iPhone 16 Pro Max vs Galaxy S24 Ultra: Battle of the Bigs

Apple has a new iPhone 16 Pro Max and it brings out the big guns, and quite literally the first thing about it is a larger, 6.9-inch screen.

Apple also has a new A18 Pro chip inside, better thermals for gaming (20% improved sustained performance, Apple says), the best battery life ever on an iPhone, a new ultra-wide camera, 4K120 video, a brand new Camera Control button, faster MagSafe and a lot more.

There is plenty to be excited about, so how does the 16 Pro Max stack up against the other biggest competitor, the Galaxy S24 Ultra? That's a Godzilla - King Kong matchup that seems to happen every year, yet we are excited and at the edge of our seats for this sequel!

Get the iPhone 16 Pro at Amazon with Boost Mobile

The latest AI-enhanced iPhone 16 Pro is available for purchase at Amazon with Boost Mobile. The smartphone arrives for less than $1, provided that you pick a wireless service plan by Boost Mobile ($65/mo) and activate your device.

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Get iPhone 16 Pro Max at Amazon with Boost Mobile

Go Pro Max this fall with style and choose the supreme iPhone 16 Pro Max. The latest ultra-premium iOS smartphone is available at Amazon with Boost Mobile. The device sells for under $1 with Boost Mobile, plan and activation required ($70.55/mo). The unit is temporarily out of stock.

$1200 off (100%)

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Galaxy S24 Ultra with 512GB is now $240 off on Amazon

The S24 Ultra is at discounted prices on Amazon. You can now save $240 on the model with 512GB of storage. Not all colors arrive at the same discount.

$240 off (17%)

Buy at Amazon

Galaxy S24 Ultra: up to $870 off with a trade-in

You can purchase a fully unlocked Galaxy S24 Ultra via the official Samsung store. The almighty AI genius arrives for up to $750 off with an eligible phone trade-in. Free storage upgrade also available on Online Exclusive colors.

$870 off (61%) Trade-in

$549 ⁹⁹

$1419 ⁹⁹

Buy at Samsung

As usual, the iPhone does not change much about its looks — we have the same rectangular shape with soft corners, flat sides with a bevel, and yes — a Dynamic Island pill-shaped cutout in the display, exactly where the selfie camera and Face ID sensors sit. There is also an even thinner bezel and the screen grows to 6.9 inches in diagonal, ever so slightly larger than the Galaxy S24 Ultra's 6.8 inch panel.

But it's not just bezel magic — the dimensions of the iPhone 16 Pro Max also change slightly, to 163mm x 77.6mm, whereas the Galaxy S24 Ultra is 162.3 x 79. So yes, the Galaxy is wider, which helps with S Pen writing.

Apple is now all in on physical buttons too. First, the Action Button makes a return. Introduced with the iPhone 15 Pro models, it replaces the Mute toggle and can be programmed to various functions.

But you have one brand new button too — the Camera Control. It is a physical key with a capacitivy surface. As the name suggests, it works with Apple's camera app, but believe it or not, it is also open for use by 3rd party camera apps. In many ways, this is like the shutter key on a traditional camera, but Apple adds a special touch with that capacitive surface, so you can swipe on it to zoom in and out, or control other camera features. Very cool.

As for colors, Apple sticks with its more restrained hues for the Pro models. You have the following colors this year:

 

Samsung being Samsung is copying those colors, so the hues are muted on the Galaxy as well (you do get a few brighter colors if you purchase over at the Samsung.com website).

Samsung might not use extra hardware buttons beyond the power and volume ones, but it has an S Pen, nested into the bottom of the phone. Some people love that, others rarely use it, but it remains a unique feature among high-end smartphones.

Both devices have a USB-C ports on the bottom, supporting USB 3 speeds.

Also read: iPhone 16 colors

How you unlock these two is a very different experience. The Galayx S24 Ultra uses an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner under the screen — it's excellent, but still requires you interact with the screen of the device. Apple's iPhones have been using Face ID for years now, and it is not changing in the 16 Pro Max.

