It’s been almost three months since Apple announced its latest line of iPhone 15 and 15 Pro phones at their annual event in Cupertino. This year was all about the long-overdue move to USB Type-C, as well as a new Titanium body. I wasn’t quick to give a review because, these days, phones, like a lot of modern tech, are far more than just cool hardware and specs. How well do they hold up physically to daily use? And how does performance change over time?
Software updates can completely change one’s experience with a device, and the iPhone isn’t immune to that. For example, shortly after launch, the iPhone 15 Pro models were plagued with overheating and battery drain issues that were identified as a software problem. Fortunately, this was eventually fixed with an update to iOS 17.
So, three months is a good enough time for most software issues and hidden hardware issues to be revealed and resolved. In my case, I was blessed by the Apple gods with a top-of-the-range iPhone 15 Pro Max in the new Blue Titanium color and 1TB storage, which I’ve managed to whittle down to 380GB left. Blame that on Apple ProRes Log videos I’ve been recording, but more on that later.
To get a model like my review unit will set you back a mind-melting $2,899, which, when put in perspective, can buy you a gaming laptop like the Asus TUF A16 Advantage Edition and still have change left over. Yes, it’s absurdly expensive, but Apple has always been notoriously pricey with its storage options. The entry-level iPhone 15 Pro Max with 256GB is $700 less, but $2,199 is still far from cheap.
For the first time in a while, I can safely say the “Pro” in the name is justified and makes a valid case for how pricey this phone is. With one of the best displays and camera systems on any phone, unmatched video shooting capabilities, and an absurdly powerful 3nm processor that can handle 10-bit, 4K, ProRes LOG in HDR, you begin to see why the iPhone 15 Pro Max costs what it does. It’s literally a video production tool in your pocket, and if the last Apple event completely shot on iPhone isn’t enough to convince you, then I doubt this review will either.
Design and Build Quality
At face value, the iPhone 15 Pro Max looks identical to the 14 Pro Max it replaces, but there is more than meets the eye. For starters, there’s the new Titanium body, which is noticeably lighter than its predecessor by 19gms. To be fair, though, unless you hold them side by side, the new iPhone is still going to be a big, heavy phone. But back to that titanium, it’s less shiny than the aluminum rails on the 14, meaning fewer nasty fingerprints. The edges are also softer, making for a wonderful feel in the hand.
The Titanium comes in four choices: Natural, White, Black, and Blue Titanium. I honestly think the Blue Titanium is the weakest of the bunch, just like the Purple on last year’s iPhone and sadly, it’s the one I got. That said, combined with the matte glass back, you have one of the most premium-looking and feeling smartphones to date. One interesting thing that could be a side effect of the new Titanium body is how the haptics on the iPhone 15 Pro feel somewhat more pronounced and have a pinging-like effect. I like it.
This years phones are built with a generous helping of recycled or renewable content as part of Apples commitement to Environment friendliness. The internal frame is 100% recycled Aluminium while the battery is 100% recycled Cobalt. The copper wire, tungsten and rare earth elements in the magnets are also from 100% recycled. Funny because I can only imagine how much more expensive the phone would be without using recycled materials!
Also new is the change from the historic ringer switch to the new Action button, which can be assigned to almost anything you want it to do. It’s good fun for the first few days, but like the old ringer switch, you quickly forget it’s there. It also doesn’t help that its high position on the chassis just makes it cumbersome to use on a daily basis. But for the dedicated power user, you can assign Shortcuts with a multitude of actions to the button.
Then the final change that is easily the most impactful is the change from the Lightning port to the much more useful USB Type-C port. This opens the iPhone 15 Pro to a world of accessories, but the most important in my use were the ability to connect external disk drives, use the same charger for my Mac and Pixel 8 Pro, and plug my Logitech G Yeti GX microphone into the phone for better video audio.
One strange choice by Apple was to go with an older USB 3.0 instead of the newer USB 3.2 Gen 2 or Thunderbolt 4, which would have been decidedly more Pro. Nitpicking aside, transferring files is way, way faster than the old Lightning cable, so I can’t complain much. I used this a lot to transfer my video files directly to my Windows machine, which is just lovely—no need for iTunes.
Over the last three months, I’ve not had any dings, scratches, or stains on the body or the display of my phone; something I can’t say for my 2-month old Pixel 8 Pro. Last year I went without a screen protector on my iPhone 14 Pro, and I don’t think you’ll need one for the 15. I’m honestly impressed with how resilient these screens are. However, not being one to tempt fate, I have put on a Belkin UltraGlass 2 tempered glass screen protector to be safe.
