How Many Inches Is the iPhone 16 Pro Max? (And Every Other iPhone)

The iPhone 16 Pro Max is 6.9 inches — if you mean the screen, measured diagonally, the way Apple measures it. Measured as a true rectangle it is 6.86 inches, and the phone in your hand is only 6.43 inches tall. Same question, three honest answers.

What "6.9 inches" actually measures

Apple's number is the screen diagonal, corner to corner — and not even the corners the screen really has. Because the display's corners are rounded, Apple measures the diagonal as if the screen were a perfect rectangle, then notes in the spec-sheet fine print that the iPhone 16 Pro Max screen is 6.86 inches when measured that way and that the actual viewable area is less. The 6.9 you see in the marketing is that 6.86 rounded up. The same convention applies down the range: the "6.7-inch" iPhone 15 Pro Max measures 6.69, the "6.3-inch" 16 Pro measures 6.27, and the "6.1-inch" 13 Pro measures 6.06.

None of those figures tells you whether the phone fits in your pocket. For that you want the body: the 16 Pro Max is 163.0 mm tall, 77.6 mm wide and 8.25 mm thick — 6.43 × 3.06 × 0.32 inches — and weighs 227 g. The diagonal is a screen-area shorthand; the height is the phone.

The 2024 jump: when 6.7 became 6.9

For four generations — iPhone 12 Pro Max (2020) through 15 Pro Max (2023) — the big iPhone's screen sat at 6.7 inches. In September 2024 the iPhone 16 Pro Max moved to 6.9 inches and the 16 Pro from 6.1 to 6.3, the first diagonal change since 2020. The trick is that the body barely grew: the 16 Pro Max is just 3.1 mm taller and 0.9 mm wider than the 15 Pro Max, because Apple shaved the bezels rather than enlarging the slab. You got 0.2 inches of screen for roughly an eighth of an inch of phone.

The September 2025 lineup kept those diagonals — the iPhone 17 Pro is 6.3 inches and the 17 Pro Max 6.9 — but the bodies thickened to 8.75 mm with the switch back to an aluminium unibody and a full-width camera plateau. The 17 Pro Max is the tallest (163.4 mm) and thickest mainstream iPhone of the modern era, while the iPhone Air went the other way entirely: a 6.5-inch screen on a body just 5.64 mm thin and 165 g.

Every recent iPhone, measured both ways

All figures from Apple's own tech-spec pages. Screen diagonals are Apple's marketed number; "rectangle" is Apple's standard-rectangle measurement from the same page's fine print.

Two details worth noticing in that table. The iPhone 15 Pro (2023) is the smallest and, at 187 g, the lightest Pro of the lot — titanium shaved 19 g off the 14 Pro despite near-identical dimensions. And the 12 Pro and 13 Pro share a body footprint to the tenth of a millimetre (146.7 × 71.5 mm), which is why some 12 Pro cases almost fit a 13 Pro — almost, because the 13 Pro is 0.25 mm thicker with a larger camera bump.

Inches, centimetres, and the case question

If you think in metric: the 16 Pro Max is 16.3 cm tall and 7.76 cm wide with a screen diagonal of about 17.5 cm. The 17 Pro Max is 16.34 cm tall — practically the same height, but 0.5 mm thicker and with a completely different camera layout, so 16 Pro Max cases do not carry over to the 17 Pro Max. Case compatibility across generations has been broken every year since 2023 by a few tenths of a millimetre here and a redesigned camera there; check the model number on the case, not the diagonal.

Quick answers

So: 6.9 inches, 6.86 inches, or 6.43 inches — the iPhone 16 Pro Max is all three at once, depending on whether you're measuring the screen Apple sells, the rectangle it pretends to be, or the phone you actually carry.