My iPhone 18 Pro Max
My new Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max. And it was free (sorta).
So you say I just got an expensive new laptop and now this? Well, before you begin to judge me, let me explain a bit as to why I just got a brand new iPhone 18 Pro Max. And more importantly, how.
Why and How
First off, my old iPhone was a 15 Pro Max, and I had already been kind of looking at the new iPhones that came out recently. I really thought it was pretty cool with a lot of nice features I’d enjoy playing with. It seems that my iPhone before the 15 was a 12, as it seems I tend to skip a year or two before upgrading. But the real kicker was the price I paid, which was exactly nothing.
All of my bills are automatically paid via one credit card. When I’m out and about or online it’s that same card, and the whole point of getting it down to one card was because this particular credit card (from JP Morgan Chase) is a “rewards” card in that you get points for every amount you spend. These points can really add up. Before I became a widower my wife and I used this same card constantly to build up rewards points which we could redeem for airline tickets, or at least a huge chunk off of the airfare. Most flights to Europe were funded this way. The other thing we did (and I still do) is pay the credit card off every month like it’s an American Express card, so there is no interest added.
One could also redeem points for other things (including cash), however I glanced at the rewards program recently and was thrilled that they’d made a deal with Apple and certain Apple products were available for points, including some of the latest iPhones. Therefore the full cost of the iPhone was covered as I had not touched the points for ages.
Setup
The setup of the new iPhone was somewhat of a pain. For those in the Apple universe, there is a procedure where you start the setup process on your new iPhone and if it is physically close to your old iPhone you can make them talk to each other and magically transfer over all data and even your eSIM for your cell phone number. Mine was a bit of a challenge.
It “failed” and I had to wipe the 18 Pro Max and start over twice as well as simply restart mid-process without re-wiping three other times. Once I finally got the data copied over, the phone actually overheated while it was installing all of the individual phone apps, in that I had the 18 Pro Max plugged in and I got the message that charging was halted until the phone cooled. I mean I expected a bit of a pain having to sign back in to a bunch of different apps, but this was rather maddening. Not thrilled.
There were a few other odd things that happened but these were coincidence - mainly there was a new version of Apple CarPlay that came out and happened to get loaded via the new phone so there I was heading out on errands with a new iPhone that was behaving slightly weird and a new version of CarPlay in the Bolt that had a slightly new look and feel.
Important: Don’t immediately wipe the data off of the old phone. While a lot of the apps will automatically transition over all of your apps’ data (including credentials) to the new phone - some will handle it quite differently, especially the more security-related apps. For example Signal requires a separate transfer involving both phones. Okta Verify and Duo Security’s Duo Mobile are two other examples I had to handle uniquely. So keep that in mind with password managers and other security applications. Even then, test your various apps that use creds just to ensure they are working. My goal is to get all of the apps’ data and access fully transferred over, and only then will I wipe the old phone. I will likely donate the 15 to a women’s shelter or some other charity which is my usual tradition.
Performance
I don’t have exact numbers to report or anything like that, but I can say that the 18 Pro Max is a lot faster and it seems to have a better wireless range. It seems roughly twice as fast as the 15 Pro Max which makes sense when you consider it is a jump from the A17 Pro chip to the A20 Pro chip and more cores, more GPU, and double the RAM. For the hell of it I also decided to get 512GB of storage in my 18 Pro Max which is half what I had in my 15 Pro Max, especially since I was using very little storage on the 15.
The 15 Pro Max had Wifi 6e (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.3 and the 18 Pro Max has Wifi 7 (802.11be) with Bluetooth 6. Fortunately I have a couple of wifi access points that can handle this, and when you couple that networking speed improvement with increased processing speeds, some tasks seem more than twice as fast. Battery life seems way better as well, although frankly it is fairly hard to tell as I don’t really keep track of battery usage except to say that at the end of a long day I do have more left. Note that in the car I use a USB cable (I have a LOT of the “smart” car features deactivated, too much privacy risk) so after a couple of errands or a run to the park for a dog walk it seems to stay nearly fully charged.
The camera is a major upgrade as pictures seem to be of much higher quality - but frankly I don’t take a lot of photos. It does produce better results from my simple experimenting, so maybe I might start taking a few more.
Summary
My guess is if you have a 17, the jump to the 18 isn’t going to buy you that much, but as a 15 user this is completely and totally worth it. If you have home wifi access that support the latest wifi speeds and your home network can handle 1GB traffic, you will see a massive uptick in network speed (I certainly did).
All in all, I’d do this all again in a heartbeat. Without a doubt, this has been an excellent phone upgrade for me. And yes, I did also order a new Series 12 Apple Watch, but I haven’t received it yet. If it warrants it, there might be a separate blog post for that. We’ll see!
