A new market-tracking note from Chinese blogger RD Observation says the Xiaomi 17 Max got off to a slower start than the standard Xiaomi 17, at least by first-week activation volume.
According to the blogger, using the first seven days of sales as the comparison window—May 25 through May 31—the Xiaomi 17 Max reached roughly 25% of the standard Xiaomi 17’s volume over the same period. The blogger emphasized that the comparison is only a reference point, since the Max model is not a direct successor to any earlier Xiaomi product.
The numbers also come from a third-party data source, so they should be treated as an outside estimate rather than official Xiaomi sales data. Xiaomi has not announced a formal first-week sales figure for the device.
RD Observation added one more interesting detail in the comments. In most phone launches, a very small number of units may be activated before the official sales date. For the Xiaomi 17 Max, though, the blogger claimed that activations between May 22 and May 24 had already reached the tens-of-thousands level. That led to speculation that some early sales may have taken place before the official launch date.
Some users in the comment section backed up that idea with their own buying experience. One user said customers who placed blind reservations at offline Xiaomi Home stores were able to pick up the phone two days before the May 25 launch date, with some units reportedly available on May 23.
As previously reported by IT Home, the Xiaomi 17 Max officially launched in May. The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s fifth-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform and packs an 8,000mAh Xiaomi Jinshajiang battery.
The device also features Xiaomi’s first Leica-branded 200-megapixel main camera, a 6.9-inch “Super Pixel” display, and three color options: white, sky blue, and pixel black.
Pricing after China’s national subsidy starts at 4,299 yuan. For US readers, the key takeaway is that Xiaomi is still pushing aggressively into large-screen, big-battery flagship phones, but early third-party data suggests the Max variant may be selling at a much smaller scale than the mainstream Xiaomi 17 model.
That does not necessarily mean the phone is underperforming. Since the Xiaomi 17 Max sits in a more specific size and feature category, its audience may naturally be narrower. Still, the reported 25% first-week ratio gives a useful early snapshot of how Xiaomi’s larger flagship is being received in the Chinese smartphone market.
