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Flat illustration of three identically sized phones standing in a row on a dark workshop bench, their backs showing glowing numbers 16, 17 and 18, lit from the right by a warm Edison-bulb desk lamp

2026 iPhone 18 Pro Max Comparison

Two years ago I ran this same comparison for the iPhone 16 Pro Max against the 15 Pro Max.1 Spec 16 Pro Max 17 Pro Max 18 Pro Max Silicon Chip A18 Pro A19 Pro A20 Pro CPU, fast + low-power coresiPhone chips mix a few big fast cores for short bursts of heavy work with several small low-power cores that handle everyday background tasks, so the phone feels quick without draining the battery. Apple calls the fast cores in the A20 Pro "super cores"; it has not described them as a different design from the fast cores in earlier chips. 2 fast + 4 low-power same 2 fast (~20% quicker) + 4 low-power Graphics, AI-boosted graphicsiThe graphics chip has small AI helpers built into every core, so work like sharpening video, cleaning up game visuals, and running AI photo edits happens faster without shuttling data over to a separate AI chip. 6-core, no AI helpers 6-core with AI helpers 7-core with AI helpers On-device AI chipiThe dedicated AI block inside the processor. Doubling it roughly doubles how much on-device AI work the phone can run at once, such as Apple Intelligence features, photo and video AI edits, and voice processing. 16-core same Two 16-core blocks, 32 total Build Frame Titanium Aluminum unibody same Front glass Ceramic Shield Ceramic Shield 2, 3x scratch resistance same Peak outdoor brightness 2000 nits 3000 nits same Weight 227 g 233 g 249 g Thickness 8.25 mm 8.75 mm same Battery Video playback 33 hrs 39 hrs 45 hrs Streamed video 29 hrs 35 hrs 40 hrs 50% fast charge 35 min, 20W 20 min, 40W ~15 min, 60W with AVSiAdjustable Voltage Supply, a USB-C fast-charging standard where the charger fine-tunes its voltage to what the phone asks for. You need a 60W-capable adapter that supports it to hit the fastest charge time. Cameras Rear system 48MP Fusion Main, 48MP Ultra Wide, Telephoto Three 48MP Fusion Three 48MP Fusion, variable apertureiA physical iris in the lens that opens and closes, like on a real camera. A wider opening pulls in more light and blurs the background more; a narrower one keeps more of the scene sharp. Main Optical zoom 0.5/1/2/5x 0.5/1/2/4/8x same Front camera 12MP TrueDepth 18MP Center Stage plus tap to zoom and rotate Cinematic mode 4K/30 same 4K/60, plus effects applied to existing video Other Bluetooth 5.3 6 same Storage at Apple Discontinued 256GB to 2TB same Also new on the 18 Pro Max, and not on the spec grid above: manual control over aperture, shutter speed and white balance with a live histogram, smart focus tracking, Apple Reference Image, better low-light video, and stabilized time-lapse up to 4K Dolby Vision. ...

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AI weekly: Is GPT-6 Astra AGI? Three rival flagships in four days, Nvidia buys Hugging Face

X is still the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn the ones worth knowing about into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). This week it was 223 tweets in four days, roughly two and a half times the usual rate. That is why this one is early and longer than normal. The previous roundup (August 31) went out Monday morning. Since then, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google have each shipped a flagship model, Nvidia has agreed to buy the place the open-source AI world keeps its models, and the US government has taken a side in the biggest AI copyright case in the country. Four days. ...

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AI weekly: Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash, Fable 5.1 might land tmrw, OpenAI's own chip beats Nvidia

X is still the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, filtering for what’s actually worth knowing, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn them into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). 277 tweets liked over ten days, filtered down to what’s below. Check out the previous roundup (August 21) if you missed it. That one was about open weights catching the frontier. This week a lab proved the point by putting a frontier-class model on the internet for free, without a name on it, and letting everyone find out the hard way. ...

