iPhone 15 Pro Review - Better than you think.

If you approach the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, I

think

it's fair to say that these are a fairly forgettable set of phones, there's no major feature that puts them on the map like the dynamic Isla was on the iPhone 14. Pros or the 120 hertz Pro motion screens on the iPhone 13 Pros, the famous summary page that Apple creates for each of its new products for this phone, half of it was full of features that they were already used to, nor There's not even a bold new color to differentiate itself aesthetically, this is the driest selection in recent memory for me, but it's only now that I've started living with it that I've noticed so many little things that it's easy to overlook things that Apple doesn't even even mentioned.

It all adds up to make this a more surprising and immediately beneficial experience than I'd say I've had with any iPhone I've tried before, especially when it comes to cameras in case you're wondering, by the way, here's what what do you get. when you order a 15 Pro it's pretty standard Apple fare, no longer the black box you used to get with the Pros. I imagine to use less ink inside you get the phone, the new USBC cable and the little insert that has the SIM eject tool manual and a couple of Apple stickers, now this cable is a small improvement with this fiber woven around which will make it more durable and very resistant to tangles, but know that it is not a fast cable, the iPhone 15 Pros.

They are capable of USB 3 speeds i.e. 20x faster than Lightning used to be, but with the default cable you won't get them, this is pretty standard for most phones though that's okay so first thing about these phones, I guess I didn't realize. The whole potential until switching to the Pro Max is the action button, this new programmable button that sits in place of the silent Ring switch and that you can set to any trigger you want and my heart took hold when I first saw it, This was good, now you can. Schedule things with a triple tap of your power button, why bother doing the same with a button that's much harder to reach and the hard to reach part that hasn't changed?

It still doesn't make sense to me why a button designed to be a shortcut is way out of reach of your fingers with a normal grip, unless you use it for the camera. I would say 80 of the photos I take with my phone I take in landscape mode and that works very well. with the action button because when you do this your finger naturally rests on it, the button is designed so that you have to hold it down for about half a second to activate it, I guess to reduce accidental presses and then that activation can immediately lead you to not only the camera but exactly the camera mode you want to be the default and then if you do that the action button will also work as the shutter button when you get there meaning this is now the quickest way to be able to record quickly. a clip when the opportunity arises unexpectedly is not perfect because let's say that if instead of here the button was up here, that would mean that you could properly grab the phone without worrying that you were actually covering what was taking the photos and you could also find out that for many commands it's actually much easier to map them to the power button or even the back tab feature that every iPhone has, but the point is that the robust new action button feature has its uses and is also something that Apple He didn't really mention it, but just what was shown as part of one of his slides was that the iPhone 15 Pros comes with a new wire radio that may well improve its communication with other Apple Smart Home devices, so I have no doubts that people will find interesting ways to use it. this action button even to control the house, okay, this is a phone, let's talk about call quality, we don't talk much about call quality, mainly because it doesn't tend to change between generations, but there is a new improvement really interesting here for the voice. isolation so I have my fiancée drisha on the line right now she is using a 15 pro and it sounds terrible yeah ok so let's try the voice isolation without any noise it literally feels like you turned off the tap , that's crazy, there's a lot. and while voice isolation won't improve the quality of your speech, it will erase virtually all background noise without reducing it, and then, like the new FaceTime video effects, the nice thing is that these voice effects happen on hardware. level, they persist regardless of the software you're using, whether it's a regular call, a FaceTime call, or a Zoom call.

What I would love is to be able to make this work with Voice Notes as well because I want to say clearly that it can and that is my main form of communication nowadays, okay the phone also surprised me when it comes to performance, naturally being the nerd that I am. One of the first things I did was run the geekbench test. The CPU in this new a17 Pro chip is coming out about 10 faster and the graphics score is up by 20 from last year, which is solid and in some ways a little surreal because it's actually approaching the graphics performance of the M2-powered MacBooks, but at the same time, if we zoom out and look at what's happening in the overall market.

