iPhone 18 Pro Max vs. S26 Ultra – Which is Better?

iPhone 18 Pro Max vs. Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra: which flagship phone is better, Siri AI vs. Gemini, camera comparison

By Josh Teder

I’ve been using an S26 Ultra for well over 6 months now, and now that the iPhone 18 Pro Max has been out for a few weeks, I wanted to put both of these phones head-to-head to see how they really compare and, by the end, answer the question of which one I think is actually better. One thing that surprised me this year is that software has played more of a difference than hardware alone, more so than in years past.

Form Factor and Design

Probably the biggest thing you’ll notice with these two phones is right when you pick them up. Holy, the iPhone feels like a brick, where the S26 Ultra feels way lighter in comparison. That’s actually a huge difference, and the point definitely goes to Samsung for having a lighter Pro phone.

The iPhone does have one advantage in form factor, though. It doesn’t wobble on a table like the S26 Ultra does, which totally doesn’t make sense for a phone Samsung wants you to actually write on with an S Pen.

Buttons and Face ID

Another advantage I’d give the iPhone is customizable buttons. It has two more physical buttons than Samsung does that you can use to map to different apps or shortcuts. Now, while yes, you can double-click the power button on a Samsung phone to do things like open the camera, Apple’s additional buttons just give you more customizability.

Face ID is another advantage for the iPhone. Yes, the under-screen fingerprint reader works fine for authentication on the S26 Ultra, but the reason Face ID gets a point is that it just feels slightly better. You don’t need to adjust your hand to authenticate, and Samsung’s face unlock isn’t secure enough to get into private apps like banking apps, while Face ID is.

MagSafe

Another hardware advantage the iPhone has is MagSafe. It’s built right into the phone, though Samsung built it into their cases. However, if you look at the case Samsung made for the S26 Ultra, not all MagSafe accessories will work with it, like this wallet. It just doesn’t quite work, though other accessories will. Samsung really should have pushed this ring further down onto the phone, and then it would be compatible with most MagSafe accessories. The point here definitely goes to Apple.

Display and S Pen

Privacy Display

Samsung has taken a bit of a beating with the points so far, but it does have one big hardware feature that the iPhone doesn’t, and that is the new privacy display.

The iPhone cannot compete with Samsung Display’s Flex Magic Pixel technology, where with the flip of a switch, you turn on a built-in privacy display.

Because this technology can be applied at the pixel level, you can apply it to just the notifications of sensitive apps. Samsung definitely gets a point here.

Brightness and Anti-Reflection

For overall display quality, the 18 Pro Max gets a bit brighter. While it is noticeable, I don’t think it really makes that much of a difference at the end of the day. The S26 Ultra also has a slightly better anti-reflective display, though Apple is almost neck and neck with it now. Some people are going to be more bothered by the S26 Ultra’s display even when the privacy display is turned off, because it does noticeably have worse colors at off-angle viewing.

S Pen

Another thing I’d give Samsung a point for is the S Pen. It’s the only one of these phones that has that kind of feature, though interestingly, Apple is supporting the Apple Pencil USB-C on the new iPhone Duo.

Cameras

Now let’s talk about one of the biggest differences between these two phones: the camera systems.

What Changed

Samsung made a few upgrades with the S26 Ultra, widening the aperture of the main and telephoto cameras to help improve low light. Apple upgraded the sensor on its main camera and introduced a new variable aperture, which can go down to 1.48. Apple claims it nets you 50% better performance in low light. But does it actually matter in practice?

Low Light

Yes, actually. In low light, the iPhone does perform better than the S26 Ultra. It’s less likely to oversharpen at 1x now that the sensor can get more light. I thought its night video was overall better, and like I noticed last year, the 18 Pro Max continues to shoot LED lights with correct colors, while the S26 Ultra’s photos typically look just a bit worse. I also thought the iPhone’s system was just better in shots with more dynamic range, and even the telephoto looks a bit better to me. Night selfies are also better on the iPhone with their coloring in low light, though that’s more of a preference.

