Is it Worth Buying the iPhone XSMax for $209 in July 2024?

iPhone XSMax

iPhone XS Max

This is Apple's most premium iPhone of 2018 Apple iPhone XSMax which was launched on 21 September 2018 at a price of $1099. After that Apple stopped the production of iPhone xs max on September 10, 2019 due to the announcement of iPhone 11, iPhone 11Pro and iPhone 11ProMax. So now there is no new xs max available, but refurbished xs max iPhone is available on Amazon and other platforms at $209 price, which is 5 times less price than the new iPhone xsmax.

So in this post we will talk about the following points

• How is the iPhone XSMax compares to 2024 smartphones priced at $209

• How many OS upgrades will the iPhone XSMax get?

• Alternative smartphone to iPhone XSMax

• Reasons to buy iPhone XSMax

iPhone XS Max Design

iPhone XSMax compares to 2024 smartphones priced at $209

So first of all let us talk about the design of the XSMax, it has an absolutely premium design with a flat display and a curved stainless steel frame on the sides which looks very premium. iPhone XS Max measures 6.20 inches in length, 3.05 inches in width, 0.30 inches (7.7mm) thick and the weight of iPhone x max is 208 gram.

The front side of XSMax has a camera notch and a 6.5 inch display with a screen to body ratio of 85.4% and the display has Gorilla Glass 6 protection. The Apple XS Max has a glass back at the back and a dual camera setup with LED flash.

iPhone XS Pro Max has 3 color options: Gold, Gray and Silver and it has IP68 water/dust rating.

iPhone XS Max Colors

On the right side of the iPhoneXSMax is the power button and SIM card tray, left side has Volume button and Ring/Silent switch, upper side has blank and On down side there is speakers, microphone and Lightning USB 2.0 port.

iPhone XS Max Display

On the front, the IP Xs Max sports a 6.5-inch Super Retina OLED display with a 60Hz refresh rate, 120Hz touch sampling rate. This display supports HDR10, Dolby Vision and has 1242×2688 resolution, 456ppi density and 653 nits peak brightness.  Overall' the quality of display is good due to the support of HDR10, Dolby Vision, higher Resolution and 456ppi density.

But if we compare with 2024 smartphones then XSM is lagging behind on some points like iPhone max xs has 60Hz refresh rate, 120Hz touch sampling rate and 653 nits Peak brightness while 2024 smartphone generally have a 120Hz refresh rate, 240Hz touch sampling rate and 1000nits Peak brightness which is 53% brighter than iPhone X Pro Max. Other thing is screen response time, 2024 smartphone has 1ms screen response time whereas x max has 11ms which is huge and you can feel it on gaming.

Overall' if you don't do gaming and want a quality display to watch video content then this is a better option

iPhone XS Max Processor

IPhone XSMax comes with Apple A12 bionic chip which is a 7nm architecture based hexa core chipset and it has 2490MHz Max Clock. single core score of xs max is 1310, 3458 multi core score and 662257 antutu score. Now we compare with 2024 smartphone, xs max iPhone has 30-40% higher single core score, 55-65% higher multi core score and 50-60% higher antutu score than 2024 smartphone but it is a 4G processor. Apart from this, there is LPDDR4X RAM type and Bluetooth 5, wifi connectivity

iPhone XS Max Battery

IPhone X Max comes with 3174mAh battery with 18W wired chrarging and it takes 3:30 hours to full charge. If we compare with 2024 smartphones, they generally have a 5000mAh battery with 25W wired charging and it takes 1:30 hours to fully charge which is 58% less time to full charge than the XSMax.

The battery life of both is almost same like 17 hours of general battery life, 4 hours of gaming, 10 hours of video but Apple XS Max has longer charging time. So if you can spend 3:30 hours charging iPhone xs Pro max then you should check out this iPhoneXSMax.

There is a dual camera setup at the back consisting of a 12MP OiS primary camera with Apple iSight (1/2.5") sensor, a 12MP OiS telephoto with 2X optical zoom, and a 7MP selfie camera at the front. From Back camera you can record upto 4K video at 60fps and from front camera you can record 1080p video at 60fps.

Talking about DXO Mark camera result, the front camera result is 97 photo quality score and 119 video quality score. The back camera result is 110 photo quality score and 96 multi core score.

How many OS Upgrade iPhone XSMax will get?

iPhoneXSMax comes with IOS12 which can be upgraded to IOS17.5.1 and Apple is also planning to upgrade to IOS18 which is the last upgrade on iPhone XS Max

Alternative smartphone to iPhone XSMax

The alternative smartphone of iPhone Max XS is Samsung Galaxy S23FE which was launched on October 2023. I'm not talking about a newly packed galaxy S23 FE but a refurbished one which costs $269 for 8GB/128GB and there is a 4 Years of OS upgrades remaining in Samsung Galaxy S23FE and many things are better than the iPhone X Pro Max So if you want to Read about Galaxy S23FE then click Samsung Galaxy S23FE

Reasons to buy iPhone XSMax

If you want a premium iPhone experience and don't want to use it for a long time, the iPhone XS is a better option and that's all for this post, see you in the next post.