iPhone 15 Pro Max: The Ultimate Review of Apple's Flagship"

This is the iPhone 15 Pro not a lot of changes(logo whooshing So, okay, I think people have gotta get this thought out of their head that you've gotta upgrade every year to the newest phone Like, I realize most of us already know this, but for some reason, people are still stuck on this thing where they say, "Oh, last year's phone is barely different from this year's phone, it's not worth upgrading.

Introduction 

" But like, that's not new, like the Zenfone 10, I just reviewed is just a refinement of Zenfone 9. Like the bleeding edge ROG phone has looked the same for three years now, the Pixel is finding its stride with design. But what we're looking for is for them to fix anything wrong or bad, and then just find ways, clever ways, good, interesting ways to just get a little bit better every year, so that over a long time, over a bunch of improvements,

It adds up to a bigger, more significant change. So that's what's happening here with this iPhone 15 Pro. I've been using it for about two weeks now. They've made some improvements, but now we're starting to also see some possible problems, some new issues that have risen, so let's talk about it. So there are four new features they've added here. I'm gonna go over some of the more fundamental and existential stuff in the regular iPhone 15 review, to see that when it comes out. But for the Pro, it's time to deep dive into the stuff that's unique to this one, the professional staff. 

Display

That being the build, the chip, the cameras, and the Action Button. So easiest place to start is the way they've built this phone. So Apple made an update to the build and the materials of the iPhone this year, they've softened the corners a little bit, it's still a boxy design, but, you know, now, instead of a completely flat glass at the front, there's this gentle little curve just at the very edges. I think that'll maybe make screen protectors slightly more intricate, but I think it has a nice look to it. And then the screen sizes are the same, but now the bezels are a tiny bit slimmer all the way around. So technically the phone is like one millimeter smaller diagonally and the rails have famously switched from that shiny stainless steel to a lighter, coated, and brushed titanium. The result, it's very slightly better,

 

I think. It's kind of funny, I've always associated a heavy phone with like expensive feeling, you know? Like, ceramic phones are extra heavy, they feel like substance. But I understand why people want it to be lighter. And so, this phone is noticeably lighter than the previous Pro. It's 10% on paper, but it feels like more than 10%. And then, there's a new set of colors too so I'm sticking with it, this new natural titanium is the best color, this is the first year I am not ordering a dark or black iPhone. They still look good, don't get me wrong, but they get all kinds of fingerprints on them like crazy.

 Also, my worries about the light-colored scratches, if you go deep enough,  So because I'm on the team no case, I'm going with the all-gray phone, I think it looks dope, so I'm going with that. I think the idea is, that if you have a perfectly working phone, there's no world where you should upgrade to this one just for the titanium build or just for the slightly thinner bezels.

 

But you have to appreciate, put this up next to an iPhone 11, then, yeah, you can see the differences compounding over time. Just like if you sat in a 992 generation 911 right now after sitting in a 997 generation car. But the real highlight of this build here, let's be honest, is there's a new port at the bottom, that USB type C, which makes a big difference to people like me who have other gadgets in their life, computers, headphones, mouse, keyboard, I just bring one charger, it works with everything. I have already had this rite of passage moment that everyone who gets this phone is gonna have where you have an existing Lightning cable and you try to plug it in and then you're like, oh right, new cable. But now I've gotten used to it.

But the thing is, I could have sworn Apple would do more with this port. Like, okay, we know that they were forced into doing this by the EU, so shout out to the EU for that. Now we have a USB iPhone, but the only pitch is just, hey, one cable for everything. That's it, Apple? So like with 30 pins to Lightning all those years ago, the benefit was obvious, it's just so much smaller of a port that lets them fit more stuff in the phone, plus it's reversible now. Now with this USB type C, it's like okay, it was already small, it was already reversible, charging speed did not improve at all, it's still 25 watts.

Desines And Views

 There's no extra like desktop mode, plug it into a monitor and get, there are no decks or anything like that, right? It's just one cable for everything. Okay, fine, sure, welcome to the club. You know, iPhone users can now take advantage of the U in USB-C. I talked about the handshake it does with plugging directly into other phones and reverse-charging them at four and  that's pretty neat. You can also plug in other things, plug as a keyboard and type with it, or plug in a monitor, it'll mirror your screen at up to 4K 60.

