Anthropic’s revenue continues to not only grow at an historic pace but also to accelerate. The model maker’s annualized revenue run rate — a projection of a full year’s revenue based on a recent, shorter period —surpassed $65 billion at the end of July, Bloomberg reported on Monday, up from $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of last year.

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

The company’s investors expect it to continue to grow at approximately the same rate for the remainder of the year, finishing 2026 between $100 billion and $120 billion, the Financial Times reported.

Meanwhile, rival OpenAI has doubled its revenue to $40 billion, up from $20 billion at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reported last week.

The two companies may calculate their revenue metrics differently, but Anthropic’s growth rate has captivated investors far more than OpenAI’s has.

Both companies have filed confidential IPO paperwork. Anthropic is expected to hit the public markets ahead of OpenAI — possibly as soon as this fall. Anthropic will be seeking a public valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to the Financial Times, which would make it the largest market debut on record.

Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in late May, when it raised a $65 billion round.

devops

Screen readers suffer as nearly 90% of top websites tested contain HTML spec violations

Are web coders losing their respect for standards? A recent review of the world’s largest sites suggests so.   

ValidateHTML, a project by independent French developer Théo Ducreux, examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, as estimated by the Tranco research project. They include the usual suspects (Google, YouTube, Akamai) plus those without public-facing components (Google’s “gstatic,” EZVIZ’s “Ezviz7”).

Ducreux found more than half – 2,656 sites – served a home page readable by humans. Many of the others, such as Google and EZVIZ’s, were just traffic redirection sites, a beacon for a company’s products to call home.

Headless or not, nearly 90 percent of these sites were not serving proper HTML, as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group). These standards are important so that different browsers and reading tools can render the requested pages in more or less the same way.  

Ducreux tallied a total of 100,305 HTML violations (including the most recent HTML5 specs) across all these sites, plus an additional 18,863 CSS errors. In other words, 87.2 percent of sites violate web specs in at least one place. Only 12.8 percent have fully valid HTML. And only 2.6 percent of all sites are completely clean, returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings.

More alarming, over a third of sites failed accessibility checks, which to their owners is more of a legal liability (and hence a compliance issue) than an embarrassment, given the potential reach of the 2025 European Accessibility Act. (Here in the U.S., woe be the accessibility-inconsiderate e-commerce site that raises the ire of the National Federation of the Blind.) 

Accessibility-wise, 20.4 percent of sites are missing alt text on images, which often contain vital information. Worse, 41.6 percent of pages are missing ARIA labels that identify page regions, potentially leaving screen readers struggling to convey the page’s structure. Here’s an iframe, figure it out. 

“Screen readers don’t have anywhere near the error tolerance Chrome has, so markup that looks totally fine to you can be broken for someone using assistive tech,” Ducreux told The Register. 

For the project, he used a home-built web crawler and a set of open-source parsers (HTML-validate, CSS Validator, Lightning CSS, fast-xml-parser). “The site, the scoring, and the crawl logic are my own code,” Ducreux explained by email. Ducreux is the principal maintainer for the project and the site. “No team, no funding, no company.”

An electronic Tower of Babel

Does lack of adherence to standards really matter? It’s an open question.

“The web is more a social creation than a technical one,” web creator Tim Berners-Lee wrote back in 1999. If we all go off and make our own standards, then it’s harder to connect and communicate.

The currently fashionable Dead Internet Theory – in which AI machines and not we meat sticks now make up most internet traffic – won’t get developers off the hook. As Shopify engineers have found, even superintelligence prefers shipshape markup. 

Browsers deserve part of the blame. Unless they have a fetish for the short-lived but brutally unforgiving XHTML, browsers today will just ignore any code they can’t grok. 

“Browsers are so good at error recovery that nothing forces anyone to fix” their code, Ducreux wrote on the site, “which is exactly why it accumulates.” Indulgence encourages slothfulness.  

Front-end frameworks create their own mischief. The single most common failure identified (in more than 59 percent of all the sites) is the misplaced element, aka incorrect tag nesting. Did you know you’re not allowed to put a style element within a div box? Many frameworks do, evidently. 

“It is a nesting problem created at build time, not in an editor,” Ducreux wrote on the site. “Nobody writes that by hand.” 

