Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max vs iPhone 15 Pro Max: What are the key differences

16 Pro Max vs 15 Pro Max

Apple iPhone 16 series is finally off the rumour mill, with some key changes and advancements. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is the flagship device from the series with a faster new chipset, a bigger display with thinner bezels, and a new Camera control button. Here we now compare it against last year’s flagship, the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The major difference between the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is in the display size. The iPhone 16 Pro Max now has a 6.9-inch screen, which is a slight bump over the iPhone 15 Pro Max's 6.7-inch display. Apple has also trimmed out the bezels of the latest iPhone 16 Pro Max and the border is less than 30%, which means you're getting more display real estate on the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

The minimum brightness on the iPhone16 Pro Max has been improved to just 1 nit, making the display better suited for low-light environments, without much eye strain. However, the peak brightness on both smartphones is capped at up to 2000 nits. Both smartphones support a 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max features Apple’s latest 3nm chip, the A18 Pro SoC. It promises a few key upgrades over the Apple A17 Pro SoC inside the iPhone 15 Pro Max. This new chipset features dual performance and better quad-efficiency cores. It also now has a hexacore GPU design and comes with a new neural engine unit for enhanced on-device Apple Intelligence processing.

Both smartphones also support Apple Intelligence and now support iOS 18, with a robust AI framework, and in the future will be upgraded even more. These devices come with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, allowing for more realistic lighting and reflections in games and other graphics-intensive applications.

Both smartphones come with a 48MP wide camera, a 12MP telephoto with 5X optical zoom, and a 12MP selfie camera. However, the biggest change in optics in the newer iPhone 16 Pro Max is the inclusion of a 48MP ultrawide lens, up from the iPhone 15 Pro Max's 12MP ultrawide lens. The ‌iPhone 16 Pro‌ Max also now can record 4K ProResolution videos at 120 fps (with external storage), which offers a significant leap over the ‌iPhone 15 Pro‌'s 4K at 60 fps. It also now supports slow motion in the same resolution.

Apple has also now included a new Camera Control button in the iPhone 16 Pro Max that supports various custom functions such as taking a quick photo, trackpad-like control, adjusting focus, exposure, zoom effects, and more.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max features dramatically faster MagSafe wireless charging, now capped at a maximum power output of 25W. It is a bump over the 15W that the MagSafe wireless charging of the iPhone 15 Pro Max supports. The new phone also supports the new Qi2 standard.

However, wired charging speeds are still the same on both devices. Apple also claims that the iPhone 16 Pro Max achieves 33 hours of battery life in video playback, 29 hours in streamed video playback, and 105 hours in audio playback, which is about four hours more endurance than the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max is priced at Rs 1,44,900, for the base model with 256GB storage, while the iPhone 15 Pro Max was launched with a starting price of Rs 1,59,900, and now has seen various price cuts in the last few months. At the time of writing, it has a starting price of Rs 1,40,999.