Display
Speaking of the display, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is one of the best, rivalled only by the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. Called the Super Retina XDR with ProMotion, it’s an AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate for gaming and highly intensive graphics but can also ramp down to 10Hz for power saving. Using it every day, I can never notice it changing, but I can say the phone is extremely fluid and responsive whether I’m doom-scrolling Instagram, swiping between apps, or watching Season 2 of Foundation on Apple TV.
The 6.69-inch display has a 2796 x 1290-pixel resolution at 460 ppi, which is extremely sharp, rendering text and fine graphics with exceptional detail. After having spent countless hours reading on the 15 Pro Max, I never noticed any jagged pixels or had strain using this beautiful display.
Last year’s iPhone had one of the brightest displays, and the 15 Pro Max doesn’t backstep on that front either. The phone can hit a peak brightness of 2000 nits when outdoors, ensuring you will never complain about seeing your content while basking at the beach. Typically, though, the phone averages closer to 1000 nits of brightness, boosting to 1600 nits when watching HDR content. Additionally, the display supports P3 wide color, which is important for anyone trying to edit photos on the phone or color grade that ProRes Log video on the go.
Returning this year is the Dynamic Island notch, which you’ll either love or hate. In my case, it’s gone largely unnoticed and underutilized. The Dynamic Island can be really helpful when using apps like Maps navigation, Uber Eats, and, of course, Spotify or Apple Music. But by and large, it’s just a black bar that sits at the top of my screen, neither getting in the way of what I’m doing nor helping.
The one thing that’s the most beneficial isn’t the Dynamic Island itself but the FaceID camera that it so cleverly hides. FaceID is still the gold standard for facial recognition on any phone, and I’ve never once had any issue authenticating. It’s extremely fast, reliable, and I’ll never tire of the slick animation that comes out of the Dynamic Island.
I’m still not a fan of the limited angles it takes to work; it’s always irritating to tilt up the phone from my desk so that FaceID can see me. It’s certainly not a deal-breaker but definitely gets irritating and will force you to look for ways to prop up the phone when you’re at your desk. I could also just spring for one of the many cool MagSafe standing chargers I see all over Instagram desk setups.
Performance
It’s almost redundant to speak of performance on an iPhone as the combination of Apple hardware and software makes even the lowest-spec phone outperform better-endowed Android phones. This year, the 15 Pro and Pro Max get a brand-new A17 Pro chip—a 6-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores. The new SoC also includes a 6-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine for machine learning and AI tasks. This is paired with 8GB of RAM, which is paltry compared to the 16GB on the Asus ROG Phone 7, but you would never notice.
Apple isn’t one to boast about gigahertz or megatransfers per second, but I will say that the iPhone 15 Pro Max has never once stuttered, frozen, or lagged in any way these past three months. And that’s even with me using unstable developer betas of iOS. Navigation around the OS is so smooth and responsive, apps open and stay fresh in memory a lot longer, and I’m often anxious about how long I’ve gone without rebooting the phone or force-closing any apps.
| Benchmark | iPhone 14 Pro Max (A16) | iPhone 15 Pro Max (A17 Pro) |
|---|---|---|
| Geekbench ML | 819 | 1370 |
| Geekbench 6 Single | 2643 | 2917 |
| Geekbench 6 Multi | 6919 | 7241 |
| Antutu | 1482431 | 1569777 |
| 3DMark Solar Bay | 4302 | 5762 |
| 3DMark Wildlife Extreme | 2974 | 3097 |
Now, between the 14 Pro Max and 15 Pro Max, I couldn’t feel any discernable difference in day-to-day use, so I had to resort to some synthetic benchmarks to determine how much better the new A17 Pro chip really is. Lo and behold, the 15 Pro Max scores higher than the 14 Pro Max in every way, ranging from 4% to 40%, depending on the test. What that means is you will see marginal or great performance improvement in some apps more than others.
Most of the horsepower comes in handling the new photo and video capabilities of the phone. It’s no small joke to film 4K video at 30fps in ProRes Log without frying the phone, but the iPhone 15 Pro Max handles it all fairly casually. Filming and editing cinematic videos on the phone is snappy and amazes that you can change things like focal length without needing render times in the Photos app.
