The iPhone XS Max was one of Apple's two 2018 flagships. It continued with the full-screen design and Face ID sensors that had debuted the previous year in the iPhone X. It was the first plus-sized iPhone with a full-screen design. As the first iPhone with finer Portrait Mode controls and Smart HDR, its camera was one of its selling features. The phone has a 6.5-inch edge-to-edge display, Apple's biggest-ever iPhone screen at the time it launched. The lack of a home button required first-time users to learn swipe gestures for multitasking and returning to the home screen. Like the full-screen iPhones before and after it, it includes a notch that houses the front camera and Face ID sensors.The handset has 2688 x 1242 resolution at 458 PPI, a 1,000,000:1 typical contrast ratio, and True Tone. It supports the P3 wide color gamut.Powering the phone is the A12 Bionic Apple Silicon. In addition to general speed improvements, it included an update to Apple's Neural Engine. The eight-core portion of the chip focuses on machine learning, handling up to eight times more operations-per-second than the previous Neural Engine.The chip's processing portion is a six-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores. The performance cores are up to 15% faster than the A11, while the efficiency cores handle lower-intensity tasks using 50% less energy.The A12 Bionic has a four-core GPU that's 50% faster than the A11's graphics. The iPhone XS Max's chip also included a faster Secure Enclave that speeds up Face ID recognition compared to the iPhone X.