For a week, I’ve been living with Apple’s two most attention-grabbing flagships — the razor-thin iPhone Air and the powerhouse iPhone 17 Pro Max — and put them through the regular weekend gauntlet of daily use, photo tests and long-haul streaming. Both are incredibly good at being iOS devices, yet they cater to fundamentally different agendas. Here’s how they each shine, and wither, and which one wins the crown.
Design and durability
The iPhone Air is Apple’s thinnest modern phone at about 5.6mm, and it feels nearly impossibly lightweight without becoming flimsy.
A grade 5 titanium frame reigns in torsion, while the back and new Ceramic Shield 2 front glass on there also diminishes scratches and glare. If you tuck it into a fitted pocket or hold it for hours, the Air feels better in hand than anything else.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max is the flip side of this philosophy: bigger, heavier, and brazenly designed for endurance. Its large chassis accommodates a new vapor chamber cooling system to help maintain performance during long gaming sessions or 4K recording. The materials are top-shelf, but I do have one little two-handed phone complaint.
Displays and audio
Both phones have Super Retina XDR displays with ProMotion up to 120Hz, but size counts. The Pro Max’s 6.9-inch display is capable of hitting a claimed 3,000 nits peak brightness and it shows — direct sunlight legibility stays great. The 6.5-inch iPhone Air is denser but still colorful and fluid. When consuming HDR content, the Pro Max has more headroom, while the Air’s smaller canvas can be also more intimate and travel friendly. Stereo speakers are powerful on these both; the Pro Max pushes a bit fuller-sounding audio at top volume courtesy of its larger enclosure.
Performance and thermals
Each uses Apple’s A19 Pro and in everyday use, you’ll be hard-pressed to tell the difference — app-launch times, photo editing sessions and multitasking are effectively instantaneous on both. Where they differ is under sustained load thermal performance. The Pro Max’s vapor chamber makes such differences slightly more obvious, letting frame rates remain higher for longer in graphically demanding games and speeding up render times in video exports. Put in terms that matter to people, imagine fewer throttling dips during a 20-minute game of Fortnite or when batch-processing RAW images.
Storage options also lean pro: the Air maxes out at 1TB of storage, while the Pro Max can go up to 2TB — and if you’re shooting a lot of high-bitrate footage, that makes a difference.
Cameras and creative tools
Apple’s new 18MP Center Stage front camera arrives on both models with the nifty orientation-aware capture, which focuses vertically or horizontally while keeping everyone in perfect alignment.
The real story is on the back: the iPhone Air operates a single 48MP ‘Fusion’ camera, which cleverly uses software to represent different focal lengths such as 28mm and 35mm equivalent, striking an understated point-and-shoot elegance.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 17 Pro Max offers the complete range of a full on-48MP trio—wide, ultra-wide and telephoto—that adds ranginess*0ccasionally keeping up to stay ahead of the curves. And most importantly for creatives using it, it works with ProRes RAW, the new Log 2 profile, and genlock-style synchronization capability to work in multi-camera setting. That’s where those features get you to the real grading flexibility and timecode-friendly shoots. It’s the sort of toolkit TV and film crews take for granted; genlock-based sync has been de rigueur in SMPTE-tuned broadcast rigs forever, and to get that level of dependability on a phone is a real step forward.
Battery life and charging
The iPhone Air will last up to 27 hours in looping video tests, which should get you through a full day plus a commute with mixed usage. The Pro Max extends to a whopping 39 hours, which is due in part to its physical battery advantage. If you tend to shoot a lot of long clips, use GPS for navigation or tether in a laptop, the Pro Max’s endurance margin is evident. Both are compatible with fast charging and MagSafe accessories; long-term battery health continues to be an Apple high point, at least relative to many Android rivals, according to independent repair networks and consumer advocacy groups.
Connectivity, SIM and storage tiers
The iPhone Air is eSIM-only to clear up internal space. That’s more feasible now that global carrier support has grown; GSMA says a few hundred operators in over 100 markets now have eSIM service. For tourists who depend on swapping physical SIMs, this will certainly require getting used to, and may be a pain; but for most users the digital activation is fast and dependable. The two models offer the most recent 5G and Wi‑Fi features and share A-series modem integration.
Price and value
The iPhone Air is $999 to start, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at around $1,199 for more storage ceilings and pro video features. At the premium end of the market, where depreciation and trade-in values are more of a consideration, industry trackers like Counterpoint Research have consistently demonstrated that iPhones keep their resale value better than most rivals — which is helpful if you get a new one every two years.
Verdict: the winner
If you treasure lightness, sparseness and having a svelte bulge in your pocket, the iPhone Air is delightful — and the best ultrathin iPhone that Apple has ever made.
But as a flagship you can drive off the deep end, the iPhone 17 Pro Max used to be the winner. A larger screen, brighter display, sustained performance thanks to the vapor chamber cooling system, long-lasting battery and pro-grade camera stack enable new and unique use cases that — honestly — the Air doesn’t stand a chance of matching. For content creators, gamers and especially heavy travelers, the Pro Max earns its premium.
Go with the iPhone Air if you want the basics in an impossibly thin casing. Go for the iPhone 17 Pro Max if you want the ultimate in iPhone — now and two years from now.