These are not unusual generational leaps of power, but what was really surprising is that after a long time it finally seems that we have something to do with that power. What you're seeing now is Resident Evil Village playing on an iPhone and we've seen a lot of pretty phone games before, like Genji Impact, but the crazy thing about this is that this isn't mobile Resident Evil Village, it's Resident Evil, the same Resident Evil that you've seen on consoles, all the resources and textures are. taken directly from the PlayStation 4 version of the game and then combined with some of the technologies from the PS5 version of the game, such as HDR, which is a much higher brightness range than next-gen consoles could support now , as someone who has played this game.

On current-gen consoles, holding it in your hand, even on one of those bulky handheld PCs with a two-hour battery life on a smartphone, is very impressive, it only runs at 720p resolution, unlike the 900p that the game runs on the PlayStation 4. But still, the fact that it's the same game that runs on a box like this or a box like this on your phone that fits in your pocket and also includes the screen, surround sound speakers and everything else built in has definitely seemed like one of those technology moments to me, sorry for the glare so many times when I'm away somewhere the only device I have with me is my phone and I just wish I could have some proper offline singleplayer games that I could sink my So if this whole console gaming on a phone thing really catches on, I'll be a very happy guy and you probably won't be watching many tech videos, but we don't know If they will do it yet, there are only four console games. like this one currently announced exclusively for the iPhone 15 pro, one of them is the latest Assassin's Creed, which is cool and surreal because that game looks like this, but one of the games I spent growing up on my PlayStation Portable was also Assassin's Creed and it looked like this, but it raises questions like how easy it is to transfer a PlayStation 4 game to an iPhone, how many will come after this initial honeymoon period, and whether they will also come to Android phones later due to how powerful they are. the graphics.

Performance on the iPhone is no different than what you get on the latest Samsung, we have no idea that there is also support for base Wi-Fi 6E in that package, which is basically a less congested version of Wi-Fi 6 but needs a router specifically. With that technology in mind, okay, let's talk about the design as we stand with the iPhone 15 Pros High Point. We just went from a set of phones that were pretty, yes, but very heavy and not comfortable, to a set of phones that are just as pretty but more comfortable thanks to the new contoured edges, much lighter thanks to the change in material to titanium not to mention more practical thanks to having a matte finish in every way with the iPhone 14 pro which used to use stainless steel with fingerprints.

On the sides, the couple of marks I have near my charging port, where I missed it, and the dust on the mute slider, are the only indications that this is a well-used phone, but by these I mean, obviously , we will need about three. Months to say anything conclusive, but it seems like the combination of having matte and brushed side rails should help hide the fact that it's not the dream, because although the material hides scratches

better

, it seems like it can get scratched more easily and so can fingerprints. on these darker phones they tend to appear as a light area, which means around the buttons you tend to have almost this halo effect due to past fingerprints that you have a hard time erasing.

They are not permanent marks, they will disappear immediately if you go in there with a cloth, but you can't do that every day, so you will notice it from time to time by moving away a little. I still

think

that the most comfortable shape a phone can have is that of a pebble. I asked my whole family and everyone agreed that the iPhone 11 Pro is more comfortable to hold and use than the 15 Pro, but I guess that has its own problems because the curved nature of the phone introduces a bulge around it. of the screen and that's actually something the new phones do especially well: the bezels are really thin.

So it's one of those things that, of course, you'll get used to the same way you get used to the acceleration of a new car or the sound quality of a great audio system, but then every time you have a bit of perspective, like looking at someone else's older iPhone, makes you re-appreciate what I think is a small feat of design, so I mentioned that the cameras are something very special about these phones and let's be very clear about something that What makes these cameras special is not a one-off, it's not about the ultroid camera that lets in a little more light, it's not about the new coating that helps reduce the amount of flare on this lens because, honestly, you still get enough lens flare. main camera to account for both, it's not about any of these pieces alone, but how it all works together as a system that is even

better

than the sum of its parts and this is what I have realized just now after using the phones, so for starters the iPhone 15 Pros take 24 megapixel photos again, which doesn't sound very impressive when you consider that the latest Samsung can take 200 megapixel photos, but the key is the fact that the iPhone can do these 24 megapixels by default. thing that it takes 24 megapixels in auto mode without any perceptible compromise that I can see neither in terms of the time needed to capture nor in terms of the dynamic range of the image nor in terms of the amount of post-processing that happens after.