A big thing this year is gaming. Now I’m really not a mobile gamer, but Apple certainly came out guns blazing by announcing full ports of Resident Evil Village running on the iPhone. I tried the demo, and boy is it gorgeous. You do get to choose different performance modes, and in the quality mode, it looks very much like the console experience. Other games like Diablo Immortal play smoothly, and the ProMotion 120Hz display keeps everything feeling like butter.
Suffice to say, you will need to use a Bluetooth controller or something like the Backbone extension to get the most out of gaming on the iPhone. The ridiculous on-screen controls just really ruin the experience and take away from the gorgeous visuals.
Battery Life
Battery life on the iPhone 15 Pro Max hasn’t been any better or worse for me than the iPhone 14 Pro Max it replaces. On a typical day, it will easily get me to bedtime with about 40-50% battery, sometimes even more if I have been disciplined with my Instagram and TikTok use. This means I can go two days before needing a charge. Battery anxiety isn’t a thing I have known for years at this point. We are talking anywhere between 6-8 hours of screen-on time.
The caveat, of course, is that if you do a lot of video shooting, gaming, and media consumption, you will definitely drain the battery much faster, but I still doubt that you will fail to get through a whole day with ease. But thanks to the move to USB-C, I was never worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a charger or cable wherever I was. Apple still refuses to give us high-speed charging, with the phone taking much longer than the Galaxy S23 Ultra to go from zero to 50% and 100%. With a 30W charger, the iPhone will take 2 hours to fill up; double what the Samsung phone takes.
Again, this really hasn’t been an issue for me. Between the excellent efficiency of the phone, plus USB-C and MagSafe wireless charging, I have never needed the phone to be fast-charged. Apple says fast charging kills your overall battery health and after three months, my phone reports 100% battery health while my 1-year-old 14 Pro reports 93%. So, yeah, I’ll happily trade fast charging for long battery health.
Camera
As I already alluded, this year the iPhone 15 Pro Max is about professional video and photography. Apple isn’t being shy about who this new phone is for, and I’m okay with that. In fact, the iPhone is at the center of my content creation journey, allowing me to shoot quality photos and videos for the likes of Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube. But let’s get the physical specs out of the way first.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max boasts a 7-camera system — it’s technically just 4 lenses, but because Apple uses three quick access focal lengths on the main camera, it counts them as 7. The main lens is a 48MP, 24mm with f1.78 aperture, which is both great for low light and that lovely depth of field colloquially known as bokeh. The second lens is a 12MP Ultra Wide with a 13mm focal length and f/2.2 aperture for a 120° field of view.
The third lens is a 12MP 2x Telephoto with a 48mm focal length and f/1.78 aperture, and the last lens is a 13MP, 5x Telephoto with a maximum 15x digital zoom that is surprisingly good though still behind Samsung’s 100X zoom on the S23 Ultra. On the front is a 12MP selfie camera with an f/1.9 aperture.
Image samples
Now, there’s just so much to talk about these cameras, but it’s been more than covered all over the interwebs. What’s important is my experience of using these over the last few months. I’ve shot hundreds of photos in that time; my kids, my travels, foodstagram shots, night shots, and every single product review you’ve seen here since October. I’ve also shot hours of video footage for my socials and YouTube as well as private videos of birthdays, school awards, and more.
It’s safe to say that the iPhone 15 Pro Max is as reliable as ever and the best all-rounder when it comes to smartphone cameras. That’s not to say it’s the best at all things, though. I recently reviewed the excellent Google Pixel 8 Pro, which I more often than not trump the iPhone in still photography, even at extreme zoom ranges. Interestingly, the Pixel tends towards a more neutral/cold picture while the iPhone is a warmer, yellower picture in most cases.
Apple touts its Photonic engine, which does all sorts of computational, algorithmic stuff in the background to ensure your pictures come out great, but it’s just not as good as Google’s magic. Despite its superior chipset, the iPhone is sorely lacking in AI magic features like Magic Eraser, generative fill, or Audio Eraser like the Pixel has. Of course, these are all things that can be added via software updates, but in 2024, it’s shocking that the iPhone has almost no AI features to speak of at all.
The Pixel is also much better at skin tone reproduction for people of color like myself, which the iPhone consistently reproduced darker than they should be, often creating family photos that were unpleasant. Especially outdoors or scenarios where there is bright light behind the subject, the iPhone would overcompensate for the environment instead of the person leading to really dark tones.