Daylight and Video

In daylight, I’d say they’re about even. For other daylight photos, the iPhone’s variable aperture is less of a selling point. You’ll see minor differences in color and saturation like we have in years past, with the iPhone processing things like a cloudy day slightly better. With flowers, Samsung continues to go kind of wild. I prefer the iPhone’s more restrained look, with brighter, more saturated colors but less sharpening and processing. It’s a great example of Apple’s processing becoming a little more restrained and not oversharpening as much.

For video in the daytime, I’d still say it’s slightly better on the iPhone, but pretty close. At night, I would still give the win to the iPhone. Overall, I’d give the win to the iPhone for photo and video quality, but that’s just me. You can see for yourself which camera’s photos you like best in the blind camera test above.

Pro Camera Controls

Apple also significantly upgraded the camera software this year. The iPhone finally gets pro camera controls in the main camera app, and Apple made the controls you see at the top customizable, so you can change your favorites depending on what mode you’re in.

Siri AI vs. Gemini

The next huge difference between these two phones is, of course, Siri AI vs. Gemini. Some of you might ask what the point of comparing these two is, since Siri AI is Gemini. That is not actually true, and it’s really important to understand that, because then it makes sense why these two systems act quite differently on these phones.

Siri AI Is Not Gemini

What Apple did is pay Google to be able to distill Google’s foundation models and help build Apple’s own foundation models. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but at a basic level, that is what Apple did. Then Apple uses its own foundation models to train smaller models that can run on its devices.

But foundation models are not products.

The way Siri AI is architected as a product is fundamentally different from Gemini. When you make a request to Siri, your iPhone translates that speech into text and then sends it to what’s called the system orchestrator. It builds a prompt and connects to Apple’s foundation model in the cloud to figure out what exactly needs to happen, which model to use, and what data to pull from a user’s Spotlight index to answer that query.

The new Spotlight index in iOS 27 really changes the game in terms of what you can do on your phone. It now includes all of your on-device messages, notes, emails, contacts, photos, music, podcasts, system settings, documents, and more. Gemini doesn’t do that on the S26 Ultra or any other Android phone. It’s a cloud-first architecture.

Where Siri AI Wins

This is why it’s so much easier for Siri to do things like search through your text messages to find information. For example, I could ask it, “Hey, what was Jackson’s new address that he sent me?” Another thing, bizarrely, that Siri can do and Gemini can’t is identify the music that’s currently playing on your earbuds when they’re connected to your phone.

Siri AI has also caught up to Gemini in a few areas, like search queries, asking about things you see on your screen or in images you’ve taken, and being able to do things on your behalf. When my mom was waiting on me to select letters for her upcoming Christmas card and I’d been putting it off for too long, I just asked Siri to do it. I know I’m a terrible son, but it could not only figure out what letters to pick thanks to the context it had from that text conversation, it then drafted and sent a message back to my family group text, which was very impressive. It’s also been about a second faster than Gemini at controlling my smart home lights.

Where Gemini Still Wins

Has Siri AI completely caught up to all of Gemini’s capabilities? No. You still get video generation and built-in image generation in the Gemini app. Apple technically has image generation as well, but it’s just in the Image Playground app.

So, which one is the winner? Overall, Gemini has more capabilities as a model, but as a product, and specifically as a product on your smartphone, I think Apple’s execution is actually slightly better.

Battery Life and Charging

So far, I’d say the iPhone 18 Pro Max has better battery life than my S26 Ultra. On days of normal use for me, I’m seeing around 70% left at the end of the day, which is crazy. The S26 Ultra is typically in the mid-60% range, including when I first got it, so it’s not that far behind, but I would give the win to the 18 Pro Max.

Another thing Apple caught up to Samsung on this year is fast charging. Both phones can charge from 0 to 75% in roughly 30 minutes.

