iPhone 14 Pro Max – Long Term Review – Worth The Upgrade?
hi everyone Aaron here for zollotech and lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the iPhone 14 pro and 14 pro Max and to whether or not it’s worth it whether that be from friends or people online asking me questions and so it’s been out a couple months and so I thought I’d sort of try and answer the questions people have about it starting with the dynamic Island so this isn’t a follow-up review it’s more of a is it worth it for you to upgrade based on what you have and based on the new
features and so the first thing is the dynamic Island like I said and people say what do you think of it is it exciting is it something to be excited for if I upgrade and typically I say that it’s nice but after a few days of use it just kind of Fades away in the background now the overall look of it is either polarizing to you you really don’t like it or it’s something that you actually find that you do like better than the notch before but personally to me it sort of just fades in
the background and becomes a nice place for notifications I don’t really find that I interact with it much but it’s not nice to maybe go into music
and it’s not something you pay attention to constantly or interact with constantly it’s more that it’s just nice and convenient that it’s there so I wouldn’t buy it for the dynamic Island but I found that it’s just a really nice thing to have there it’s very apple-like where it’s just sort of nice animations to give you subtle notifications and information about what’s going on on your phone now the next thing people ask me what about the display is it something to be really excited about or is it great and I find that that’s probably one
of the best things about this phone the display is incredibly bright and seeing it outside with this sort of daylight it’s one of the best things about it because it goes up to 2000 nits of brightness it just makes it much easier to see if you’re in a bright environment so if you’re in an area where it’s regularly sunny and you’re outside a lot it’s going to make a difference compared to last year though if that doesn’t matter you’re not outside you’re usually using it indoors at work or something else you really won’t notice that
difference everything else is the same there with promotion the smoothness and everything else is the same as what we had last time but the extra brightness definitely helps also with HDR footage if there’s some brighter HDR footage out there it looks great on this display and the always-on display is something that you’re either going to love and you’ve wanted forever or something that you won’t care about the one thing that’s really nice with the addition of iOS 16.2 Apple has added the ability to just turn off the wallpaper in the background altogether so it just
gives you the time the clock your widgets things like that and that’s about it everything else just sort of Fades away now it is nice to have an always on display with wallpaper I actually like that and I haven’t really noticed a battery difference having that on or off but I’ve been testing that out just to see what it’s like now as far as the battery life of this phone that’s something that some people say is great others don’t it depends what phone you’re actually coming from so if you’re coming from an 11 Pro Max
that’s where we’ve got really good battery life with iPhone you’re going to see about the same sort of battery life now technically we have better battery life depending on what you’re doing from the 13 Pro Max to the 14 pro Max however the battery is technically smaller but with the new chipset being more efficient sort of makes up for that so if you’re just watching video that you’ve downloaded maybe you’re on a plane and you’ve downloaded a bunch of video you’ll get a little bit extra battery life but in everyday tasks with the always on
display on and with just doing what you normally do on your phone I find I actually get less battery life it will easily get me through the day I get through the day with about 50 of my battery life either way so it will last me without a problem and it charges at the same rate as before so there’s not really a difference between the 13 Pro Max and 14 pro Max that way but I would say you’ll probably get a little bit less less battery life if you’ve got the always-on display turned on if
not it’ll be about the same as the 13 Pro Max depending on what you’re doing the other big upgrade this year is with the cameras the camera jumps up to 48 megapixels on the main sensor with the main wide camera and there’s definitely more detail there so if you’re shooting outside just like this the camera looks great you’ll see the photos behind me and what they look like there’s incredible detail there especially when you zoom way in if you want to capture that with Pro Raw photos you can fully edit them and more however there’s
been some odd sort of things happening with the processing where it sort of darkens things for some people especially indoors so I don’t know that it’s necessarily a big jump up if you’re going from a 13 Pro Max and you’re not caring about Pro Raw photos or 48 megapixel photos if you’re just using the standard mode it will use 12 megapixel photos anyway or sort of compress them down to that size so if you’re upgrading for the camera just for that unless you’re going to edit I wouldn’t say it makes much of a difference also
