Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max review

Emergency improvements

All new iPhone 14 models support this new feature called Emergency SOS via satellite. It required designing all-new custom hardware and bespoke software to make sending out a message to a satellite possible without bulky antennas. This service is text-only and will be used primarily for emergencies, but it does support two-way communication, so you will be notified when rescue is on the way. The Find My app will also be able to share your location with friends so that they can keep an eye on you.

The new satellite messaging service • An emergency questionnaire • Find My reports location over satellite

You can compose custom messages to explain your situation, but when speed is life-saving several specially-prepared questions will let you send out a detailed SOS in just a few taps. In locations with a clear view of the sky, a message can be transmitted in about 15 seconds, but if there are trees overhead, it may take a couple of minutes. The satellite service will launch in November for users in the US and Canada, and iPhone 14 buyers get a free 2-year subscription.

Crash Detection is also available on all iPhone 14 models, thanks to a new accelerometer that can detect up to 256G. If such an emergency occurs, the phone will automatically contact emergency services. This is a setting within the Emergency SOS menu called Call After Serious Crash. You can either turn it on or off; there are no other settings.

Crash Detection

Dynamic Island and Always On Display

The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max feature two exclusive software tricks as part of iOS 16 - Always-on Display and Dynamic Island.

Let's start with the Always-on Display. It has no options - it's either on or off. It dims your lockscreen to a certain level but keeps it always on as is - with the wallpaper, widgets, and everything. Even if it is not mentioned, the AOD does go off when the phone is in the pocket, lying on its face, in a backpack, and even when you are not around the phone after a certain time has passed.

Settings • AOD

Note that the AOD has different brightness according to the ambient light - it can be incredibly dim in dark environments, but it is brighter when you have the phone in broad daylight. And this should affect the battery life in different ways.

The Island is what Apple calls the new i-shaped cutout, and the Dynamic Island is the animations that the maker has developed to make it cool and less of an eyesore.

For all intents and purposes, the Dynamic Island is a pill-shaped notch as Apple has blackened the middle part for aesthetic purposes. There you will see the mic and camera indicators and nothing else.

The animations around the island always use black background.

There are three Island modes. Standard form - inactive island or just accommodating camera/mic indicators.

Indicators

The active form is a longer pill-shaped notch with info on both left and right side for certain events, alerts, notifications. This long pill can also split into an i-shaped one if you launch another compatible app that can be minimized here, like the Timer.

Dynamic Island

There is also a third form that expands into a pop-up balloon - this can be invoked by a tap and hold on the small animation. A tap will open the respective app instead, though. We think these gestures should have been inversed, or at least configurable, but as usual - Apple knows best.

Dynamic Island expanded

So, the Dynamic Island incorporates different things - starting with the Face ID animation, charging animation, music info (Music, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, Soundcloud), call info (Phone, WhatsApp, Skype, Instagram, Google), timers, etc. If you activate a second app that needs to use the Dynamic Island, you get a sweet animation that shortens the island and adds a small icon on the left side.

The supported system alerts include calls, AirPods and Watch connections, Battery and Charging, Focus changes, AirDrop, Face ID, AirPlay, NFC events, SIM alerts, Silencer on/off.

Dynamic Island alerts

The Dynamic Island supports few features at launch, but Apple will open it with the upcoming Live Activities feature. This will allow displaying various real-time notifications like sports scores, voting, etc.

At its premiere, the Dynamic Island is not the disco dance Apple suggested it to be at the event. We do appreciate that it accommodates all those legacy bubbles like Phone, Navigation, Music, Alarms - stuff that usually went within the left horn. And we have to give it to Apple - it does know how to make something as an eyesore as this cutout a feature, something that will spread across various Android launchers by the end of this year.

The Dynamic Island is in the early stages right now and needs more work from both Apple and the developer community. But we are sure it will get there because Apple now wants everyone to look at the notch instead of ignoring it.

There are two downsides as we see right now - bright environments reveal the cameras and sensors, as well as the display part in between, and thus break the Island's illusion. And second - it sits a bit lower than the previous notch, which means it does eat even more screen space than the old notch, in a certain way.

Performance and benchmarks

The new Apple A16 Bionic chip is at the heart of the new iPhone 14 Pro devices. It is manufactured by TSMC 4nm process node and contains 16 billion transistors, up from 15 billion within the A15 chip.