Performance

As you might expect, given that the iPhone is 6 months newer than the S26 Ultra and has a 2-nanometer chip, the 18 Pro Max trounces the S26 Ultra in single-core, multi-core, and the Geekbench GPU score. It also wins in 3DMark’s Solar Bay Extreme test, a graphics-intensive ray tracing gaming test, and beat the S26 Ultra on the Wild Life Extreme stress test, probably thanks to that newer chip and the larger vapor chamber Apple put in the 18 Pro Max.

Operating System and Ecosystem

The S26 Ultra is more customizable thanks to things like Samsung’s Good Lock, which really lets you customize the phone to your heart’s content. Plus, notification management is just better, and the phone integrates much better with Samsung’s ecosystem of devices, as you might expect.

The 18 Pro Max, of course, integrates really deeply with Apple products and has unique features in iOS 27 this year, like being able to vibe code Siri Shortcuts using just your voice, new image editing tools that can change the perspective of your images, and of course, the all-new Siri AI. I don’t really think there’s a huge advantage for one over the other in terms of operating system or how well they integrate with their ecosystems, so I’d say this one is a tie.

Speakers and Mics

Overall, I think the 18 Pro Max gets the win in speakers. They’re noticeably clearer and a bit better balanced when playing music than the S26 Ultra’s. I also tested both phones’ mics here in my studio, and I’m going to say that one is a tie.

Price and Value

The S26 Ultra retails for $1,399, though with how often these things are on sale, it’s doubtful you’ll ever pay that. I’ve seen them go closer to $1,100 here in the US. The iPhone 18 Pro Max starts $100 less than the S26 Ultra, but it’s unlikely you’re going to find that phone on sale anytime soon, unless you’re getting some sort of specific carrier deal. You can see current prices on all of the devices I talked about in this post in the Featured Products section above.

If you’re looking for deals on Samsung and Apple devices in general, just search “Apple deals” or “Samsung deals” on our shop page. And if you ever see a product on the shop page and wonder when we covered it, click the 6 icon at the top right of the product card, and a window will pop up showing you all of the places we’ve covered that particular product.

Given the S26 Ultra has usually been selling below the iPhone’s price, even though it does technically start higher, I’m going to call this one a tie.

Scorecard

Here’s how every category shakes out, based on the calls I made above.

Category	Winner	Why
Weight	Galaxy S26 Ultra	The iPhone feels like a brick by comparison
Sitting flat on a table	iPhone 18 Pro Max	The S26 Ultra wobbles, even with a case
Customizable buttons	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Two more physical buttons you can map
Face ID vs. face unlock	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Face ID is secure enough for banking apps
MagSafe	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Built into the phone, not just Samsung's cases
Privacy display	Galaxy S26 Ultra	Flex Magic Pixel, down to individual notifications
Brightness	iPhone 18 Pro Max	A bit brighter, but not a huge difference
Anti-reflective coating	Galaxy S26 Ultra	Slightly better, though Apple is almost neck and neck
S Pen	Galaxy S26 Ultra	The only one of these phones with it
Photo and video quality	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Better low light, less oversharpening
Siri AI vs. Gemini on a phone	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Apple's execution is slightly better
Battery life	iPhone 18 Pro Max	About 70% left at the end of the day vs. the mid-60% range
Fast charging	Tie	Both go from 0 to 75% in roughly 30 minutes
Performance	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Trounces the S26 Ultra in benchmarks
Operating system and ecosystem	Tie	Each is best with its own devices
Speakers	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Clearer and a bit better balanced
Mics	Tie	Both held up in my studio test
Price and value	Tie	The S26 Ultra usually sells below the iPhone

Verdict

So, given all of the points, which phone wins? Overall, I’m going to give it to the iPhone 18 Pro Max, thanks to its better implementation of an on-device assistant, plus things like battery life, Face ID, performance, camera system, speakers, and its customizable Action button. But that’s just me.

Want to keep digging? Search our site for more iPhone and Samsung coverage, or read our long-term reviews of the S26 Ultra, MacBook Neo, and AirPods Max 2.

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