when it comes to video that’s actually about the same except when you’re using it for HDR I actually find the HDR coloring to be a little bit worse for some reason I’ve tried to edit it some in post and on some of my videos I’ve recorded it with it just doesn’t look great to me and I had to really modify it a lot to get the look I had last year with just straight out of the camera I don’t know if this is something they’re going to upgrade later with the phone with updates but it’s
just something I’ve noticed however the best part of this is the forward-facing camera in fact I’m recording from it right now and if I turn on this camera and just snap a photo here you’ll see that I’m recording with the front-facing camera it’s doing a great job I don’t have an external microphone and you’ve probably seen others record with it also I think that’s a big big upgrade this year that’s really underrated they added autofocus improved the sensor and it just looks much better I can put it on a tripod like I just showed you
and hit record and not worry about it so unless there’s a ton of ambient noise where there’s a little bit of construction going on behind to me there’s some birds overhead occasional planes other than that it really sort of eliminates that noise and of course you can fix that later on also but that’s probably the best part of the iPhone 14 pro or any of the iPhone 14 lineup is that forward-facing camera it’s much much better than before thanks to autofocus so like I said it’s just something that I’ve been using I actually used it
in other videos just put it in front of me and hit record instead of using a big Sony camera this seems to work just fine and most people actually think the footage looks better when you’re watching it on something like YouTube now this year we get a spec bump to the a16 bionic just like every year they bump that up one number and it still has six gigabytes of RAM for the average user you’re not going to notice any difference whatsoever regular tasks feel the same opening the camera you might see a small difference when
maybe you’re editing a 48 megapixel raw photo in the time it takes to process that or a night photo but with even exporting 4K video I’ve shown in different comparisons there was about a second difference sometimes even half a second difference so it just depends on what you’re doing with the phone it seems to handle everything with ease there is one exception though and that’s with overall smoothness Apple this year added upgraded silicon that actually handles the dynamic Island and different animations and it really sort of Smooths things out when you’re scrolling and doing things
where you’re swiping home so unless it’s a software issue where there’s some odd bugs typically it’s smooth and fast so for most people I don’t think you’ll notice much of a difference using the a16 bionic and I tell most people it’s not really worth upgrading just for that unless you’re coming from an older phone then you’ll notice a difference in fact my wife when she upgraded this year from the 12 Pro to the 14 pro she didn’t notice a speed difference at all she noticed a difference with the display in the cameras last time she
upgraded from the iPhone 10 to the 12 Pro and immediately noticed how much faster it was so this year it seems to be less and less of a speed change from year over year and it’s still decent but it’s not really a reason to just run out and pick one up because your iPhone 13 Pro Max feels slow I don’t think you’ll see much of a difference there and so that’s typically what I tell people asking if they should upgrade to the 14 pro or 14 pro Max normally if the camera matters to you most
of all the forward-facing camera or the rear camera with 48 megapixel photos then it’s worth the upgrade if you’re in outdoor environments that are bright all the time you’ll notice the difference there also anything else you probably won’t see much of a change other than the physical change of the dynamic Island everything else feels very very similar as the OS hasn’t changed a whole lot either and you have basically the same experience on the iPhone 13 Pro Max with the exception of a couple different small features here and there with the camera otherwise it feels
very very similar so I don’t know if it’s worth it for everyone for a few people it’s going to be worth it but if you care about those 48 megapixel Raw photos and you use your phone for photography the most well then it’ll make a difference but again there’s some odd processing from time to time that you may need to adjust those photos a little more than you’re used to other than that it’s great for video like I’m recording here as I showed you earlier and I definitely recommend it if you’re on an older phone
or you can get a great deal as quite a few of my friends have gotten good deals from their carriers recently where they’re getting up to a thousand dollars trade in from their previous phones so they’re getting this for 100 or 200 then it’s definitely worth the upgrade so be sure to check the Local Deals in your area but again every few years Apple fully redesigns this so you may want to wait but let me know what you’re doing in the comments below I’d love to hear from you there and of course I’ll link this
wallpaper in the description like I normally do if you haven’t subscribed already though please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like as always thanks for watching I’ll see you next time