So, the iPhone 16 Pro Max comes with the largest screen ever on an iPhone at 6.9 inches. As with the 15 Pro series — you have that Always-On feature, which drops the refresh rate to 1 Hz and keeps your wallpaper or custom picture still over the entirety of the screen.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra uses Samsung's homemade AMOLED panel, also with a variable refresh rate that can drop down to 1Hz. It also has Always On, though a bit more conservative as the Galaxy cannot do the "all screen wallpaper" while the phone is asleep.

The big difference between these two, however, is reflectivity. The Galaxy comes with a special anti-reflective coating that obliterates most reflections and this helps immensely to see the screen easily outdoors. The iPhone does not have that feature, which is a bummer.

Digging deeper, reports say that the iPhone 16 Pro models use M14 OLED panels (the newest generation of OLED), which are more efficient and have greater longevity for individual pixels. Samsung's S24 Ultra supposedly uses M13 OLEDs — these specs are a bit deeper and not really talked about officially, so do take this with a grain of salt.

As for colors, both of these look fantastic.

New this year for the iPhone is it can drop to 1 nit minimum brightness, so it's easier on the eyes at night, but that is catching up with Samsung rather than innovating.

The iPhone's front is protected by a new generation of Ceramic Shield front glass — it's proven itself to be quite shatter-resistant. Samsung's flagship has an exclusive Corning Gorilla Armor, which is an excellent glass with an exceptional anti-glare coating — not only does it protect the screen quite well, it also improves the viewing experience immensely.

Under the hood of the iPhone 16 Pro Max, you get an Apple A18 Pro chipset. Built on the second-gen 3nm process by TSMC, it is cutting edge and at the time of the launch, it's the first phone to use that process.

The previous A17 Pro chip that Apple used was powerful, but it needed to throttle just after a couple of minutes of hard work. And the A18 Pro seems to address that with a new heat dissipation solution and better efficiency.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside the Galaxy S24 Ultra is also a stellar performer, capable of standing toe-to-toe versus Apple's silicon. Especially considering that it takes a bit more stressing to make it throttle.

The race these days is for the best AI performance, so we will be curious to compare these two chips in AI tasks, so stay tuned for that over the next couple of weeks.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max also upgrades to Wi-Fi 7, supposedly to facilitate 4X data speeds over the previously-used Wi-Fi 6E. The Galaxy S24 Ultra already does support Wi-Fi 7.

When it comes to software, we have two well-matured operating systems here — Apple's iOS versus Samsung's One UI.

Well, these days, the battle is not about power user features, it's mostly about AI. Galaxy AI is already here, and offers features like article and voice recording summaries, live translations, and generative image editing, which is pretty hit-and-miss. Apple, on the other hand, offers help with rewriting and rephrasing messages, erasing objects with features like Clean Up in the Photos app, an integration with ChatGPT and an all-new non-dumb Siri. Hooray!

Last year, the iPhone 15 Pro Max came with a new, 5X zoom lens over a 12 MP sensor, and it already had the 48 MP main camera sensor from the iPhone 14 Pro. This year, with the 16 Pro Max, Apple is upgrading the ultra-wide camera to a 48MP sensor.

Additionally, Apple has a new lens coating to deal with the lens flare that has become kind of a meme over the past 4 years — especially night shots are often dotted with small flares of light, captured and bouncing between the phone's multi-layer lenses. We are yet to test that in more detail.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra, on the other hand, has a 200MP main camera — the ISOCELL HP2SX sensor, which has 0.7μm pixels, but merges them in clusters of 16 when taking photos by default.

It performs admirably in every comparison and held the top spot in our camera benchmark for a while on launch — now dethroned by the Xiaomi 14 Ultra with its massive camera. Further, the S24 Ultra has a 50MP 5X zoom camera, 10MP 3X zoom camera, and 12MP ultra-wide camera. Yeah, you read that right — Samsung has two zoom cameras, one dedicated to portraits, the other working hard for that Space Zoom feature (up to 100x).

Also read: iPhone 16 camera: All the upgrades

And we should once again mention the useful new Camera Control on the iPhone which makes taking photos and videos just a bit easier.