 The Pro phone now supports USB 3.0 data transfer speeds so you can get that ProRes footage off the phone noticeably faster, and you can, for the first time, shoot video directly onto an external drive. Now there's some talk about the cable that comes in the box. Remember that nice high-quality braided USB-C cable Does that come in the box? But it's only USB 2.0 transfer speeds, it's a slow cable. So if you have a Pro phone, do you need to get a faster separate cable for it? That seemed weird to people, but it's not, that's very normal.

 Most smartphones come with just a USB-C cable just to charge. It's a charging cable.If you wanted a data cable, you'd have to buy a thicker, more robust cablethat looks the same but is a data cable.It's kind of confusing and annoying actually. Welcome to the world of USB-C, my friends, it's good to have you.But that is a good segue to the main enabler, the new powerhouse chip inside this phone with a new name,the A17 Pro. So the base iPhone 15s got last year's A16 bionic from the 14 Pro. And so, here's this new more powerful chip in the highest-end phones and it's not the A17 Bionic, this is the first one with the Pro name, A17 Pro, and this thing goeskind of crazy on paper.

 This is their first three-nanometer chip, the first three-nanometer chip in any phone that we'll probably see for at least another year or two. I ran some benchmarks, it's approaching M1 chip levels of synthetic benchmark scores, and compared to last year, it's 10 to 20% more powerful on both the CPU and the GPU, which is very respectable. But more power is likemore horsepower in a car. It's only useful or noticeable if it lets you do more things with it.

 I'm gonna live with this analogy a bit more for a minute, but like the last generation Porsche 911 Turbo S, it was already so ballistic fast that you never approached that limit anywhere on public streets until you get to the highest end of the performance, on the track. And the highest-end iPhone is the same way, like, the Pro iPhone's been great at just surfing Instagram and texting and doing all the normal web browsing, basic stuff you'd do on a phone. And so, the only place you'd notice the extra performance is, well,

 we got a gaming demo. Apple showed these wild demos on the new iPhone at the keynote. And just a disclaimer, I'm not much of a phone gamer  But they launched exclusive games on the iPhone, that is as "Resident Evil: Village" and "Assassin's Creed", but not on cut-down mobile versions, these are the same versions with the same assets and the same textures and everything from the PlayStation version cause it is the PlayStation version.That's impressive. Plus you know, performance headroom is never a bad thing.

Battery Life

But I think also for me and a lot of other people, the more impactful things that you'll notice about this new chip are in the dedicated parts of it that are for specific tasks. Like, the new image signal processor Let you take fast, lag-free photos constantly. The new neural engine recognizes Portrait Mode subjects, like people's faces and dogs and cats automatically, and lets you go back in time and set a regular photo to a Portrait Mode photo. The USB 3 controller that enables faster data transfer speeds is also on the A17 Pro, all of that is coming from the new chip. But what I'm more concerned with at the moment is battery life. Okay, so actually, it's kind of two main issues that have been popping up that you kind of have to try to figure out, are they isolated issues or are these real problems with the phone? And those are battery life and overheating issues.

 And to be honest, part of the reason this review took longer than normal is I've been trying to dig into the battery and figure out what's going on here. So objectively speaking, these phones have slightly bigger batteries than last year and a new three-nanometer chip. So in a controlled environment, they should do better and they do, they last longer on simple benchmark stuff. So that's good news. Now when I test a phone, like normal, I pretty much, I kind of go by feel, I always have a mix of good days, some average days and then some bad days, where I can sort of figure out what's draining it, what its weaknesses are, and then I can conclude that. So now here we are, 

I get a couple of days in, I get a couple of weeks in and I've had a good amount of average days, I've had a couple of those bad draining days, but I also haven't had any of those amazing days where I get like nine hours of screen on time. I just haven't had any yet. And then, we also started to see some of those headlines about battery life potentially being worse and there are also some overheating issues popping up on Twitter or X and some people were asking if mine has had any issues. So here's the weird answer, yes, but not when I would expect, 

Two days ago, I was just at a golf tournament, it was in Florida, it was like 100 degrees or something crazy like that. And I'm outside with my phone at max brightness with GPS going all day out in the sun, and it was fine, no problem, no overheating issues.

 But then, a couple of hours later, I'm on the airplane with my phone in Airplane Mode and I've got just like music playing on Bluetooth with Spotify and like scrolling through Instagram, and for like five minutes, the phone just gets hot and just blasts through like 5% battery, and then it's fine again afterward, and I'm like, there almost seems to be no rhyme or reason why it does do this randomly once in a while? So my best theory is that the A17 Pro is just, it's a more powerful chip and so, therefore, can drain power more quickly than before in high-intensity settings, like gaming, et cetera. And there's also been some issues attributed to iOS 17 bugs like we're already on 17.0.2. I imagine some more updates are coming to both iOS and a bunch of apps. 

