Big-screened beauty.

APPLE MAY HAVE intended the ‘X’ to be pronounced as ‘10’, but the humour in this iPhone’s phonetic pronunciation isn’t lost on us. With an upper pricetag that races past the $2,000 mark without even blushing, and a supersized 6.5-inch display that for the first is larger than the screen on all its competitors, there’s nothing restrained or moderate about this year’s flagship iPhone.

But if you can handle the Max’s excesses (sorry), it’s an absolute beauty of a phone. It’s the Victoria’s Secret model of smartphones, while most of its competitors are more of the Kmart catalogue vintage. Building on the design language introduced with the iPhone X, the XS Max offers up the same luscious stainless steel slab encased in glass, with rounded corners and a stunning edge-to-edge OLED display that takes up the entire front of the device.

Well, almost all of it. There’s a ‘notch’ at the top of the screen where the cameras, sensors and microphone sit. While tech commentators delight in obsessing over “notch size”, we think it’s a non-issue. It’s something you may notice the first few times you use it, but it will quickly fade into obscurity with day-to-day usage.

What you’ll notice a lot more is that the home button has taken a permanent hiatus. This means having to re-learn a lot of actions that relied on the home button (such as returning to the home screen and moving