iPhone 16 Pro Max Anyone else feeling bored or somewhat disappointed with their 16 Pro Max? thinking about switching to S25 Ultra just for fun.

[JuicyGoomba]

I would switch if the android market had a lot of photography apps like iOS. There too many options and accessories that are made for the iPhone like external lenses, Beastgrip accessories like the Beastcage (currently have one on order). Samsung has good cameras but doesn’t have the software to control them as well as Apple. Also android isn’t as secure as iOS. I’d loose my airdrop, image quality via text to other iOS devices etc. If I did get one, I’d buy it and open another line and use it with my iPhone. Similar to what I’m doing now with two 16 pro max iPhones.

2012 called, they want their predispositions and prejudices against Android back.

 

[JuicyGoomba]

Pixel is cool. I wouldn’t call pixel AI revolutionary. It’s an interesting demo like Apple version.

The Pixel is essentially just an iPhone but smoother and more responsive. I'm satisfied with my Pixel 9, but the overall experience is quite a bit less cohesive than an iPhone despite the many advantages.

Also if Apple's AI is a demo, then I'm not sure what it's actually demonstrating other than the incompetence of Apple's software development. At least Gemini actually feels a like a developed product, almost like it's going to replace Google Assistant and become the de-facto voice/AI assitant or something.

Siri was already 5+ years behind Google Assistant, and Google stopped developing Assistant years ago in favour of Gemini. So where is Siri now? IMO Apple will never catch up and will simply make Siri competent enough to hand everything over to AI plugins like Gemini and GPT that you download.

Sadly on MacOS 15.2, Siri is abysmally bad at handing things over to GPT and you have to explicitly state in your query that GPT has to handle it. Otherwise it's the good old "Sorry, I can do that yet" with no option of using GPT.

 

[JuicyGoomba]

As a side note for anyone wanting to try Samsung, please try a Pixel first. Samsung software is better than it was, but it's still unnecessarily convoluted, bloated, and generally just a mess. It looks prettier, but it's still one of the worst Android "skins". I'd even take MIUI and Colour/Oxygen OS over OneUI. The entire thing serves as an advert for the Samsung "ecosystem".

When I'm on an iPhone or using a Pixel, I feel no compulsion to suddenly get rid of my Garmin in favour of an Apple Watch or Pixel Watch. Same goes for earbuds.

The Pixel/Android do have one useful feature though which is Fast Pair. It's kinda of like that fancy popup you get when you bring AirPods close to an iPhone, only it isn't artificially gatekeeped and works for everything supporting the latest Bluetooth standards from the past few years. Even works on Windows 11 and ChromeOS.

Of course Apple need to continue convincing everyone that they put some special sauce in their OS that "magically" finds all the Apple accessories. "Magic".

 

[Anonymebaba]

Yes honestly i came from an 11 Pro Max (2019) and was fine for me but I broke it. I paid 1400€ for this phone and while it's a good phone, it doesn't do anything better than most older iPhones. An iPhone 13 (non-Pro) would have been enough.

I am particularly disappointed by the camera. I think we juste reached a point where the size of the sensor makes the bottleneck. Photos are grainy and lack detail. The shift to 48MP even seems to have lowered the final result somehow, maybe because of the smaller pixels.

In terms of raw performance, I even have some mild slow-downs (but it's just software-related, hardware on the phone is nice). Anyway being in France, i don't have access whatsoever to the new "IA capabilities" that Apple Intelligence is supposed to give.

The only thing i would dream of is a free ChatGPT4 subscription embedded in Siri which could serve as a personal assistant.

iOS 18 is bad and the battery performance is not better than my 11 Pro Max was when i got it. Panel lottery for the screen is a pain in the a** too (I was lucky to have a Samsung screen with pretty good uniformity after 1 exchange).

In the end, I think we must wait for the next "iPhone X" kind of radical change to justify spending 1400€ on a new high-end phone. Apple is way behind in AI, new Snapdragon chip seems to be better than A18 (although raw performance is not the issue), iOS is now as complex and conter intuitive as Android.

