recently, when doing shopping in the mall, I came across a window that caught my eye. There was a somewhat unusual phone being displayed there. It was the iPhone 16 Pro Max. I slowly gazed down, expecting an exorbitant price, but to my surprise this iPhone was priced at just $50, however upon closer inspection I realized it was actually a fake iPhone 16 Pro Max. In the end, I didn’t pay much attention to it and kept walking like normal, or at least that’s what a responsible person would have done in my place. But as the impulsive buyer that I am, I made my way into that store and bought that fake iPhone 16 Pro Max. Now that I have it in my hands, let’s see what I can do and see if we can save face with a phone that pretends to be something that it’s not.
Starting off with the design, it looks exactly like the original iPhone 16 Pro Max, but upon closer inspection i started noticing some off little details here and there, like the camera on the dynamic island which is in a more centered position. From afar it could pass as a genuine iPhone 16 Pro Max, and even up close it really looks like one. They did a good job emulating the construction of the original iPhone 16 Pro Max, from the rounded edges to the corners, and they even managed to copy the iPhone 16’s Camera Control.
When I put it next to a genuine iPhone 16 Pro Max, i could tell by just looking at them that there are minor but noticeable differences. Don’t expect to see titanium here since it’s entirely made of plastic. But despite that, build quality is better than I thought it was going to be, I mean it barely has any hull areas which are the norm in other cheap knock-offs. Surprisingly it still has the lighting port, which we’ll be talking about later on.
Just by turning it on i noticed the screen bezels aren’t huge, but they’re not as thin as the original iPhone 16 Pro Max. The screen isn’t as terrible as I expected and it’s bright enough to view content even under moderate sunlight. I even find it to be better than some cheap Samsung phones like the Galaxy A12. I think these people were like, we don’t have any options to choose from, so let’s spend all the budget we have on this actually decent display.
The dynamic island is somewhat present on this fake iPhone 16 Pro Max, and I say somewhat because it rarely ever does anything. Charging and switching on and off silent mode are some of the few ways to activate it.
Looking really closely it seems to have a 720p resolution, and since we don’t know anything about the resolution and other specs, I installed CPU-Z and found it has a resolution of 1290×2696 pixels. Ok that sounds too high to be true, so I went a little bit further and installed AIDA64, which shows a more down-to-earth resolution of 720px1600.
The brain power on this device is none other than an Apple A17 with 6 cores and a 28nm process, which is great isn’t it? But wait, something seems off there, let’s double check that. Oh, it’s actually a MediaTek A17 Bionic, wow, I didn’t know MediaTek was making processors for Apple now. Wait, that’s not the whole story, of the 6 available cores, only 4 of them are working, and the processor is built on 28nm, indicating that this A17 Bionic’s manufacturing date is between 2012 and 2016.
The GPU is pretty much the same one we can find on devices like the Galaxy S3 and S3 Mini. Now you might be wondering, is the hardware of a Galaxy S3 enough to run iOS 18? And the truth is it’s not, this iPhone is really slow, but we’ll be absolutely covering that more in depth a bit later on.
The interface on this iPhone 16 Pro Max knockoff is very similar to the original, they copied almost everything, the settings menu is pretty much the same you can find on a real iPhone 16 Pro Max, the same goes for the notification bar and even the control center. They even copied the accessibility circle which allows us to use things like Siri, which is there for decoration only, it apparently has 512GB of storage, but we’ll be testing that by installing heavier apps a bit later on.
The manufacturer of this iPhone 16 Pro Max clone did an amazing job since they covered the warranty for this device for both hardware and technical support until May 5th, 2087. This is almost an exact replica of the desktop of an original iPhone 16 Pro Max, from the icons of the apps to the menus and widgets. But what happens when we click on the apps? The app store looks the same from the outside but once inside, what a surprise, they copied even the interface of the original app, we can even install well known apps like Instagram or WhatsApp and a few games like Temporon or Subway Surfers. The weather widget doesn’t work, I tried every setting available to make it work but nothing, it really is a pity because the interface takes a hit with that widget not working. But is this also the case of other apps?
Testing Apple Maps I realized no, because it’s just Google Maps in disguise, and I prefer it to be this way since at least we have usable maps. With the photos app they took the time to create a similar app to that of the original, and they did an ok job. But what about Safari? The app at least on the surface has been replicated very well, I dug a little bit deeper and found that it’s actually Chrome version 130, which is quite recent. Because of that, browsing the web shouldn’t be a problem, except for how extremely slow it is to navigate around with fake Safari. The ironic thing is that we can access the Apple website, and in theory we could even buy the real iPhone 16 Pro Max there. The music app is just a simple music player with the aesthetics of an iPhone, nothing interesting to be honest. Other apps are simple copies of the original ones like the calculator or the calendar which are pretty well made, but it’s not the case for all like the health app which is just a crappy copy. And then we have apps where they didn’t even bother like the talks app, which is just Yahoo’s talks. Then we have the podcast app which is just a YouTube app, and the iTunes store which is YouTube Music. Interestingly, the fake iPhone 16 Pro Max comes with useless demos of PUBG Mobile and WeChat, which is a Chinese messaging app. It also comes with an app that allows us to install themes, which would be nice if it weren’t so damn slow. We also have Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and more trash like that installed.