Of course, iPhones do have a slight advantage with the Photographic Styles — you can fine-tune how your iPhone camera processes photos. With the new iPhone 16 Pro series, there are more options and you can even go deeper with individual color saturations.

For video quality, the big ticket item on the 16 Pro Max is 4K120 slow motion. This is high quality, detailed footage that we have so far only seen on one phone, the camera-centric Sony Xperia 1 lineup. And it's a feature that pros will love. The Galaxy does not support that.

Another great addition is four studio quality mics on the 16 Pro Max, which should help you get crisper vocals and overall audio in your footage. And a new Audio Mix edit will let you choose between a few ways of mastering your clip, which is wild.

iPhones sound great — especially the ones that have more room for the sound to bounce in. Those being the Plus and Pro Max models. Apple is teasing clearer highs and deeper bass, so we are excited to see what's new here. 

Samsung has also upped its game in audio over the last few years, especially since it bought audio expert JBL. The Galaxy S24 Ultra has a bit more of a mid hump and less of a deep bass than the current crop of iPhones. It's not a bad sound, though different.

As for haptics — the iPhone Taptic engine has been incredible since inception. Precise and pleasing clicks with every interface interaction. But Android has now almost caught up, and Samsung's vibration is almost as good.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max gets the longest battery life ever on an iPhone, and that is impressive considering previous phones were also long-lasting.

We don't yet know the exact battery size of the 16 Pro Max (rumors say it's a 4,676 mAh), so we'd need to wait for the teardowns in just a few days for that information. The Galaxy we know uses a 5,000mAh battery.

But... in this universe, it's not just about the capacity — it's how you utilize it.

iOS is exceptionally good at preserving the battery life and killing app processes that don't need to be working. The iPhone 15 Pro Max is already a two-day phone for many people. The Galaxy S24 Ultra, even though with a bigger tank, does push you a bit more towards the charger.

But hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We will be running our extensive in-house battery testing and you will find the results here very soon.

So far, Apple's own numbers tell us this much — the iPhone 16 Pro Max can last for 29 hours when streaming video. Compared to the official Apple numbers for the iPhone 15 Pro Max, that's a 13.8% increase. If we apply that logic to our own tests of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, we can assume that the iPhone 16 Pro Max will last for:

The Galaxy S24 Ultra already passed through our benchmarks, these are the actual numbers it pulled:

• Web browsing - 20 hours 6 minutes
• YouTube streaming - 8 hours 18 minutes
• Gaming - 13 hours 53 minutes

When it comes to charging, Apple sticks with depressingly slow 20W wired charging speeds yet again on the 16 Pro Max. The Galaxy charges faster with 45W support.

But interestingly, MagSafe wireless charging is now much faster on the 16 Pro Max with speeds of 25W. Yes, you read that right – wireless charging is faster than wired charging on this iPhone. We've never seen such a thing on any phone so far.

This should give you 50% charge in just 30 minutes, while the Galaxy which supports 15W wireless charging only gets around 33% in the same time period (and it has a bigger battery).

Just remember that you'd need the new MagSafe 25W charger and you have to connect it to a power brick that can deliver at least 30W of power.

Also read: iPhone 16 Battery and charging

Here's a quick look at the essentials here. But you can open up the full iPhone 16 Pro Max versus Galaxy S24 Ultra specs comparison, if you wish to delve deeper.

Apple has once again raise the bar with the iPhone 16 Pro Max, improving most fundamental areas.

The bigger screen size, the slimmer bezels, the faster chip which now cools better, the new ultrawide camera, the 4K120 video recording and the new Camera Control are the highlights. But the most consequential new feature might just be the longer battery life.

But let's not underestimate the Galaxy S24 Ultra here — it's been a heavy-hitter ever since it launched this January. It has a solid performance, wider screen with S Pen support, more versatile zoom camera, and arguably AI features that are a bit ahead of Apple. It also still has cool features like DeX that you won't find on an iPhone (or many other Android phones either).

If you are still unsure about which one to get, remember that a new Galaxy S25 Ultra model is likely to arrive in January 2025, which is not too far away. And if you are ready with your decision, let us know which phone are you getting and what you like about it.