've been using this this morning with the screen on the entire time for this video
of course using it before that and i'm at 95 battery life like i said by the time i go to
bed at night i'm at about 55 sometimes it just depends only once have i brought it under that
amount and if you're on ios 15.1 there are bugs with those software updates so sometimes people
are experiencing poor battery life from that and really it shouldn't be an issue for this phone but
some people will notice a difference with those updates and we're going to see updates for years
with this so we'll probably see ios 20 ios 21 with this phone probably in the future by the time
apple stops making updates for it so it's got a long way to go as far as being around for a while
and being reliable but battery life is amazing and reception is probably the only area where i've had
issues and this could be related to potentially the updates that i'm using reception has been very
hit or miss depending on what update i'm on on the 13 promax sometimes i'll have great reception
and other times things just won't load i'll switch on airplane mode it will disconnect everything
sometimes i'll disconnect bluetooth turn everything back on and then it fixes the issue
i've been having more and more issues on 5g with this if i turn off 5g i typically have less issues
also wi-fi sometimes is problematic even though it's not for other devices i have
connected to the same network so i don't know if that's because i'm running betas but i'm seeing
more and more issues with this even with the qualcomm modem but that can be related to software
updates as well with things maybe calls dropping and more generally it's pretty good compared to
previous phones with intel modems such as the 11 pro max but in overall i'm very surprised that the
software is a little bit buggy with the cellular part of this i'm surprised it's not working
perfectly at this point and again it can come down to things such as your carrier and more so
it may not all just be ios it could be the carrier putting up new towers or switching between that so
i'm not going to blame apple 100 on this but i would love to see that issue resolved as i
don't see as many issues with android with this now should you wait for iphone 14 if you don't
have a 13 already well you may want to because the rumor is it's going to look more like an iphone 4
or 4s where the camera is flush mounted and it's going to be about a year away
but they're said to redo the design to be more like this phone now whether or not apple does that
typically lately they've been on three-year cycles with sort of the overall design so we may not see
that this coming year however they could make it a little bit thicker maybe even better battery life
and sort of flush mount the cameras this time making it a little bit thicker i'm not sure
that's going to be true in a year or so of course we'll know for sure but i'm not sure i'd wait for
an iphone 14 unless maybe you had an iphone 12 pro max and you don't really care about the updates
this year if you have an 11 pro max an iphone 10 or older and you want to go to the new design well
then sure you could try this one out of course if you're on apple's plan you could just swap it out
every year too if you wanted to but if you're a long-term phone user that keeps their phone
three or four years and you have a 12 pro max i'd probably wait for next year's if you have an older
phone i don't really think there's a reason to wait if you can get your hands on one of these
so i think the iphone 13 pro max is great i'll continue to use it as my main phone the mini and
the 13 and the 13 pro are all great phones as well but they're just too small for me overall the pro
max is really more comfortable in my hands in fact when i was using the 13 pro full time during the
review i found that i was more likely to actually have it slip in my hands because it was smaller
it just seemed like it would fall out of my hands a little easier and i almost dropped it multiple
times i never have an issue with the larger phone i can easily hang on to it and as long as you have
pockets to accommodate it you should be good to go there but overall it's a great phone and i really
like using it i hope apple continues to give some better updates for this maybe with some new
features and more but i'd love to hear from you if you're using a 13 pro max if you're upgrading this
year after a month it's been a great phone i'd love to hear your experience in the comments below
if you'd like to get your hands on this wallpaper of course i'll link it in the description
like i normally do and if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the
video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron i'll see you next time