Actually, here it is more faster to take a 24 megapixel photo than for most phones to take a 12 megapixel photo, which is the default industry standard, even four phones that have 200 megapixel camera sensors, so that's one part, but then you have the file format most phones when they take pictures, they generate them as JPEG images for quite a few years, although the iPhone uses a file format called Heat, which is very similar to JPEG and image quality, but with sizes of smaller file size, actually about half the current size. that the resolution of the photos has increased even though the image size has increased with it, but even though the resolution has doubled, the image size has only increased by one point five times, leaving you with this strange situation where the 24-megapixel photos taken here take up less space than 12-megapixel shots on other phones.

Oh, and that smaller file now also includes portrait mode data and live photo data at the same time. This is where it really started to click for me because I think Motion Photos in general is an awesome feature. I was recently making a little video for Dresher and my anniversary and the only way that video was possible was because for every photo I took, obviously the phone was also storing the entire scene right before that photo was taken. captured and as you do it it's very quick to save that movement as its own video that you can put into a longer project.

I also love portrait mode whenever I'm trying to take a good photo for someone else I'll take like three normal shots and then I'll take a separate set of three portraits so they can decide which one they prefer because they're almost two very different propositions, theThe normal shot is very practical and utilitarian and then the portrait shot is very cinematic, all that extra time, all that nonsense and everything about having to think just disappeared because you don't need to be in portrait mode to take portraits, you just take the photo as you always do and as soon as a person, a dog or a cat, appears in the image.

This little F will appear when that F appears. You know that you are automatically capturing depth information and that you can return to the shot after you have taken it to adjust the level. of portrait mode you want to apply again at 24 megapixels so double the resolution that portrait mode used to be, the F will also appear if you ever tap to focus because then the phone knows that you are trying to focus on something in particular which means that even if you don't focus on that issue at the moment, you can go back later and modify it, so what I'm really referring to here is that Apple has managed to build with the iPhone 15 Pros a camera system that everyone has to think about. in this, it's framed the way I want it to be, the rest is done for you and now the photonic engine was introduced last year as a level of processing applied to each image to add. extra detail and fixing the colors, but when it was announced it was not for all camera modes, for things like portraits and night mode, which already required a lot of processing, which was not Headroom to have the photonic engine working, it is not now. works in portrait mode works in night mode works on the front camera and works at every magnification of the rear camera and you can really tell the difference like if I went out a couple of days ago to take some photos of the night sky and although sometimes between generations of iPhone you struggle to tell the difference, the improvements here are instantly recognizable at a glance and the other thing they've addressed is HDR HDR in photos is one of Apple's long-standing historical weaknesses.

I think it stems from the fact that Apple doesn't want to over-process images, but the truth is that in many cases, like when you have very harsh backlighting behind you, you have to, it's better here. I wouldn't say that Apple has completely resolved all cases. Some parts of the image are overexposed, but at the same time I didn't expect such a noticeable difference compared to last year's phone. It can be noticed in the rear camera and also in the front camera. Do you see what I'm seeing? What I'm saying about these cameras is the idea that no individual aspect is particularly innovative or new, it's just the fact that everything comes together in the highest quality and easiest way I've ever seen with, by the way, the operational version smoothest camera app.

What I've ever seen on a phone or within a three megabyte file is how Apple is trying to present this as seven lenses in your pocket. There is some truth to it, but you can't really take that statement at face value. The way it works is that the iPhone 15 Pros has a 48-megapixel main camera sensor. If you tap this single zoom, it will cycle through three different focal lengths between 1X and 1.5x now because the camera is 48 megapixels and you're generating images. at 24 megapixels you can zoom between 1X and 1.5 x different amounts of this entire sensor to achieve a result that is still genuinely a 24 megapixel shot and, on the plus side, when you take, say, a 35 millimeter photo, It's more detailed than if you just took a 1x photo and zoomed in until it looked like a 35 millimeter photo, but the downside is that when you do this you're not using the full extent of your sensor and therefore the quality of the image. image is not that high.

