Huawei’s Mate 90 Pro Max Ties the iPhone 18 Pro Max in 7 Rounds. Where You Live Breaks the Tie

Our Mate 90 Pro Max vs iPhone 18 Pro Max comparison ends 3–3, with Huawei’s 6,800mAh battery and 200MP zoom against Apple’s A20 Pro, which scores about 2.6x higher in single-core tests. You’ll see why the tiebreaker comes down to where you live and which apps you need.

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Huawei launched the Mate 90 Pro Max on October 1, less than two weeks after the iPhone 18 Pro Max went on sale on September 18. It matters right now because both phones are chasing the same buyer in China, where Apple just grabbed a third of weekly sales while Huawei led the last full quarter. We’ve gone through both spec sheets, benchmark data, and camera hardware across seven rounds, then mapped each result to the kind of buyer it actually helps.

Both phones are big slabs with 6.9-inch screens, aluminum frames, and large camera bumps, but they’re built for different worries.

Huawei focused on survival. The front uses its Kunlun Glass 3, the camera bump gets its own Kunlun Optical Glass layer, and Huawei claims 20 times better drop resistance on the camera side, 50% better drop resistance overall, and 16 times better scratch resistance than before. The back is glass-fiber-reinforced plastic rather than glass, which is less likely to crack if you drop it. It’s also rated IP68 and IP69. IP68 covers being submerged in water, while IP69 adds protection against hot, high-pressure water jets, the kind of spray you’d get from a pressure washer. You also get an infrared blaster, so the phone can work as a TV remote.

Apple went for refinement. The iPhone 18 Pro Max uses an aluminum unibody with Ceramic Shield 2 on the front and Ceramic Shield on the back. It weighs 249g, measures 8.75mm thick, and is rated IP68 at up to 6 meters for 30 minutes. It keeps the Camera Control button for quick shots and the customizable Action button.

One gap bugs us: Huawei hasn’t published the weight or thickness of the standard Pro Max. The Collector’s Edition weighs 235g, so the regular model is likely in the same range, but we’d want the official figure before calling it lighter.

Colors split along taste lines. Huawei offers Rose Gold, Jade Green, Crystal White and Obsidian Black. Apple sells Black, Silver, Glacier and Burgundy.

On ratings alone, Huawei takes this round. If you’re rough with phones or work outdoors, IP69 and a plastic-composite back are worth more than a few grams.

Huawei’s headline number is 12,000 nits, four times Apple’s rated 3,000-nit outdoor peak. It’s real, but narrow. Huawei measures it at 1% APL (average picture level), which means only about 1% of the screen is lit, like a tiny highlight in an HDR video. At 20% of the screen, it drops to around 6,000 nits. Full-screen, it’s about 2,200 nits.

Apple’s figure shrinks under testing too, just less. Independent lab readings put the iPhone at around 2,300 nits on a large part of the screen. So when you’re reading a map in direct sunlight, the moment brightness actually matters, these two panels are effectively level.

Both use LTPO OLED screens. OLED means each pixel makes its own light, and LTPO lets the screen drop its refresh rate to save battery when nothing is moving. Both run up to 120Hz with nearly identical resolution: 2848 x 1320 on Huawei and 2868 x 1320 (460ppi) on Apple.

Huawei pulls ahead on comfort details. Its dual-layer OLED stacks two light-emitting layers, which should help it age more slowly, and its 1,440Hz PWM dimming flickers faster at low brightness, which some people find easier on the eyes at night. Apple answers with an anti-reflective coating and support for both HDR10 and Dolby Vision, the HDR formats Netflix and most streaming apps use. Huawei leans on its own HDR Vivid format.

For what you’ll see every day, call it a draw.

This is the round where the spec sheet hides the most. Geekbench is a test app that gives a phone’s processor a score, and single-core roughly measures how fast everyday taps and app launches feel, while multi-core reflects heavy work like exporting video.

The A20 Pro’s 4,042 single-core score is the highest ever recorded on Geekbench 7, even beating Apple’s M5 Max laptop chip in that one test. By our math, Apple leads by about 2.6x in single-core and almost 2x in multi-core, comparing Huawei’s best run against Apple’s. Against Huawei’s average runs, the gap gets wider.

There’s context Huawei deserves. It builds the Kirin under strict US limits on chipmaking equipment, and the Kirin 9050 Pro is its first chip to stack two layers of circuits. Huawei claims a 31% gain over last year and enough AI power to run a 30-billion-parameter model on the phone itself. The A20 Pro, meanwhile, is about 21% to 23% faster in single-core than last year’s A19 Pro, with a GPU up to 40% faster.

Games tell a kinder story for Huawei. In native HarmonyOS versions of Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves, the Mate ran roughly on par with last year’s iPhone 17 Pro Max, holding steady frame rates with low power draw.

The iPhone wins, and not only on raw numbers. That extra headroom is what keeps a phone feeling quick in year four or five, and it’s what heavier on-device AI features will lean on.

The Mate’s main camera uses a large 50MP, 1/1.28-inch sensor with an RYYB filter, which swaps green pixels for yellow ones to catch more light, plus a variable aperture (f/1.4 to f/4.0) and optical image stabilization (OIS), which physically moves parts of the camera to cancel out hand shake. The standout is the 200MP periscope telephoto, also 1/1.28-inch. A periscope lens folds light sideways inside the phone, so it zooms further without a thick bump. That big sensor lets Huawei crop to an “8x optical-quality” shot at about 50MP, with up to 100x digital zoom. A 40MP ultrawide and a 13MP selfie camera with a 3D depth sensor round it out.