The speaker on this iPhone 16 Pro Max replica is not great, but honestly I expected something way worse and I thought it was going to burst my ears, but it didn’t. What did destroy my eardrums is the horrible sound that blasts at full volume even when the ringtone volume is low.
The people behind this fake iPhone 16 Pro Max really thought some things through, because we can also use the Play Store so we don’t have to rely on APKs. Same if someday this becomes a reality, with the ability to silo other app stores on a real iPhone.
I plugged it to my computer using the Lightning port, I clicked I trust this computer, and once in the file explorer, the computer showed me that this iPhone 16 of the 512GB only had 48GB available. I was like, fine, 48GB is not bad, it’s enough for me. I reached for my folder with Android games and started loading some games. After waiting for a while, the computer prompted an error. I tried again and thinking it was some error due to the screen being off, I kept touching the screen to prevent it from getting locked, but the error went back to haunt me. But something changed this time, the computer now showed me that the iPhone 16 had 78GB now. That was very weird. So I copied a folder of APKs and I had no issues whatsoever. I also put some game ROMs and there was not any problem either. However, when trying to copy PS1 ISO, once again the iPhone didn’t let me copy the file. And that’s when I realized that the available space had dropped to 21GB. Now I understood that it wouldn’t let me copy those large files because the iPhone was running out of space. And the thing is, this iPhone didn’t really have 512GB, which was obvious, but what I didn’t expect was that its actual capacity was about 4GB, not enough to install big games like GTA San Andreas. Anyway, I’ll find some way to install big games on this thing, but in the meantime, let’s see how the cameras fare. Will they be a disappointment?
And spoiler alert, the answer is yes and no. The interface, well, it’s identical to that of the iPhone 16, it counts with filters and several modes, which are more for decoration than anything else, but why did I say it was a disappointment? Two of the cameras are fake, and this is easy to prove by just covering the lenses, but why do I say no at the same time? Because the quality of the main sensor, or the only sensor for that matter, is not as bad as expected. In fact, it takes somewhat acceptable photos. I mean, it’s not going to win any best camera award, but I’ve seen way worse cameras than this thing, so I guess that’s a win for this fake iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Now let’s see what this iPhone is really made of. Starting with the SNES, the performance as expected from the GPU of the Galaxy S2 and S3 family is more than great, it runs King of Dragons without a hitch, but can it run Doom? And yes it can, literally zero issues on this iPhone. Okay, the SNES is a very old console, but what about the Nintendo 64? I played Mario 64 without frame skipping and other hacks, and it runs perfectly, but the same goes for Zelda Ocarina of Time, I could play the game here from start to finish just fine, but it’s not perfect because it does struggle a little more and in certain places we can expect some frame drops. For regular Android games it’s fine, if only we could have this level of performance on the interface then I would be more than happy. I installed Plants vs Zombies from the Play Store, which is 100% playable, but I can’t say the same for Subway Surfers, which lacks so much it makes me want to throw it out the window.
A game that I played 10 years ago that I suddenly remembered out of nowhere and that I really liked at the time is Dead Effect. For those of you who have played this game, you’ll know that this game is a copy of Dead Space, and now that we’re talking about clones, I found it appropriate for this article. The game has pretty good graphics for a decade year old Android game and runs very well on this phone, even with the graphics settings on max. And finally we have the most demanding game that this phone’s small storage capacity can handle. We have GTA 3 running with every graphics setting on max. Performance is very very good, and that’s to be expected considering that it has the same GPU as the Galaxy S3, and in theory could even run GTA San Andreas, but since there’s not enough space this is as far as we can get. If only it had microSD card expansion it would have much more potential, but unfortunately it’s not possible.
In conclusion, from what I can see the manufacturer of this iPhone 16 Pro Max replica spent all the budget they had to create this phone on design and screen, neglecting other aspects such as the processor, storage and RAM. If this weren’t the case it would make a somewhat decent low end device, and I wouldn’t even see myself using it if it weren’t so damn slow. But hey, if we’re messing around and acting like a clown with it it’s fine, but beyond that I don’t think it’s worth spending 50 dollars on this thing. But out of all the iPhone 16 Pro Max clones I’ve seen, this one is honestly one of the best.