Review: iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max

Smartphones, for many of us, are emotional objects. We pick them up dozens of times per day. We use them both to deeply connect and mindlessly scroll. We feel frantic when we think we’ve misplaced them. Apple’s iPhones, in particular, trigger a personal connection to an inanimate object. They’re well-designed, satisfying, and covetable.

This year's new iPhones? They're last year's phone design with some new internals. One of those new features is an impressive new chip, one of the first of its kind in a smartphone. This chip powers faster FaceID unlocks, better photos, and advanced AI. For the $1,000 you’ll spend on this phone, you’re earning back seconds of your time, getting photos you can adjust after you shoot them, and experiencing sophisticated computer vision in mobile apps.

But aside from one of the phones having a giant display, the iPhone XS and the larger iPhone XS Max don’t feel much different from last year’s iPhone X. This year’s phones don’t spark strong feelings—except maybe chagrin that they cost so much.

Some people will upgrade because they’re due for an upgrade. Others will buy one of these because they want to have the newest thing. And that’s fine. They’re great phones. Just don’t expect to feel the kind of feelings, as you’re sliding this phone out of your pocket or purse, that you’d get with a radically redesigned piece of hardware. As I used these new phones, I found myself struggling to define, exactly, what felt new about them. It’s there; you just have to dig deep.

If you’ve seen an iPhone X, then you already know what the iPhone XS looks like. And really, you already know what the iPhone XS Max looks like: it's a jumbo iPhone X. Aside from the size and battery difference, the XS and the XS Max are exactly alike. I had originally planned to write two reviews, one of each phone, but then decided there was no need for that. Even their cameras are the same.

The phones are made of stainless steel, and coated in what Apple says is the strongest glass ever used in its phones. Just like last year’s phone, the XS has a 5.8-inch diagonal display with a 19.5 by 9 aspect ratio, which means it packs a lot of screen into a relatively small body. The iPhone XS Max is roughly the same size as last year’s iPhone 8 Plus, but has a much larger display—6.5 inches on the diagonal, compared to the 8 Plus’s 5.5 inches.

Overall, the OLED displays on these phones are beautiful, though largely unchanged from last year’s X. Apple claims the displays on the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max will deliver 60 percent greater dynamic range on HDR content, and that the screens are more touch sensitive. Personally, I haven’t noticed much of a difference there. Another difference from last year’s iPhone X: the glass on the new phones is supposed to be more durable. However, I’m already seeing a hairline scratch on the face of the iPhone XS, something that the iPhone X was prone to, as well.

The iPhone XS and XS Max still have a Lightning port—same as the old phones. But the speakers have been tweaked to give wider stereo sound. They sound great, and louder than previous iPhones.

If you’ve already decided that you’re getting one of these new phones, but don’t know which one to pick, it really comes down to battery life and bigness. The iPhone XS Max has a larger battery than the iPhone XS, given its larger physical size. It’s supposed to last an hour and a half longer than an ol’ iPhone X. The iPhone XS, meanwhile, only lasts a half hour longer. I found the difference between the iPhone X and XS’s battery life to be negligible; but the iPhone XS Max’s battery never gave me the kind of anxiety I get at the end of the day with a smaller phone.

For some, the iPhone XS Max’s big display—the biggest ever on an iPhone—will be worth the occasional fumbles and the times you just need two hands just to hold the thing. Personally, I still think the size of the iPhone XS is the way to go. And while I don’t really notice the “notch” at the top of the iPhone XS (the cut-out that houses the front-facing camera and 3D sensors), I find this same cut-out jarring when I’m using split-screen mode on the iPhone XS Max.

Before I go on, we should talk about cost. Like last year’s iPhone X, the iPhone XS starts at $999 for a 64-gigabyte model. The price jumps up to $1,349 for a version with 512GB of internal storage. The iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099, and goes up to $1,449 for the 512GB configuration.

These are the first iPhones to have 512 gigabytes of internal storage, something Samsung already offers in its flagship phones. Early benchmark tests also suggest that both phones have 4GB of RAM, one gigabyte more than last year’s iPhone X. (Apple hasn’t confirmed this.) We’ve come a long way from the days of 8GB of storage and 1GB of RAM.

A lot of people will make the argument that these powerful mini-computers are worth the inflated cost, especially since it's something you use all day every day. I think those arguments are valid. But a thousand dollars for a phone is also a huge expense for the majority of the population. You could hardly be blamed for choosing more affordable options like an older iPhone or a mid-range Android handset, even with the knowledge that you're not getting the best-of-the-best internals.

And if you weren’t already annoyed by the price, this might send you over the edge: Neither the iPhone XS nor the XS Max ship with a lighting-to-3.5mm adapter in the box. You might recall that iPhones don’t have headphone jacks anymore. So, if you still used wired headphones, you’ll have to buy your own dongle for them. And the phones still ship with USB-A cables, even though modern MacBooks use USB-C. These are small things, but it’s hard to imagine the Apple of even just five years ago forcing such tradeoffs onto its customers.

By far the most important update in the iPhone XS and XS Max is Apple’s new mobile chip. Last year’s A11 Bionic chip was a 10-nanometer chip with a six-core CPU, a three-core GPU, and a neural engine designed for machine learning tasks that could perform up to 600 billion operations per second. This year’s A12 Bionic is a 7-nanometer chip with a six-core CPU, a four-core GPU, and an even faster neural engine. It not only has more cores, but it can process up to 5 trillion operations per second.