Apple uses 48MP sensors on all three rear cameras. The 4x telephoto crops to a 12MP shot at 8x, giving what Apple calls a 16x optical-quality zoom range, with digital zoom up to 40x. Apple also added a variable aperture (f/1.48 to f/4.0) to its main camera this year, so that old Huawei advantage is gone.

The real gap is zoom. At 8x, Huawei keeps roughly four times as many pixels as Apple, which shows at concerts, sports, and wildlife. Apple’s strength is consistency: colors and exposure match closely as you switch lenses.

Huawei also sells camera hardware you attach to the phone itself:

Apple sells nothing comparable, only third-party clip-on lenses. There’s more on how Huawei’s Ruiying Z10 camera module works in our launch coverage.

Flip to video, and the result reverses. The iPhone records 4K at 120fps in Dolby Vision, shoots ProRes and ProRes RAW, and offers Cinematic mode at 4K 60fps and Action mode for shaky shots. ProRes is a professional video format that keeps more detail for editing, at the cost of much bigger files. Even the selfie camera records 4K Dolby Vision.

Huawei records up to 4K in its own HDR Vivid format. It’s good footage, but with fewer pro tools, and HDR Vivid isn’t widely supported by editing apps and platforms outside China.

For stills, Huawei wins, and its toolkit widens the gap. For video, the iPhone wins comfortably, and if you make videos for work, that should weigh more.

Huawei’s 6,800mAh battery is about 22% larger than Apple’s eSIM-only US model (5,567mAh) and 26% larger than the version with a physical SIM tray (5,391mAh). mAh (milliamp-hours) is simply how much charge a battery holds.

Charging isn’t close either. Huawei supports 100W wired and 50W wireless, plus reverse wireless charging and 18W reverse wired charging, so you can top up earbuds or a friend’s phone. Apple reaches 50% in about 15 minutes with a 60W adapter, a big step up for iPhone, and offers 25W MagSafe and Qi2 wireless charging. Its reverse charging tops out at 4.5W over a cable.

Apple’s efficiency narrows the gap more than the raw numbers suggest. The iPhone 18 Pro Max lasted about 18 hours 27 minutes in a standard web-browsing rundown, half an hour longer than its predecessor, and Apple rates it at up to 45 hours of video playback. The Mate scored 9 hours 56 minutes in a different standardized drain test, about 1.5 hours better than last year’s model. Because the two tests aren’t the same, we won’t put those results head to head.

Still, more capacity and much faster charging is a hard combination to beat. Huawei wins, clearly.

The Mate runs HarmonyOS 7, Huawei’s own operating system. In China, it’s a strong platform: native versions of WeChat, Alipay, and major games are ready, and extras like Huawei’s NearLink wireless tech and satellite messaging work out of the box. Outside China, it’s the dealbreaker. There’s no Google Play Store, which means no official Gmail, Google Maps, or YouTube apps, and many banking apps won’t install.

The iPhone runs iOS 27, with Apple Intelligence and the new Siri AI in beta. That’s a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere, since Siri AI still isn’t live for EU iPhones.

Price isn’t winning China outright for Huawei, either. In the week of September 14 to 20, Apple took 33% of China’s phone market. Over the full second quarter, though, Huawei led China with 22.6% of shipments against Apple’s 18.1%. Apple wins launch weeks, and Huawei wins the calendar.

Apple wins this round for most buyers. If you live in China, flip it.

After going through both spec sheets, benchmark data, and camera hardware line by line, here’s how the seven rounds land:

Three rounds to Huawei, three to Apple, one draw.

Get the Mate 90 Pro Max if you live in China or rarely depend on Google apps, shoot a lot of zoom photos at concerts, sports, or on trips, want a phone that lasts well past a full day and charges in minutes, or work somewhere wet, dusty, or rough on gear. It’s also the better value in China, where you get 512GB for less than Apple’s 256GB model.

Get the iPhone 18 Pro Max if you live outside China, make videos for work or social media, already use a Mac, iPad or Apple Watch, or plan to keep your phone for five years or more. In that last case, the A20 Pro’s extra headroom and Apple’s long update record are worth more than any spec Huawei leads on today.

On hardware alone, Huawei built the more ambitious phone. But performance and software are the two things you can’t fix with an accessory or a power bank, and Apple wins both, which is why we’d call the iPhone the safer buy for most people outside China.

Huawei hasn’t confirmed a global release. Recent Huawei flagships have reached markets like the Middle East and Southeast Asia months after China, usually at higher prices, and still without Google services, so check your banking and payment apps first.

Most cameras use red, green, and blue filters. RYYB swaps the green filters for yellow ones, which let in more light, so the sensor captures cleaner low-light photos. The trade-off is that colors need more processing to look natural.

Only if you want the new camera tricks. The A20 Pro is about 21% to 23% faster in single-core, and the main camera gains a variable aperture. For $1,299, $100 more than last year, most 17 Pro Max owners can comfortably wait.

The Mate 90 RS is Huawei’s luxury edition, with supercar-inspired styling and a higher price. It shares most of its hardware with the Pro Max but supports the Ruiying Z10 camera module, so you’re paying mostly for design and that accessory.

Yes. The vivo X500 Pro Max beats it in 4 of 7 rounds, and Honor’s Magic 9 Pro Max out-specs it for $969. Unlike the Mate, both run Android with Google apps where they’re sold internationally.

Vincee Cole is a technology journalist with four years of experience covering the full spectrum of modern tech — from consumer devices, artificial intelligence, to quantum computing, blockchain, and digital assets. His reporting cuts through complexity to deliver stories that are sharp, grounded, and relevant to both general readers and industry insiders. Previously, he worked with fintech research teams across Southeast Asia, analysing how emerging technologies are reshaping financial systems at scale.