iPhone 16 Pro Max Price in UK: £703 or £999, Same Phone

Search the iPhone 16 Pro Max price in UK today and Google hands you four numbers for the same 256GB phone. Apple's own refurbished store says £949. Back Market says £703. PriceSpy calls £999.99 the best price. A comparison page still sitting on page one says £1,099.

None of those pages is lying. They are quoting four different things and calling them all the price. Apple no longer sells this phone new at all, so every figure you see is either a refurbished unit, a used one, or leftover stock at a number Apple set a long time ago.

Here is what each one actually buys you, and the bit of arithmetic that made me stop and check: Apple's refurbished 16 Pro Max costs more than a brand new iPhone 17.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max price in UK, all four of them

Checked this morning, 21 September 2026, all UK sites, all 256GB unless stated:

• Apple Certified Refurbished: £949 (512GB £1,119, 1TB £1,289)
• Back Market, Fair grade: £703 (512GB £818, 1TB £871)
• PriceSpy's listed best price: £999.99, a sealed new unit on eBay
• A comparison page still ranking on page one: £1,099, last touched in January

That is a spread of £396 between the cheapest and dearest figure Google shows you. My maths: the top number is 56.3 per cent more than the bottom one, for a phone with the same model number on the back.

The £1,099 is the one to ignore first. It is the price Apple charged when it was selling the thing new, and Apple has not sold a new 16 Pro Max in the UK for a while now. It is still ranking because Google has not recrawled it, which is its own small lesson about how quickly Apple pricing pages go stale.

Why £703 and £949 are not the same product

This is the comparison every page-one result skips, and it is the only one that matters.

Apple's refurbished listing carries a line worth reading twice: full one-year warranty with a brand new battery and outer shell. Not a cleaned-up battery. A new one, and a new chassis, which is why Apple's refurbished iPhones turn up looking untouched. I went through what Apple's refurbished programme actually replaces a couple of weeks ago, and the iPhone side of it is genuinely generous in a way the Mac side is not.

Back Market's £703 is a Fair grade handset with a twelve-month seller warranty. Fair means visible wear. The battery is whatever the previous owner left you, and on a phone from 2024 that is the part I would worry about.

So the £246 gap between them is not a bargain you are missing. My maths puts Back Market 25.9 per cent below Apple, and what that 25.9 per cent buys is a new battery, a new shell, and Apple handling the warranty rather than a marketplace seller.

Worth knowing before you decide: Back Market's own ladder on the 256GB is £703 Fair, £715 Good, £753 Excellent, £827 Premium. Premium is only £122 short of Apple's refurbished price, at which point I would take Apple's.

The number that should stop you: a new iPhone 17 is cheaper

Apple's UK store right now starts the iPhone 17 at £899 and the iPhone 16 at £799. The refurbished 16 Pro Max is £949.

My arithmetic: Apple is charging 5.6 per cent more for a refurbished two-year-old Pro Max than for a brand new iPhone 17, and 18.8 per cent more than for a brand new iPhone 16. Same shop, same warranty length, one of them has never been opened.

That does not automatically make the refurb a bad buy. The Pro Max gives you the bigger screen, the telephoto camera and the larger battery, and if those are why you are here then paying £50 over a new 17 is a defensible trade. But nobody on page one puts those two numbers next to each other, and they should.

The Back Market end of the range reads very differently. At £703 you are £196 under a new iPhone 17, which is 21.8 per cent less, and within £4 of a brand new iPhone 17e at £699. That is the genuinely interesting comparison: the cheapest used Pro Max in the UK costs almost exactly what Apple's cheapest new iPhone costs.

Storage is where the used market actually wins

If you want more than 256GB, the gap between the two routes widens sharply.

• Apple refurbished: 256GB to 512GB is £170. 512GB to 1TB is another £170.
• Back Market: 256GB to 512GB is £115. 512GB to 1TB is £53.

My maths on that last step: Apple charges £170 to go from 512GB to 1TB, Back Market charges £53. That is 68.8 per cent less for the same jump. Per gigabyte, Apple's second storage step works out at about 33p and Back Market's at about 11p.

The practical read: if you only want the base 256GB, Apple's refurbished price is defensible. If you want 1TB, £1,289 from Apple against £871 used is a £418 difference, and that is a lot to pay for a new battery.

The colour tax nobody mentions

One more thing I noticed while pricing this up. On Back Market, Black Titanium in Fair condition starts at £703, but Natural Titanium in the same grade starts at £739. That is £36, or 5.1 per cent, for a colour, on a used phone, in the same condition band. Apple's refurbished store charges the same across all four finishes.

What I would actually buy

If you want the Pro Max specifically and you want it to feel new, Apple's refurbished 256GB at £949 is the honest option, and I would take it over any marketplace listing at £900-odd. The new battery is the whole argument.

If you want a big-screen iPhone and the Pro badge is negotiable, a new iPhone 17 at £899 beats it on price, on battery age and on the length of software support ahead of it.

If you are price-led, Back Market at £703 for a Fair 256GB is the right call as long as you go in expecting scuffs and a tired battery, and you budget for a battery service. Do not assume AppleCare One will cover an ageing battery on a phone you bought from a marketplace either - check eligibility before you count on it.

What I would not do is take PriceSpy's £999.99 at face value. A comparison engine calling £999.99 the best price on a phone Apple will sell you refurbished for £949 is the clearest sign that nobody is checking these listings against Apple itself.

Questions people actually ask

Does Apple still sell the iPhone 16 Pro Max new in the UK?

No. Apple's UK line-up is now the iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPhone 17, iPhone 17e and iPhone 16. The 16 Pro Max only appears in the Certified Refurbished store, at £949 for 256GB.

Is the iPhone 16 Pro Max price in UK cheaper refurbished or second hand?

Second hand is cheaper on paper, by £246 at the time of writing. Refurbished from Apple includes a brand new battery and outer shell and a full one-year warranty, which a Fair-grade used handset does not. The cheaper number is real, it just buys less.

What should I pay for a 512GB iPhone 16 Pro Max?

£1,119 from Apple refurbished or £818 from Back Market. The £301 gap is the widest of any storage tier, so this is the size where the used route is most tempting.

My take

There is no single iPhone 16 Pro Max price in UK, and the pages that claim otherwise are usually quoting a number Apple stopped charging months ago. There is a £703 phone with an old battery, a £949 phone with a new one, and an £899 new iPhone 17 sitting quietly between them that most of these pages forget to mention.

All prices here were checked on 21 September 2026 and will move. The percentages are my own arithmetic on those figures.

Source: Refurbished iPhone 16 Pro Max, Apple UK