It comes with a familiar six-core CPU configuration - there are two performance Everest cores clocked at 3.46GHz and four Sawtooth efficiency cores working at 2.02GHz. The CPU overall is billed to be 40% faster than the competition, while its two high-performing cores require 20% less power than the ones in the A15.

The improved 5-core Apple GPU offers 50% higher memory bandwidth.

The A16 uses includes a 16-core Neural Engine that is capable of 17 trillion operations per second.

The A16 uses Qualcomm's X65 5G modem for cellular connections.

The ISP has seen some improvement, too, with even more advanced computation photography capabilities and up to 4 million operations per each high-res photo taken.

Finally, there is a brand-new Display Engine, a dedicated feature that made possible the Always on Display by tuning the display properties to reduce battery consumption (1Hz refresh rate, brightness, color settings). It also allowed for higher peak brightness up to 2,000 nits. The antialiasing work around the Dynamic Island is also a major task for the Display Engine.

Obviously, any of the tasks mentioned above could have been done by traditional hardware. But having the Engine working independently from the rest, GPU included, allowed for much better resource allocation and saves a lot of battery juice.

The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max still use 6GB of RAM, but it has been upgraded to LPDDR5 and now offers 50% higher bandwidth than in A15.

There are, indeed, improvements in the CPU performance - to the tune of 8% in the single-core GeekBench run and 14% in the multi-core test. It's not a groundbreaking development, but it's about what you can expect for YoY advancements.

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
  1890
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro
  1861
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  1741
• Apple iPhone 14
  1738
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4
  1337
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  1329
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  1324
• OnePlus 10T (High performance mode)
  1321
• Motorola Edge 30 Ultra
  1276
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  1180
• Sony Xperia 1 IV
  1160

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
  5423
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro
  5346
• Apple iPhone 14
  4761
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  4706
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  4300
• Motorola Edge 30 Ultra
  4265
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4
  3981
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  3980
• OnePlus 10T (High performance mode)
  3907
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  3657
• Sony Xperia 1 IV
  3403

The 50% wider memory bandwidth Apple quoted for the A16 'materializes' in Antutu, where the new phone scored in the low 160Ks vs. 103K on our iPhone 13 Pro we had for comparison.

Antutu 9: iPhone 14 Pro Max • iPhone 13 Pro

The overall Antutu score isn't as dramatically different, the 12% improvement falling within the realm of predictable yearly improvements.

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 14 Pro
  968412
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
  955884
• Apple iPhone 14
  817125
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  801691

Graphics benchmarks illuminate the effect that the minor difference in display resolution can have on fps count - the higher-res Pro Max can't quite match the Pro's scores in onscreen tests in GFXBench. Then again, the larger phone does have a fraction more raw power as evidenced by the usually better results in offscreen runs.

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  63
• Motorola Edge 30 Ultra
  62
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro
  60
• OnePlus 10T (High performance mode)
  60
• Apple iPhone 14
  55
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  55
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
  54
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4
  42
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  39
• Sony Xperia 1 IV
  31
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  29

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  79
• Sony Xperia 1 IV
  74
• Motorola Edge 30 Ultra
  73
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro
  60
• Apple iPhone 14
  60
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  60
• OnePlus 10T (High performance mode)
  60
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4
  59
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
  54
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  51
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  37

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
  52
• OnePlus 10T (High performance mode)
  51
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  51
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  51
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  50
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4
  50
• Motorola Edge 30 Ultra
  43
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro
  42
• Apple iPhone 14
  38
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  35
• Sony Xperia 1 IV
  26

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  121
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
  118
• Apple iPhone 14 Pro
  112
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  104
• OnePlus 10T (High performance mode)
  103
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4
  102
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  102
• Motorola Edge 30 Ultra
  93
• Apple iPhone 14
  91
• Sony Xperia 1 IV
  79
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  76

When it comes to stability during sustained load, the 14 Pro Max returned rather impressive results, superior to the ones we got on the smaller size. In a 30-minute APSI Bench continuous CPU test, the 14 Pro Max throttled just a little to 92% (compared to the still respectable 84% on the Pro), while in the 3DMark Wild Life stress test the number was 83% (75% on the 14 Pro).

ANSI Bench CPU test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test

To sum it all up, the iPhone 14 Pro Max has an immensely powerful chipset that offers unrivaled smartphone performance and is solid under continuous load.