In short, the new chip is the thing that’s supposed to make your phone feel faster, your photos look better, and your AR and AI apps more useful.

The chip giant Qualcomm, which makes the Snapdragon chips that power high-end Android phones, plans to ship a 7-nanometer processor soon. But with the launch of the new iPhones, Apple has just beat it to the punch.

Previously, the neural engine could only be accessed by Apple, which used it to power apps like Animoji and FaceID. Now third-party app developers can tap into it. We saw glimpses of this at last week’s Apple event, when the multiplayer game Galaga AR was demoed on stage alongside HomeCourt, a seriously cool basketball analysis app. HomeCourt can already recognize the lines of a basketball court and, using computer vision, track the shots you take and the ones you make. But right now it doesn’t do that in real-time. In the future, using the new A12 Bionic chip and Apple’s machine learning framework, it’s supposed to be able to do that.

The app wasn't available to beta test during my review period, but we can expect more apps like it to roll out very soon. In the meantime, though, the processing power of the new A12 manifests itself in other ways. Unlocking the phone with FaceID seems slightly faster. App switching feels faster. And then there are the photos.

Let’s say you’re not into real-time basketball analysis or cool augmented reality apps or mobile games. You probably still care a lot about your smartphone’s camera. And this new processor, along with a larger camera sensor, mean both the iPhone XS and XS Max have a better camera than the one in last year’s high-end phone.

At a glance, the cameras in the iPhone XS and XS Max cameras appear to be the same as the ones in the iPhone X. Two 12-megapixel rear cameras. One 7-megapixel front-facing “TrueDepth” camera. 4K video at 60 frames per second. 1080p slow motion video at 240 fps. All the same.

Apple says what’s new is that this larger camera sensor equates to larger pixels. The camera is supposed to do a better job of adjusting its exposure to capture more information in each image. Last year’s iPhones already automatically captured high dynamic range images. This year it does it again, but better, grabbing more highlight data, and on more of your photos.

I captured a series of images on the new iPhones, last year’s iPhone X, last year’s iPhone 8 Plus, Google’s Pixel 2 XL, and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 9, and compared them all. (iPhone 8 Plus photos weren’t included in all of galleries here, due to a lack of consistency in which phones I used to shoot certain scenes.) Each smartphone camera has its own distinct personality: Samsung’s photos tend to be warm, saturated, and softened, while Google’s Pixel tends to capture crisp images, with cool, almost muted colors.

The photos I captured on the new iPhone XS and XS Max are undoubtedly better than the ones I took on the iPhone 8 Plus, and slightly improved from the iPhone X photos. The new phones performed well in low light, capturing even background imagery in more detail. In some ways the photos from the new iPhone remind me of Samsung’s photos now. Faces look smoother in both selfies and portraits, and the colors look richer in pictures of food, skylines, and natural landscapes.

The new iPhones also let you adjust the depth of a Portrait photo after the photo has been captured. This isn’t a new idea—Samsung has offered this in its flagship phones since it launched the Galaxy Note 8 last year. In Samsung cameras, it works by capturing one wide-angle and one telephoto image from the dual-lens camera and merging them together, using one image for the focal point and one for the blur effect. Sometimes the background blur looks too dramatic, and imprecise. Other times it works fine.

Apple’s method sounds similar, but works differently. The iPhone uses images from the two cameras—the wide-angle lens and the telephoto lens—to create a depth map. Then, the bokeh effect is simulated digitally. As you flick the slider through the aperture stops, background objects are blurred proportionally to how close they are to the main subject.

Overall, Portrait photos taken on the new iPhones looked a lot better than older iPhone Portrait photos—with or without the depth effect. In nighttime photos I took of my colleague Pia, the new iPhone depth-adjusted photos were better able to capture the car lights and city signs flashing behind her, and generally looked better than Samsung’s blurred photos. Still, it’s not comparable to the bokeh effect you’d get on a DSLR with a fast lens.

There are obvious differences between last year’s iPhones and this year’s iPhones, like the new processor and the giant display on the Max. But there are subtle differences too. It’s that subtlety that makes it hard to conjure up strong feelings around the new phones. It is an “S” year for iPhones, after all.

But in this case, it’s impressive incrementalism: There’s a noticeably faster chip, and a camera that captures a greater level of detail that you can actually see. Apple has nudged innovation in smartphones forward again, even if some of the results (like new apps that will use the new tech) have yet to be experienced.

I still think you shouldn’t feel like you have to upgrade if you invested in last year’s phones—or even if you have a slightly older phone, like an iPhone 7. Is there a palpable difference between these models and your one- or two-year old phone? Yes, absolutely. But that doesn’t mean your older phone is bad. That’s the thing about high-end smartphones, these mini-computers in our pockets: even last year’s models are still pretty darn amazing.

Update, September 19, 5 PM EDT: The video in this review misstated the water rating for the iPhone XS and XS Max. While the IP68 standard states that devices must be waterproof to more than 1 meter, Apple's new phones are waterproof up to 2 meters for up to 30 minutes.