Many folks believe sloppy HTML is no big deal, including some in the peanut gallery at Hacker News. One contributor noted that “HTML5 defines a method for turning more-or-less any sequence of bytes into the same DOM tree,” DOM being the Document Object Model the browser uses to understand a web page. 

Ducreux himself doesn’t see bad HTML as an existential threat to the web, outside of hindering accessibility, which can leave someone guessing at online content they may really need to understand. 

“Honestly, most invalid HTML doesn’t break anything visible, browsers are built to guess what you meant and just patch it silently,” he wrote by e-mail. But at the same time, the web isn’t just about browsers.  

“AI agents reading pages, voice assistants, translation tools, screen readers – none of them have Chrome’s 20 years of guessing your intent,” he wrote. “Writing to spec is what makes a page mean the same thing to all of them, not just to whoever’s rendering it in Chrome that day.” ®

Following California and Ohio, Apple Wallet is getting another driver’s license, with North Carolina preparing to bring digital IDs to the iPhone. The state is currently developing its mobile ID program, but residents won’t be able to add their license directly to Apple Wallet at launch. Instead, North Carolina will first roll out its own NC Wallet app, with support for Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, and Samsung Wallet expected to follow in early 2027.

Apple Wallet support is coming later

The initial NC mobile ID rollout is expected to arrive before the major wallet integrations. North Carolina’s DMV has been pursuing a mobile driver’s license solution as part of its technology modernization efforts, and the state says the digital credential will provide another way for residents to prove their identity without carrying the physical card.

The Apple Wallet version should work much like Apple’s existing digital IDs. Once supported, users will be able to authenticate themselves on their iPhone, with Apple’s system designed to let users control what information is shared rather than simply handing over the entire license. Apple currently supports digital driver’s licenses and state IDs in a growing number of U.S. locations. However, North Carolina isn’t yet listed among the states with active Apple Wallet ID support.

The physical license isn’t going anywhere

There is an important distinction here: a digital license is intended to be an additional option, not an immediate replacement for the physical card. North Carolina’s mobile ID program is being developed alongside the existing physical credential, meaning residents won’t suddenly be expected to leave their plastic license at home.

That makes the eventual Apple Wallet integration more useful than revolutionary. For people who already carry their iPhone everywhere, having the driver’s license alongside payment cards, boarding passes, and other credentials is a natural next step, although the physical driver’s license probably shouldn’t be tossed in the drawer just yet.

Denser NAND has made yesterday’s tiny capacities increasingly hard to justify.

NAND learned to cram in a lot more data

luchschenF/Shutterstock

Making tiny drives doesn’t save much

A company builds a governed context layer specifically to stop its AI agents from confidently giving wrong answers. Once that layer is live, the company is more than twice as likely to report the failure happening — not less.

In the past six months, 68% of enterprises have traced a confident but wrong AI agent answer to missing or inconsistent business context. Thirty-seven percent say it happened more than once, ahead of the 32% who saw it happen only once. The figures come from a VB Pulse July 2026 survey of 101 qualified enterprises with more than 100 employees. That’s up from 57% in a VB Pulse survey conducted in June. Recurring failures climbed too, from 31% then to 37% now.

This is the second time VB Pulse has asked enterprises this exact question, once in June and now in July. The failure rate is climbing, not falling, even as more enterprises report a governed layer in production, up from 25% in June to 32% now.

How agents get context determines whether they’re wrong

Every AI agent needs some way to know what the business actually means, whether a metric is defined consistently, whether a document is current. That’s the operation. The challenge is that enterprises hand agents that context in very different ways, and those ways are not equally reliable.

Retrieval over documents remains the most common approach, the primary source for 31% of enterprises. But a real share of enterprises skip a structured approach altogether. Thirteen percent run agents primarily on long-context loading, feeding documents directly into the model’s context window rather than retrieving them. Five percent give agents no structured context at all, just the model’s general knowledge. Between them, nearly one in five enterprises are feeding agents business context by brute force or not feeding it at all.

Even the leading approach can still produce a confidently wrong answer. Retrieval works by matching a question to text that looks similar in meaning. Similar wording doesn’t guarantee the same meaning. Srijith Rajamohan, an AI research leader at Redis, described exactly this gap in an interview with VentureBeat earlier this year. 