Software And  Features

But by the end of this, I kind of feel like I'm expecting battery life to even out to be the same as last year, which is a boring answer, but that's kind of what I expect. Now we can talk all we want about what the word Pro means in a smartphone, but with iPhones, that has mostly meant cameras. And it turns out a lot is going on with these relatively similar-looking cameras on these new Pro phones, both in hardware and software. So you're looking at a new bigger 48-megapixel main camera. 

There's also an improved ultra-wide with a closer-up macro capability and a whole telephoto situation that we'll get to in a minute. But then with software, there is this whole new intricate image-processing pipeline happening. So you know how most smartphones, a lot of 'em today have like 48-megapixel cameras and they all bin down to 12 megapixels. They give you 12-megapixel shots. You know, previous iPhones did this, this new one, for those who might've missed it, is actually by default spitting out 24-megapixel images instead of 12, and it's only about one and a half times of file size. So this new process, which is the same actually across the board for iPhone 15s and 15 Pros, is it's taking a 48-megapixel full sensor shot for detail information and also taking a full-sensor 12-megapixel shot, which is the quad binning for light information and noise.

 And then, it's using the neural net to combine them and do a sort of detailed transfer to get you this hybrid 24-megapixel image. It's very complicated and very clever, and the result is slightly better. It's right in line with what I've been saying. So if you just generally look at photos shot on this camera, it's an iPhone photo, like, they look pretty great, they're awesome with a dynamic range and sharpness across the board. I still prefer and shoot in the rich contrast most of the time, but, yeah, mostly, the iPhone  15 pro is one of the best cameras at just pointing and shooting, in full auto, just getting results that look good, even if it doesn't look the most like real life, you know, it's doing the classic relighting and tone mapping and everything we're used to form all this smart HDR, it's all here and a lot of people like it, and it looks good. The improved Macro Mode is also really good. And with this natural fall-off with the primary camera without even needing Portrait Mode, you can get some blurred backgrounds, it's awesome

 Autofocus is also really, really fast, especially whenever there is a face in the scene, this thing loves seeing faces. And the benefit of the bigger sensor shows itself at night too with even longer handheld captures. It's not magic, it's just physics, but, you know, does the 24-megapixel make a difference over the 12-megapixel? Well, zoomed out, absolutely not, they look the same. So you gotta zoom in, and even at 50% zoom, you still can't tell. It's not until you zoom all the way in that you can, okay, you can see a difference, you can start to notice a difference in fine detail and contrast. The 15 Pro is definitely when your pixel is peeping, more contrasty, and sharp when you're all the way zoomed in versus last year. But that's just when you've zoomed in. And by the way, once you get past 2X zoom, it's back to kicking out regular 12-megapixel images. 

So again, it's like, it's a small, small year-over-year improvement with that tiny amount of like pixel-peeping detail, but over a longer distance, over a bunch of generations, that's the type of thing that adds up. They even, on the Pro phones, did a couple of presets from the 1X lens. There's a 24-millimeter all the way zoomed out, then a 28-millimeter, a little bit tighter, and a 35-millimeter that all have their dedicated image processing pipeline presets to maximize detail into this super res, zoom, and focal lengths that you can digitally zoom between. I wouldn't exactly call it having extra lenses on the phone, but, you know, 1.5X zoom on last year's phone versus 1.5X zoom on this year's phone, slight difference. But there is a difference. Honestly, the most important thing about these new phones though is their video cameras, so I'm just gonna nerd out about these for a second. Because of the iPhone's video capabilities, I've talked about this so much, but they're still so clearly far out in front of the rest of the smartphone world.

 It doesn't even shoot 8K, which it's capable of with 48 megapixels. I wish they would let us, but even just at 4 K30 in full auto, the detail, the autofocus, the slight depth, the dynamic range, the stabilization, they're all world-class. I mean, if you wanna just look at the test footage, the entire electric Rivian delivery van review I did on the Auto Focus channel was shot on iPhone 15 Pro, audio included, . Also, shout out to the new AV1 Codec support on the chip,  that's gonna play nice. But this year, you can also shoot Log, literally a Pro camera feature. Now it is annoyingly buried several layers deep in the separate Settings app, which is not very professional. But if you find the time to go switch over there and get into Log, the iPhone will shoot with way more information, that classic flat Log look, dynamic range, everything.

