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

Another year, another iPhone — typically, with some small improvements to it. Well, there's nothing small about the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Its screen has grown to 6.9" (from 6.7"), its camera bump is hard-to-miss and loaded with high-res sensors, and its processor is yet another heavy-hitter, built on an improved 3 nm process.

It's arriving in a market that has the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which is already well-established as one of the most powerful Android smartphones, with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 tuned specificially for Galaxy, its gorgeous 6.8" AMOLED screen, elaborate software with S Pen support, its own AI tricks up its sleeve, and very good cameras.

So, does Apple do enough with the iPhone 16 Pro Max, or has it finally slowed down so much that its customers might start turning to Android flagships instead? Let's see how the new iPhone 16 Pro Max does against the tried-and-true Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

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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. It can open you favorite app, turn on a specific Focus mode, or even launch any Siri shortcut.

But you have one brand new button too — the Camera Control. It is a physical key with a capacitive 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 offers a slightly larger collection. On regular, you can get the Galaxy S24 Ultra in:

• Titanium Violet
• Titanium Yellow
• Titanium Black
• Titanium Gray

However, if you order from Samsung.com, there are three extra exclusive colors to pick from — Titanium Blue, Titanium Green, Titanium Orange.

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. Samsung's stylus is nothing to snark at — it's the result of years of development and a partnership with Wacom, so it's incredibly accurate and expreissive, be it for writing or sketching.

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 sorely missed. However, make no mistake — the iPhone does have enough brightness to blast, so it's visible under the bright sun:

Display Measurements:

As for colors, both of these look fantastic. Of course, they are not perfect — it's pretty hard to get that pentile matrix to be exact. Compared side by side, the iPhone's display pulls slightly towards yellowish hues, the Galaxy S24 Ultra is a little teal-ish. But when you throw blue light filters and adaptive color calibration — both phones have this — into the mix, this point becomes moot. At the end of the day, they are sharp, accurate, and great to look at.

New this year for the iPhone is it can drop to 1 nit minimum brightness, so it's easier on the eyes at night. In our measurements, it's even slightly lover than 1 nit — certainly a welcome improvement. Samsung's screens also hover around this, so they were already pretty comfortably for nighttime use.

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. We can also testify that, after months of daily use, the Gorilla Armor on our Galaxy S24 Ultra doesn't have any annoying micro scratches, which typically appear on phones out of nowhere.

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.

And here are the benchmarks. In CPU score, the Apple A18 Pro is back on top and by considerable margin at that! However, with 3D graphics, it's not that much of a clear winner. The Galaxy S24 Ultra got a higher peak score, but throttled down lower. But, in general, they are in the same ballpark. Of course, the next generation of Qualcomm chips — and the next Galaxies — are just a few months away, so we'll see what they do to one-up Apple.

But another point about 3D gaming — Apple has been doing a steady push into gaming. For one, it's the improvements and upgrades with 3D performance and hardware ray tracing, but also partnerships with game developers that bring console titles to the iPhone and iPad — Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, Death Stranding, and who knows what is coming. Samsung, and other Android manufacturers like Asus, do need to try and get some of that pull, as they have spent years to get a piece of that handheld gaming market, and it seems Apple is now getting a steady footing in it instead.

The race these days is for AI features and performance, of course. And Apple's new silicon has the dedicated NPU cores to support "Apple Intelligence" features, which will be trickling into iOS periodically, starting from October. But the Galaxy S24 Ultra already has Galaxy AI — with note / website / recording summaries, live translation, generative image editing, et cetera. 

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. This year, you could say that iOS is closer to Android than ever. You can now put app icons wherever you want on the homescreen, not just in a row (yes, in 2024, imagine that). And you can customize it further by selecting a specific color for all your app icons to be painted in.

But if customization and flexibility is what you are after — it still can't beat One UI, which has split screen, an app drawer on the side, boundless homescreen customization, themes, and much more.

For software updates, Samsung has also upped its game. The new Galaxy flagships come with a 7-year software update commitment, meaning the Galaxy S24 Ultra will hit its cap in 2031. Apple iPhones typically get 5 years worth of iOS updates. In reality — 5 years is plenty enough, as at that time the phone's hardware may also be beat up enough to warrant an upgrade. But 7 years is just unbeatable headroom.

After upgrading the main camera with the iPhone 13 Pro Max, then the zoom camera with the iPhone 15 Pro Max, Apple now turned its sights to the ultra-wide camera — the iPhone 16 Pro Max now comes with a 48 MP ultra-wide, instead of 12 MP. The main sensor is also 48 MP, and the 5x telephoto camera has a 12 MP sensor underneath.

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 were often dotted with small flares of light, captured and bouncing between the phone's multi-layer lenses.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra has a 200 MP main camera, 10 MP 3x telephoto camera, another zoom camera that's 50 MP and 5x, and a 12 MP ultra-wide camera.

It's not all about the megapixels and lenses, though, as in the world of smartphones, automatic post-processing plays a huge part in the final image. So, we have to field test them!