“If you have a sentence like ‘Rome is closer than Paris’ and another that says ‘Paris is closer than Rome,’ and you do an embedding retrieval followed by a text search, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference,” Rajamohan said. “The same words exist in both sentences.”

Buying shifted to access control. Grading didn’t follow.

The way enterprises choose a retrieval system doesn’t help close the gap. Access control and permissions now tie ease of data ingestion as the top selection criteria, at 24% each. It’s the first time in this survey series that a governance property has led to the buying decision. Retrieval accuracy trails at 15%. The property most directly tied to a confident wrong answer isn’t the property most enterprises are buying for.

Once a system is running, correctness is still how enterprises judge it. Response correctness is the primary success metric for 38% of enterprises, twice the next closest answer, security and access control at 19%. Enterprises are shifting how they buy toward governance. They’re still grading success on whether the answer is right.

The companies fixing this are the ones reporting it worst

A governed context layer is meant to fix this. It’s one shared, agreed-on model of what the business’s data means, that every agent and BI tool references instead of guessing on its own. Adoption is far from settled.

Thirty-two percent of enterprises run one in production. Thirty-one percent are piloting or building one right now. Twenty percent are evaluating one. Fourteen percent have no plans to, and 4% don’t know.

Compare that adoption data against who’s actually had the failure, and the picture inverts. Among the 91 enterprises able to say whether they’d experienced the failure at all, those running or building a governed layer report it recurring at 50%. Those without one report it at 21%.

A governed layer doesn’t cause the failure — it’s what makes the failure visible in the first place. Tracing a bad answer to a broken definition or a stale table requires a shared, governed reference point. A context layer provides that. Without one, the same wrong answer still happens — it just gets chalked up to the model, or never gets traced at all.

The pain point predates AI by decades. Kyle Nesbit, founder of the semantic layer startup Credible Data, described it to VentureBeat last month. “It’s the same pain point people have had for 30 years, the lack of governed data analysis,” Nesbit said. “Now with AI, it’s the same problem, but orders of magnitude more chaos and pain.”

Company size sharpens the same point. Enterprises with more than 1,000 employees report recurring failures at 55%, against 30% for those between 101 and 1,000 employees. That’s despite the bigger companies being less likely to have a layer already in production, 24% against 37%. More instrumentation and more people asking why a number was wrong turns up more failures, not fewer. A clean record is not evidence of a healthy context layer. It’s at least as likely to be evidence that nobody’s checking.

What this means for enterprises

Here’s what this adds up to for enterprises building on this layer.

Retrieval alone will not close the context gap. RAG remains the default context source, and nearly one in five enterprises are running agents on long-context loading or no structured context layer at all. More documents or a bigger index doesn’t fix a definition that means two different things in two different systems.

The budget is moving faster than the infrastructure is shipping. Sixty-three percent of enterprises are already building or running a governed context layer. Only 32% have actually gotten one into production. That gap is where the spend is going, not where the problem has been solved.

A clean failure record is a red flag, not a green one. The 22% of enterprises reporting no context failure at all are not the best-governed group. They’re the group least likely to be checking. The size data backs this up directly. Larger enterprises report recurring failures at nearly twice the rate of mid-market peers, despite being less likely to have a governed layer in production, not more.

No one is planning to hand the layer to a single provider. Seventy-nine percent of enterprises intend to keep at least part of the context layer outside any one vendor’s stack, split between best-of-breed tools and an explicit mix. Just 12% plan to consolidate onto a single provider’s native context stack.

The finding that organizations aren’t likely to hand over control to a single provider is a theme that VentureBeat has reported on consistently this year. Michael Ni, an analyst at Constellation Research, put it bluntly earlier this year when DataHub’s context layer push first landed.

 “Whoever controls runtime context, controls the AI decision layer for enterprise data,” Ni said.

According to online reports, Apple has added ‘classic’ films to its TV service, and I imagine that some will exclaim that it’s “about damn time”.

One of the main criticisms (not by me, mind you) levied at Apple TV is that its library isn’t big enough. Yes, I’d agree in the sense that its catalogue is not as big as others, but in another sense I don’t agree because the point of Apple TV is that it is small and building a reputation for good quality TV series (less so about the films).

Every service has to start somewhere, and they all started small. HBO wasn’t a giant when it started (in the vein of Game of Thrones, it was more a usurper). Neither was Showtime nor Comedy Central, to name a few.