 And you don't have to deal with whatever Apple was gonna do with over-sharpening and saturation and processing. Apple has its transformation LUT to turn it into SDR or HDR or you can go in and fully grade it yourself to get the most out of the iPhone's video and it looks, like, good. So the one thing that I'm gonna say too, you know because I'm pixel-peeping at this point, is the haloing from point light sources? You know, it's one of the hardest challenges with these tiny optics so I get why they haven't just fixed it yet, but like it's pretty bad. Anytime there's any sort of point lights, especially with video, despite whatever new lens coding they're doing, it's pretty dramatic and it seems like it's the worst on the iPhone or any other phone. So it's there, gonna point it out again, but, hey, if that's the biggest downside of iPhone video, I'll take it. And then, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the big one is the only one that comes with the new 5X larger telephoto lens. I would bet my life that that's gonna come down to the smaller 16 Pro next year, whatever, but it's only in the big one this time. But yeah, it does let you get a little further with max zoom, from 15X to 25X.

 It's nice if you do a lot of zoomed photos and videos, which is a very specific crowd, some people do that, you know, concertgoers, things like that. But there are just very few people who should buy one just for this lens because it also means you have to have a bigger phone and it also happens to mean that your 4X photos just before you get to 5X will be worse on this phone. But, yeah, it's not nearly as capable as some of the longer telephoto periscope lenses. I mean Samsung has a 10X optical lens that blows this one out of the water in terms of reach, I think Apple's main advantage is just stabilization. Like, they finally do that zoom-in preview window on the corner of the viewfinder and they over-stabilize the frame, so you can zoom all the way in and get a shot in the super creeper mode, it's great. 

But I'm just gonna shamelessly borrow this  because he said it as well as anyone possibly could, and he's right, which is just that so many of the differences between these cameras, this one, the last iPhone, the Samsung, the Pixels of the world, so many differences between them in software that it's hardly even consistent anymore. So if you are looking for like a hard verdict on like iPhone 15 Pro side by side versus Samsung versus Pixel or Oppo, 

whatever else, you kind of just have to make it up after a while, like, yeah, there are gonna be certain instances, like exact zoom focal lengths where one is sharper than the other, but honestly, at the end of the day, a lot of it is gonna be tasty. And so, yeah, you just kind of have to figure out which one you like as far as image quality and especially UI, just the actual way you shoot photos and videos. Which reminds me, I do wanna mention, that this RAW Max button is hilarious. This is a button to take your full-res 48-megapixel Pro-RAW photos, but it just says RAW Max, okay. And if you want a 48-megapixel JPEG, you have to jump back into the Settings app, switch it over, then bounce back, and now the button says, JPEG Max, which is also hilarious. The last thing I gotta say though, this new Pro phone has an Action Button on this new Pro iPhone only because only pros need customization.

Conclusion 

 Look, I kind of love the Action Button, but I also need to realize that it's kind of either overrated or underrated, depending on who you are. Like, on one hand, it's a customizable button, like, who even saw this coming? It replaces the least-used button that was on previous iPhones because your phone should always be on mute anyway. And so, then, you can map this Action Button to anything you want. You can keep it as a mute switch and it has the same strong haptics so you can tell if it's muted or unmuted in your pocket without looking.

 But there's also a bunch of other cool functions you can pick from, from launching your camera to a voice recorder to just literally any app on your phone you want through a Siri Shortcut.  To the specific things inside of apps, from unlocking your car, to not just launching my favorite task manager app, but launching a new task inside of my task manager app. It just lets me, it's great, it's awesome, honestly, I 

hope it gets copied, even though a bunch of phones were doing this years ago and then they stopped. I hope they bring it back now in response to how great this is. On the other hand, I do kind of feel like, for a lot of people, this is gonna be one of those things that they play with for like three or four days and then just kind of forget about it and never use it again so the I Phone 15 Pro Is a great 

Phone and now choice is your Thank You For Reading.

  And I mostly think that's because it's not super reachable. Like, it's not a one-handle button where your fingers usually rest for everyone, especially on the Pro Max, it's way up there on the corner above the volume buttons. It could be a cool shutter button for the camera, but the volume buttons already do that, so yeah, I feel like you might as well just end up setting it back to a mute switch and forgetting about it after a few weeks.