Honor Magic 9 Pro Max melds a classic ARRI camera with an iPhone-like look, launches this month

Ben Schoon | Sep 9 2026 - 9:30 am PT

Honor has officially shown off its next flagship, the Honor Magic 9 Pro Max, which has a pretty familiar-looking design, a massive camera powered by ARRI, and a release date that’s mere weeks away.

Honor Magic 9 Pro Max is a new entry to the company’s flagship lineup, arriving on top of the Pro that was at the top of the list in prior years – “Pro Max” is a whole trend this year, it seems.

There’s still a ton we don’t know about this new device, but it’s clear that the camera is right at the center of the conversation.

A huge camera lens on the back takes up over half of the phone’s width, with two other cameras flanking it. They all sit on an iPhone-like camera island with an accent color on the bottom half of the device – this is a very obvious case of “inspiration” drawn from Apple’s latest, though Honor argues the arrangement “draws inspiration from the design language of one of ARRI’s most iconic cinema cameras.”

Advertisement - scroll for more content

Honor explains:

The design journey of the HONOR Magic9 Pro Max began with a simple question: How can a device inspire the same sense of creative possibility as cinema? For nearly a century, ARRI has helped filmmakers turn imagination into moving images. In 1937, the iconic ARRIFLEX cinema camera revolutionized professional filmmaking with its legendary “three-lens turret”—a design that brought function, precision, and industrial beauty into one form. Today, HONOR joins hands with ARRI to bring that timeless inspiration to the HONOR Magic9 Pro Max through an all-new camera architecture. (Image attached)

There’s clear inspiration in the camera design, but the phone as a whole certainly brings in some iPhone vibes, and it’s a wild change of pace from last year’s Honor Magic 8.

Specs on the cameras and the phone as a whole aren’t official yet, but ARRI is a part of the processing pipeline, just like on Honor’s Robot Phone.

Hands-on: Honor’s Robot Phone is probably the coolest phone you still can’t buy

The signature color here is “Moss Green” and Honor says it will fully unveil the Magic 9 Pro Max on September 28. That’s only in China, though, with a global release presumably following later on.