Part of Apple TV’s raison d’etre is that it’s a streaming boutique, and if it were to license catalogues for streaming in the vein of Netflix or Prime Video, then what would set it apart from them?

The addition of these ‘classic’ movies is a swerve ball because none of them are particularly recent (Arrival is ten years old this year); they’re not from any one studio but a selection of Sony, Paramount, 20^th Century, Walt Disney etc and a very curious selection of genres at that.

It seems as if Apple is testing the waters, but what is it a launchpad for? A wider selection, a buffer for when its own release schedule is a bit thin? It’s made me ponder a few things about why Apple just didn’t buy Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. would have been a great fit

If there’s any service that Apple TV seems to be aping, it’d be HBO. High-quality, (mostly) original content that tells a wide and diverse range of stories. HBO is the standard that every other channel and TV service wants to match.

But Apple, and I’d wager it could be viewed as either ambitious or arrogant, wants to build something, not acquire it. That certainly takes a much longer time, and recently, there have been questions asked about whether Apple really wants to devote lots of money to a service that’s losing money. That said, it seems most streaming services are losing money, though recently there have been signs of a turnaround.

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Nevertheless, buying Warner Bros. would have given it a massive library. It would have given it a built-in subscriber base and audience from HBO Max (140 million compared to Apple’s 45 million), which also means it would have given Apple TV scale and reach – the ability to reach a wide number of people.

Apple seems to think that everyone with an iPhone or iPad would be interested in its streaming service, to the point where it’s virtually given it away in the last few years to ensure people come to the service. That doesn’t build a streaming service, at least not in the long-term.

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Apple TV’s films are weak sauce

There is this baffling experiment streamers seem to have indulged in, where they make a film, and it turns out to be not very good.

The best Netflix films tend to be ones already produced outside of the Netflix system that it snaps up at festivals. Very rarely has it developed a manner of consistently creating good content. That’s another reason why Netflix was interested in Warner Bros.

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Others have been equally up and down. For every Project Hail Mary there seems to be a Masters of the Universe for Prime Video, but Apple TV has arguably been the worst of the lot because it has spent huge amounts of money, and lassoed star names and managed to produce limp and forgettable efforts. At least Netflix has Beasts of No Nation and The Irishman in its back catalogue; what exactly has Apple done?

Warner Bros.’ slate of 2025 films were virtually all smash hits, generating cultural awareness and becoming part of the conversation, which is something you’d think Apple would like to be a part of. This has been a part of Warner Bros.’ DNA for decades, and it’s not something that you can magic up in an instant.

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That said, Apple did make Killers of the Flower Moon, but it felt as if it came and went along with the awards season of that year. Apple TV’s films need staying power. They need to last – it needs its own version of The Sixth Sense that it’s just licensed. Films that people remember and come back to. The films Apple TV has licensed are a reminder of just that.

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Apple TV needs a hit factory

I respect Apple’s approach in the sense that it’s creating original content, but it can’t keep ploughing huge amounts of money into films that are so forgettable that you can’t remember watching them, or exist almost as art exhibits, to be seen, pondered about and then moved on from. It needs things to keep people coming back to.

HBO has Game of Thrones, and it had the likes of Euphoria, The Wire, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Netflix had Stranger Things and it has One Piece. Prime Video has The Marvelous Miss Maisel and Reacher is currently in its fourth season.

They have shows that people keep coming back to. Apple TV has this as well: Slow Horses, Severance, Silo, Ted Lasso, but does not own all of these shows (Ted Lasso is actually Warner Bros., Silo is co-produced with AMC Studios, and Severance was owned by production company Fifth Season until it bought the rights in early 2026). And as good as these series have been, they’ve not dramatically boosted its subscriber base. 45 million in seven years does not look great. Disney+ has about 132 million in about the same time – that’s almost three times as much.

Whether Apple likes it or not, developing and then extending recognisable films and series is what people react to. There’s admiration in what Apple is doing, but there’s also a sense of naivety. For the established studios, most of whom have celebrated their 100-year anniversaries in the last five years, it’s taken decades to reach this point.

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Apple can’t take decades of losses on principle, which makes it all the more galling that Warner Bros. was right there for the taking, and it didn’t even bid. I wonder whether that’ll be a wise decision in a few years’ time.