PhoneArena Camera Score:

The iPhone 16 Pro Max camera, while great, did not bring about any major improvements or groundbreaking new features. Most of what's new is on the software end, with Photographic Styles and the new 4K 120 FPS mode for super-detailed slow-mo clips. However, it still scores about the same on our Camera Benchmark test as the iPhone 15 Pro Max — and a point or two below the Galaxy S24 Ultra, depending on which category you are looking at.

But the good news is that a point or two means nothing, and it's still an excellent camera. Let's check out some samples:

Main Camera

Both phones handle dynamics and colors great, and the resulting images are excellent on both sides. There are differences that we can latch onto, however — surprisingly, the iPhone tends to oversharpen fine details a bit more. You can spot jagged edges around leaves that simply don't look natural. That's a weird reversal, as just a few years ago it was Samsung that tended to oversharpen.

On the Samsung side, we still have the issue with greens being a bit too saturated or skewed a bit away from reality. Though, it's not that much of a problem on the S24 series — it only becomes evident when you compare it directly to more "honest" colors, like the ones from the iPhone here.



When the light goes down, both phones start working overtime with their noise reduction and sharpening. The results are mixed. We find that if there are more artificial light sources around, Samsung photos tend to be a bit better, with more striking colors and contrast. But as the light becomes less and less, it's the iPhone that manages to reproduce better detail and colors. You can see more samples below in the "extra" gallery to see what we are talking about. But, in general, great night photos from both cameras. And, both produce an equal amount of disappointing artifacts when overdoing the noise reduction.

Zoom Quality

A bit of an Uno Reverse card here — the Galaxy S24 Ultra oversharpens a bit more as you zoom in, while the iPhone 16 Pro Max confidently lets some details come out soft. But in the end, at a reasonable zoom of 10x, the iPhone photo looks a bit more realistic with both colors and details being more grounded. The S24 Ultra photos just appear a bit too processed.

Now, both of these phones have 5x telephoto lenses and do digital processing beyond that. It's worth noting that the iPhone still taps out at 25x zoom, while the Galaxy goes all the way up to 100x.

Ultra-wide Camera

Both ultra-wide cameras try to stick with the same color calibration as their respective main cameras. So, here, we have the same slight discrepanices in color science. The Galaxy is a pinch more saturated, maybe slightly warmer. The iPhone is a bit more grounded. Both ultra-wide cameras handle high dynamics very, very well and display visible oversharpening that seems to be happening in the post-processing. All in the name of a clear ultra-wide landscape shot, we presume.

Selfies

Both of these phones take pretty good selfies with a wide dynamic range and lots of detail. But, consistently, the iPhone captures better skintone and more vibrancy in the background. The S24 Ultra selfies appear just a bit washed out, with some yellow-greenish hues in the skintones. You can check more selfie samples in the gallery below:

More Camera Samples

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.

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. What does that mean, though? Thanks to teardowns, we know the 16 Pro Max battery is 4,685 mAh — really the biggest battery in an iPhone (the 15 Pro Max had 4,422 mAh). That's up against the Galaxy, which has a 5,000 mAh cell, which is considered the current golden standard for big-sized flagship phones.

Of course, we have iOS and Android thrown in the mix, as there's a huge difference between how these operating systems deal with app processes and how their battery percentages trickle out. iOS is great with standby, which is why iPhones typically do great even with smaller batteries. Android is a bit more liberal with letting apps do stuff in the background — but the bigger batteries typically offset that.

But OK, what about full-on use? Well, our battery test is designed to simulate just that:

PhoneArena Battery and Charging Test Results:

Well, when it comes to the simpler task — like browsing, reloading, scrolling webpages, the iPhone goes on for 2 hours more than the Galaxy. That's a 10% improvement there, but we still do wish to point out that 20 hours of screen-on time already sounds incredibly healthy as far as battery endurance goes. For YouTube streaming, the iPhone goes on for 2 extra hours yet again — this time, it's a 25% improvement over the Galaxy S24 Ultra's endurance. We do wish to point out that Samsung Galaxies are notorious for always getting low battery scores on the YouTube tests, even when compared to other similar Android phones.

Then, with gaming, the Galaxy gets a bit of a victory, with almost 2 hours on top of the iPhone or about 15% more. 

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's iPhone 16 Pro Max isn't exactly the earth-shattering, mouth-watering, game-breaking upgrade we expected, exactly. But it does come with some improvements, and iOS 18 does the rest to give it a fresh new flair. It's sitll a premium smartphone, right up there at the top, and will certainly be the one that many smartphones are compared to over the coming year.

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).

Then, there's also the fact that the Galaxy S25 Ultra model is coming in early 2025 (probably January?), which is not too far away. If it can build on top of the great platform that the S24 Ultra is — it may just be worth waiting for that one.

If you are out to buy yourself a flagship smartphone right now, and are trying to decide between the Galaxy S24 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro Max — we can honestly say that both of these are excellent. Your decision should involve the wider ecosystems around them — iOS or Android? Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch? Are you using an Apple computer or a Windows / Samsung laptop? Are you platform agnostic? Well... pick the one that looks better!