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Oracle Gives You a Free $80/Month Server

I have seen this free Oracle tier mentioned a few times and their signup form always scared me off, but I finally verified it’s accurate this morning. Oracle’s Always Free tier gets you 2 cores, 12 GB of RAM, and 10 TB of monthly bandwidth for $0. Forever, not a 30-day trial. The closest DigitalOcean droplet is $84/month. What’s crazier: this was twice the size until a few months ago. Oracle gave 24 GB of RAM until June 15, 2026, when they halved it to 2/12 with no announcement, no email, and no changelog entry. They edited the docs page in place. On August 18 they started terminating instances that were over the new cap. (ok, that’s scary) ...

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AI weekly: open weights catch the frontier, Harvey ditches OpenAI for Kimi, Claude designs proteins

X is still the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, filtering for what’s actually worth knowing, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn them into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). 172 tweets liked over eight days, filtered down to what’s below. Check out the previous roundup (August 13) if you missed it. Last time the story was frontier prices collapsing. This week the price went to zero, because the model you’d have paid for is now a 17GB file on your hard drive, and the companies building serious products started treating that as the default rather than the fallback. ...

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AI weekly: frontier prices collapse, Jeff Dean leaves Google, Claude watermarks everything

X is still the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, filtering for what’s actually worth knowing, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn them into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). 167 tweets liked over eleven days, filtered down to what’s below. Check out the previous roundup (August 2) if you missed it. Last time the story was models getting out of their sandboxes. This stretch it’s the price of frontier intelligence, which fell hard enough in one week that anyone still running a spend spreadsheet from July needs to redo it. ...

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AI weekly: the Hugging Face agent breach, Claude Opus 5, Astra's ten proofs

X is still the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, filtering for what’s actually worth knowing, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn them into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). Two weeks again, 265 tweets liked, filtered down to what’s below. Check out the previous roundup (July 20) if you missed it. Last time the story was open weights becoming a policy fight. This stretch the story is what these models do when nobody is watching closely enough: two labs disclosed that their own models got out of the sandbox and into real systems. ...

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AI weekly: Kimi K3 open frontier, Thinking Machines' Inkling, a possible China-model ban

X is still the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, filtering for what’s actually worth knowing, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn them into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). It’s been two weeks again, so this is another bumper edition: 285 tweets liked, filtered down to what’s below. Check out the previous roundup (July 8) if you missed it. Last time the story was five frontier models shipping in a fortnight. This stretch the frontier stopped being the story: an open Chinese model reached the top of a coding leaderboard, an American lab open-sourced a trillion-parameter multimodal model, and Washington started drafting a response. ...

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AI weekly: Fable 5 unblocked, Grok 4.5 codes with Cursor, GPT-5.6 Sol ships tomorrow

X is the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, filtering for things I think are actually worth knowing, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn them into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). I skipped a week, so this is a bumper edition: 254 tweets liked, filtered down to what’s below. Check out the previous roundup (June 27) if you missed it. Last time the government had just started pulling frontier launches into its orbit. This stretch it resolved: Fable 5 came back online, and in the meantime five major models shipped in under two weeks, including one xAI built specifically to code. ...

Flat illustration of a marble government building facade at night with two glowing server-rack doors set into it, one door cracked open spilling warm light, a small Slack-style chat bubble badge glowing on the wall, on a dark navy background

AI weekly: the government in every model launch, Claude Tag, GPT-5.6 Sol

X is the best way I’ve found to keep up with AI. I like tweets throughout the week, filtering for things I think are actually worth knowing, then use Claude Code to pull those likes automatically and help me turn them into this post (here’s how the pipeline works). This week: 105 tweets liked, filtered down to what’s below. Check out the previous roundup (June 20) if you missed it. Last week the Fable 5 shutdown turned into a standoff with the White House. This week that standoff started resolving, OpenAI got pulled into the same orbit, and Anthropic shipped the most interesting product launch of the year while the policy drama played out. ...