PS: I have a 15 inch M3 Macbook Air that I love, so don't take it for an anti-Apple rant

 

[I7guy]

Yes honestly i came from an 11 Pro Max (2019) and was fine for me but I broke it. I paid 1400€ for this phone and while it's a good phone, it doesn't do anything better than most older iPhones. An iPhone 13 (non-Pro) would have been enough.

Taken at face value the above could be interpreted as the iPhone 11 doesn’t do much better than an iPhone 4. I agree if the comparison is between an iPhone 11 and an xs max. But if you don’t use the features of the 11 PM than yeah, you bought something you didn’t need.

I am particularly disappointed by the camera. I think we juste reached a point where the size of the sensor makes the bottleneck. Photos are grainy and lack detail. The shift to 48MP even seems to have lowered the final result somehow, maybe because of the smaller pixels.

Can’t comment on the camera as I don’t have an 11PM but the camera on my 15pm is head and shoulders above the xs max.

In terms of raw performance, I even have some mild slow-downs (but it's just software-related, hardware on the phone is nice). Anyway being in France, i don't have access whatsoever to the new "IA capabilities" that Apple Intelligence is supposed to give.

The only thing i would dream of is a free ChatGPT4 subscription embedded in Siri which could serve as a personal assistant.

iOS 18 is bad and the battery performance is not better than my 11 Pro Max was when i got it. Panel lottery for the screen is a pain in the a** too (I was lucky to have a Samsung screen with pretty good uniformity after 1 exchange).

In the end, I think we must wait for the next "iPhone X" kind of radical change to justify spending 1400€ on a new high-end phone. Apple is way behind in AI, new Snapdragon chip seems to be better than A18 (although raw performance is not the issue), iOS is now as complex and conter intuitive as Android.

PS: I have a 15 inch M3 Macbook Air that I love, so don't take it for an anti-Apple rant

I don’t have any overarching issue on iOS 18.

 

[chars1ub0w]

I am particularly disappointed by the camera. I think we juste reached a point where the size of the sensor makes the bottleneck. Photos are grainy and lack detail. The shift to 48MP even seems to have lowered the final result somehow, maybe because of the smaller pixels.
...
The only thing i would dream of is a free ChatGPT4 subscription embedded in Siri which could serve as a personal assistant.

Cameras for flagship smartphones are all about the same level according to DXOMark with very few exceptions, e.g. maybe the newest Vivo (untested) would be #1. A larger sensor and bigger lenses certainly would be a huge improvement, but people want their phones slim and the camera bumps are already big enough.

With respect to AI, Apple is trying to preserve privacy by having the AI model run locally on your phone if possible (so nobody gets to see what you're asking) rather than doing it in the cloud. Cloud AI also costs a lot of money (electricity and big investments in hardware), so off-loading to the phone is a big money saver. Apple Silicon GPUs are certainly fast enough, but this requires lots of RAM to load the model. The bigger the model, the better the results. This means future iPhones should have a lot more RAM, e.g. 32GB, 64GB. Certainly, we know 64GB would be enough to comfortably run good performing LLMs.

 

[Anonymebaba]

Cameras for flagship smartphones are all about the same level according to DXOMark with very few exceptions, e.g. maybe the newest Vivo (untested) would be #1. A larger sensor and bigger lenses certainly would be a huge improvement, but people want their phones slim and the camera bumps are already big enough.
View attachment 2475864

With respect to AI, Apple is trying to preserve privacy by having the AI model run locally on your phone if possible (so nobody gets to see what you're asking) rather than doing it in the cloud. Cloud AI also costs a lot of money (electricity and big investments in hardware), so off-loading to the phone is a big money saver. Apple Silicon GPUs are certainly fast enough, but this requires lots of RAM to load the model. The bigger the model, the better the results. This means future iPhones should have a lot more RAM, e.g. 32GB, 64GB. Certainly, we know 64GB would be enough to comfortably run good performing LLMs.

On-device AI is good for photo-enhancement or "magic eraser" but it can't go much further than this. I am of course asking for cloud-based AI. Nobody would dare to say models such as ChaGPT can be run locally (let alone on a phone) it doesn't make sense so i don't see what you mean 🤷‍♂️. And requests going to servers doesn't bother me as long as it belongs to Apple (contrary to their iCloud storage which is actually Google servers in the back 😅)

 

[Anonymebaba]

Taken at face value the above could be interpreted as the iPhone 11 doesn’t do much better than an iPhone 4. I agree if the comparison is between an iPhone 11 and an xs max. But if you don’t use the features of the 11 PM than yeah, you bought something you didn’t need.