Google just unveiled its latest lineup of Pixel phones, including the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL and Pixel 11 Pro Fold. If you’re looking for the model with a bigger screen, consider the Pro XL, which now starts at $1,299 for the 256GB storage configuration.

The Pro XL model has always been Google’s big-screen, big-battery flagship and typically features the company’s latest developments in screen technology, performance and camera quality. That holds true this year, with the Pixel 11 Pro XL fielding its brightest display yet (up to 3,600 nits), a more AI-optimized Tensor G6 chipset and a new camera system that can capture up to 120x distances with Super Res Zoom. There’s plenty of flashy AI tricks to go around, too.

If many of those aspects remind you of another big-sized phone, then that makes two of us.

The Pixel 11 Pro XL competes closely with Apple’s $1,199 iPhone 17 Pro Max, which continues to hold up as the best premium iPhone on the market. While Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 18 series as early as September, the current model remains a formidable option for those planning to upgrade today.

And if you’re now split between the new Pixel 11 Pro XL and the iPhone 17 Pro Max, here’s a breakdown of how the two flagships compare across key categories.

Pixel 11 Pro XL vs. iPhone 17 Pro Max: Design and display

On the surface, the two phones are built rather similarly, with a combination of recycled plastics, metals and aluminum surrounding the displays, cameras and internal components. The iPhone has a slightly larger 6.9-inch OLED display compared with the Pixel’s 6.8-inch OLED, but you likely won’t notice the difference.

Where things begin to separate is with the screen brightness, at least on paper. The new Pixel 11 Pro XL is rated for 3,600 nits of peak brightness, making it one of the brightest phones you can buy. By comparison, the iPhone 17 Pro Max peaks at 3,000 nits. We’ll have to see if the difference in numbers translates into real-world advantages, such as the legibility of text and pictures outdoors. Stay tuned.

The design of the cameras is different, too, both on the front and the back. On the front of the Pixel 11 Pro XL, there’s a punch-hole camera that’s strictly used for facial recognition and selfies. Whereas on the iPhone (as has been the case with iPhones for the last few years), there’s the pill-shaped Dynamic Island that doubles as a status indicator for quick access to the music player, timers, Uber rides and more.

Besides making the Pixel 11 Pro XL’s camera bump slimmer this year, Google has also integrated a new HiLight LED that pulses colors based on who’s calling you or if you’re conversing with Gemini. It’s a modern interpretation of the notification LED found on BlackBerrys and old-school Android phones, and it could be even better if Google expands its customizability in the future. The iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t have this exact feature, but the Always-On Display option, as well as the Flash for Alerts toggle within the Accessibility settings, are decent alternatives for staying on top of notifications without waking up your phone. 

The iPhone also has two extra buttons. The Action Button is the most flexible, which you can program to perform unique functions, such as starting cooking timers and triggering Shortcuts – ordering coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts shouldn’t be this easy. It also has a Camera Control button, meant for quickly turning on the camera, and its pressure sensitivity helps for adjusting settings before taking a photo.

Lastly, each device comes with a set of unique and mostly fun colors. The Pixel 11 Pro XL comes in Olive (an earthy green), Fog (gray), Obsidian (matte black) and Canyon (with warm, salmon-ish tones). The iPhone 17 Pro Max comes in Deep Blue, Silver and Cosmic Orange – the latter of which shimmers with bold, vibrant hues. Pumpkin? Fanta? Cheetos?

Pixel 11 Pro XL vs. iPhone 17 Pro Max: Performance and battery

Google says the new Tensor G6 chipset should yield 25% faster browsing speeds and 3.5 times faster on-device AI processing, among other benefits, for the Pixel 11 Pro XL. While I would file most of those numbers in the marketing drawer, our early hands-on experience with the phones demonstrated the processor’s fluidity and snappiness on Android 17.

We’ll have to benchmark the phone to get a full read on its performance, especially under duress and in real-world usage. But the fact that the Tensor G6 is built on a 2nm (nanometer) architecture, compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 3nm A19 chipset, should give it an edge. The smaller nanometer value implies that Google was able to fit more transistors in the same space, thereby improving the phone’s overall performance and power efficiency.