Optical zoom
Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed the versatility of the multiple lenses at my disposal, especially that 5X optical zoom has come in clutch on so many school plays and sports days that I wonder how we ever lived without it. The quality is impressive even when recording video in low light at 5x zoom. Even more impressive is how the super steady Action Mode works with the new 5X lens for some lovely, smooth long-range shots.
And even though the Pixel has greatly improved in its video capability, the iPhone still has the upper hand there. The ability to record 10-bit HDR in Log format is a game-changer considering this is something mostly found on professional mirrorless cameras that cost more than the iPhone. For those who don’t know what Log formats are, they are to video what RAW files are to photos. They capture a whole lot more color information, which allows you to radically change the tone, feel, and look of the video using custom LUTs or color grades in professional video editing software like Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve.
But, as you probably can imagine, this comes at a hefty cost in storage. A minute of 4K 30fps ProRes Log footage will easily eat up 6GB of storage while a standard video will be just a mere fraction of that. So, while you can shoot video this way, you will need to use external storage or run out of space on your phone in short order.
Thankfully, the move to USB-C proves fortuitous as you can now record video directly to an external SSD plugged into the phone. It’s a bit of a balancing act, but there are very quickly spawning a multitude of Professional camera rigs that you can use with the iPhone 15 Pro Max to make this easier.
For the futurists among you, Apple also recently released an update in iOS 17.3, which allows the phone to record Spatial video that can be played back on the upcoming Apple Vision Pro augmented reality headset. This will essentially let you relive your memories in almost full 3D, which sounds incredibly cool.
And while I was fascinated to play around with ProRes Log, I quickly abandoned the notion given how much storage would be needed and my lack of color grading skills. Still, it’s nice to have the option, and as someone really leaning into the video space, I’d be happy to have footage that doesn’t look anything like you’d expect from a smartphone.
All these features, reliability, and consistency have allowed me to really lean into video creation over the last year. I’ve published dozens of high-quality short-form content that was shot on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. From talking head shots with Cinematic Video to product b-roll to travel vlogs, the iPhone has been a consistent companion that I can rely on. The new lenses, ProRes Log, and USB-C all make me capable of producing better videos than I ever imagined and will be using it much more to start long-form videos.
Apple FineWoven Cases
Now, I had to drop a note in here about the controversial Apple FineWoven cases that were introduced with the iPhone 15. These new cases replaced the Apple Leather cases and within a few days, the internet was awash with horror stories of the lack of durability. I’ve used mine daily for these 90 days and I can say that the hype was overblown but not farfetched.
My case is definitely worse for wear with some flaking on the sides and ugly-looking stains on the back. It’s still in one piece though, but I’m shocked how bad it looks after such a short time and with very careful use. I don’t manhandle my devices (primarily because they are long-term loaners which have to be returned) and I never drop my phones.
I would never recommend anyone buy the FineWoven case but rather stick with the Silicon cases or some third-party Leather cases. The FineWoven has truly been the most disappointing part of my iPhone 15 experience.
Conclusion
So there you have it; the iPhone 15 Pro Max is undoubtedly the best iPhone Apple has ever made — as it should be. The design and titanium build are better than ever, and it’s hard to point out a phone that is better constructed than the iPhone 15 Pro. But for anyone with an iPhone 13 Pro or 14 Pro, there’s little reason to upgrade to this new phone. If you are a serious content creator, photographer, or filmmaker, you definitely want this in your pocket as a backup camera. The inclusion of ProRaw and ProRes Log means you can easily mix iPhone-generated content with that from professional cameras. I urge you to go look at the M3 Macbook Event that was shot entirely on iPhone 15 Pro.
Price is still a consideration, and we can all agree that $2900 for a phone is not good financial sense for the vast majority of people. If you are really looking for a camera to shoot video professionally, a mirrorless camera like the Sony ZV-E10 can be had for less than half the price and would totally blow the iPhone out of the water in terms of phot and video quality without being too bulky to carry around.
Additionally, even with the powerful new chipset for gaming, the iPhone isn’t really the best mobile gaming experience. For half the price, you can get the Asus ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go that will do the job way better.
But if all you want is an all-in-one device that you can communicate with your loved ones, play some AAA games on the train to work, shoot and manage a professional-looking YouTube or TikTok channel, there’s really very little like the iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s so good that even with all the great features on my Pixel 8 Pro, I was more than happy to come back to the iPhone as my daily driver.