Can’t comment on the camera as I don’t have an 11PM but the camera on my 15pm is head and shoulders above the xs max.

I don’t have any overarching issue on iOS 18.

Well i mean watching videos in full screen for instance is marginally better but this "dynamic island" is somehow worse when watching content. An underscreen FaceID is something that could have changed a lot for instance. Speakers have not changed, if not worse (which is important for me) and battery life is just bad. The excitement to use the new phone was non-existant and i never had this "wow" effect from previous phones. Not in terms of design, nor photo, nor software (and the keyboard is lagging so much writing this 😭).

 

[chars1ub0w]

On-device AI is good for photo-enhancement or "magic eraser" but it can't go much further than this. I am of course asking for cloud-based AI. Nobody would dare to say models such as ChaGPT can be run locally (let alone on a phone) it doesn't make sense so i don't see what you mean 🤷‍♂️.

Nobody would dare? Sure you can run large scale models locally on a MacBook Pro laptop nowadays.
And they are as strong as ChatGPT 3.5/4 in AI benchmarks, see here.

For example, here it is running the new Llama 3.3 70B parameter model (equivalent to the earlier Llama 3.1 405B parameter model), Q4_K_M edition wholly using the GPU of a M1 Max (it uses 43GB). You can see me asking questions about yesterday's politics. It does very well. So Apple could allow this power on new generation iPhones with enough RAM. Note the GPU Metal score of Apple A18 Pro is higher than the M1 SoC (noted by Notebookcheck here)

 

[naturalguy]

Pixel is cool. I wouldn’t call pixel AI revolutionary. It’s an interesting demo like Apple version.

As of today Gemini is light years ahead of Siri

 

[I7guy]

Well i mean watching videos in full screen for instance is marginally better but this "dynamic island" is somehow worse when watching content. An underscreen FaceID is something that could have changed a lot for instance. Speakers have not changed, if not worse (which is important for me) and battery life is just bad. The excitement to use the new phone was non-existant and i never had this "wow" effect from previous phones. Not in terms of design, nor photo, nor software (and the keyboard is lagging so much writing this 😭).

I guess the dynamic island doesn’t bother me and the sound quality imo is noticeably improved. Battery life in the year and a month since I’ve owned the phone is consistent and good.

I do have a wow effect with new phones as does my spouse. YMMV.

 

[John Tarb]

I upgraded from the 13 Pro Max to the 16 Pro Max in late October, and as a tech enthusiast, I’m already bored with this brick. It doesn’t offer anything noticeably different from the 13 Pro Max, which I used for 2.5 years.

Apple’s “AI” doesn't exist it's just a marketing gimmick, and the camera upgrades are not noticeable, even though I take a lot of photos and videos. The new camera button? good idea but poorly designed, touch-sensitive aspect of it is unreliable and completely unergonomic. The display looks identical to the 13 Pro Max, and I don’t see any real benefit from the Dynamic Island over the old notch. Plus, the new Photos app is just terrible.hate it everythime.

I love my other Apple devices: MacBook Air (best laptop), Apple TV (amazing), AirPods Pro 2 (excellent), and Apple Watch Ultra (great). But I’m just not into the iPhone or iOS anymore.

I already have a nice, fast 8” Android tablet and have owned a few Samsung Note flagships over the years, so I’m not addicted to iOS, and I never use iMessage.
I’m seriously thinking about switching to the S25 Ultra for a change, even if it means giving up my Apple Watch Ultra (which I think is way better than any other smartwatch).


Anyone else disappointed with the 16 series, especially those who are into tech and upgrading from the 12 series or newer?

Losing the Apple Watch Ultra would hurt, but the Galaxy Watch lineup is improving, especially with Wear OS integrations. Ultimately, if the iPhone doesn’t excite you anymore, it might be time to switch.

 

[richard371]

No way would i switch ecosystems over a phone even if it is better.