That last point is important because the Pixel 11 Pro XL packs a 5,115-mAh battery. That’s a sizable capacity compared with the industry average (between 4,500 and 5,000), and just barely larger than the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 5,088 mAh. So it all comes down to how efficiently the phones can operate, from the heat dissipation of the vapor-cooling chambers on both devices to the computational synergy with Android 17 and iOS 26. The Pixel 11 Pro XL still needs to go through CNET’s battery tests, but it does have a high bar to overcome: the iPhone 17 Pro Max recently won CNET’s Lab Award for having the best battery life among all of the phones we’ve tested in 2025 and early 2026.

I can’t compare the Pixel 11 Pro XL to the iPhone 17 Pro Max without mentioning the Gemini versus Siri debate. On the Pixel 11 Pro XL, Gemini can leverage the internet to run agentic (in the background) tasks, such as ordering a DoorDash for you while you’re browsing. Features like Rambler, which filter out filler words like “ummm” and “ahhh” when you’re dictating, are more grounded but just as technically advanced.

Until Apple launches iOS 27 to the public later this year, the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Siri are more limited in functionality. As of today, you can use the assistant to interact with native apps like iMessage, such as sending a text to a contact or drafting an email. You’ll also notice some Siri/AI smarts when inquiring about on-screen elements or via the camera app. 

The takeaway: Gemini is superior, but buying an iPhone doesn’t mean you’re completely locked out of using Google’s AI features. If anything, wait until iOS 27 and Siri AI launches (or download the public beta) to get a full scope of how AI is utilized across the two phones.

Pixel 11 Pro XL vs. iPhone 17 Pro Max: Cameras

As far as the cameras go, both phones feature a triple-camera setup, with capabilities that go beyond the hardware specs.

Pixel and iPhone cameras

CNET’s Jeff Carlson compared the Pixel 10 Pro XL’s cameras with the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s last year and found the two going neck-and-neck across different conditions, lighting environments and subject types. We’re talking high marks for capturing and retaining details and colors, even when sensor-cropping. 

I’m expecting similar results this year, as Google has put more effort into improving the ease of capturing photos and videos, such as the speed at which Night Sight photos are taken and processed, than anything else. The company is also touting its Magic Capture Mode, which lets you record a video while the phone automatically captures shots it deems ideal. This could be great for taking photos of moving subjects like pets, kids and sports events where getting a perfect shot is challenging.

If you’re less enthusiastic about AI enhancements, Google’s new Camera Looks feature lets you apply film-inspired color profiles before taking photos, bypassing the computational modifications that typically happen between you capturing and opening the photo in the gallery.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max has a similar capability called Photographic Styles, which lets you adjust the tone, shadow levels, color temperature and other settings in the camera app.

Pixel 11 Pro XL vs. iPhone 17 Pro Max: Storage, charging and other specs

The charging specs of both phones are quite similar. The Pixel 11 Pro XL is slightly faster, with a max wired charging rate of 45 watts, compared with the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 40 watts. As for wireless charging, the Pixel 11 Pro XL and iPhone 17 Pro Max both support 25-watt speeds over Qi2.2 with native support for magnetic accessories like Google’s PixelSnap and Apple’s MagSafe wireless chargers. In our wireless charging tests, the 17 Pro Max recharged by 53% in 30 minutes. We’ll have to run the Pixel 11 Pro XL through the same test, but for reference, last year’s 10 Pro XL recharged by 32%.

With Google raising the base price of the Pixel 11 Pro XL this year, its configurations (256GB, 512GB and 1TB) are now on par with those of the iPhone 17 Pro Max. That means your buying decision, when it comes to pricing at least, may boil down to how competitive your carrier or online retailer’s trade-in credits and promotions are.

While iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones are notorious for getting the most aggressive BOGO and “free phone” deals, Google Pixel customers should find similar buying opportunities, especially during these initial launch weeks, now that you can preorder it. With Apple set to launch new iPhones next month, you may even find a second-hand iPhone 17 Pro Max for less money. And this sort of price comparison is all the more important, as phone costs continue to rise amid an ongoing RAM shortage that’s driving up manufacturing costs. Apple raised the prices on over a dozen products this summer, and we’ll find out soon if the expected iPhone 18 Pro Max ends up following suit.

Check out the chart below for more specs to compare between the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL and Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL vs. Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max specs

Kerry Wan is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNET, based in New York City.
He has over 10 years of experience testing and reviewing consumer technology from mobile hardware to home entertainment.

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