I wouldn't say the degradation is noticeable, but it will be there and it's a bit disgusting to call this a 7-lens system when in reality, if you're going to do that, you could just add a stop at every different magnification possible and then call it a thousand-lens system. cameras as a feature, okay, it gets the job done, but unlike the way it's presented, it's not the same as having seven lenses right now. Let's talk about the new zoom camera, so for the iPhone 15 Pro Max only the triple optical zoom lens camera has become a five times optical zoom lens camera and this is a bigger update than what it seems initially.

They didn't just take the zoom camera that was already on the Pro and put a larger lens on the Pro Max. It has a larger sensor and better stabilization than the regular Pro too and let's be very clear, although the 5x zoom is not the highest magnification we've seen on a phone by any means, it's still a very high 5x zoom. good quality. camera, which means that in most lighting conditions shots look pretty good even at 10x and the lens has so much natural separation from the foreground background that you often don't even need to rely on portrait mode for that DSLR-like separation and check this out, this is a A single Zoom portrait taken with the 15 Pro Max notice how much distortion there is on my face.

Taking a portrait at 3x is much more flattering because you can be further away and then 5X is a little bit even more flattering than a 3X, so it has a purpose and it's just a fun tool because 5x feels like a very different image than what looks like a one x image and you don't have to go back as far as I expected to adapt to the person you're testing. to shoot in the frame, but it's still very much a trade-off. See the way this phone's main camera sensor works. You can only get so-called lossless zoom between 1X and 2x, so the whole gap between your 2X zoom and your 5x zoom.

The range is now based on a pure digital zoom, so in these shots the 3x image while hovering is definitely the weakest quality and as you like 4.9x, like just before the camera is activated with 5x optical zoom, starting to look a little rough. It's also worth noting that the optical zoom cameras on both the Pro and Pro Max are not 24 megapixels, but 12, as is the ultra-wide lens, which is pretty normal for a phone, but is feels like one of the only light ones. Inconsistencies remain, but the camera comparison with Samsung's is coming very soon, so if you want to see that, then he is subscribed to the channel.

Megapixel now, based on a bit of browsing on and they also seem to degrade faster over time, now it could be a few different things, it could be the iOS 17 beta which was quite hard on the battery, it could be the extra screen brightness putting more strain on the battery and causing more heat inside, which can permanently degrade your cell phone, whatever it is. Apple didn't really acknowledge or address any issues with the battery, so it's unclear if any of those long-term effects will be present, but what I can say is that the iPhone 15 Pros are certainly better than the 14 Pros, with a larger battery capacity, even more mature software and better heat dissipation, which should make the battery last longer over time, but in addition to a camera.

There will also be a very detailed battery test along with it, so there will be a lot to talk about. I'm a little sad to see that the charging speed hasn't increased, which would have been one of the main advantages of a USB 3. Port, but at least the phone takes advantage of some of the power of USBC with the ability to reverse charge your airpods , which is actually great news and what really surprises me that Apple didn't speak at the event is that it's not just about airpods. The fact that your iPhone 15s can now deliver power over USBC means that almost anything you can connect this cable to can be charged, which means that for the first time since I switched to the iPhone four years ago, I don't have to feel like I'm the drum leader in my group of friends.

I guess the main advantage of the iPhone being USBC now is some semblance of stability. This movement was always on the horizon. I always felt like it might be next year when Apple changes and now that it just happened, you can safely invest in some USBC accessories that you know won't be obsolete for at least a couple of years, but probably longer. I know there have been a lot of rumors about the portless iPhone, but honestly, I think they are a far cry, there are so many things that would be affected if Apple made that move anytime soon, like being able to listen to proper lossless music, being able to transfer files massive, pro video clips that Apple is touting as one of the new features you should be using as well as all sorts of really specific things, like using your phone as a screen to pilot a drone, where you need the lowest possible latency to be able to bring everything together. this, then we must consider the prices of the iPhone 15s in which the professional remains.

The price is 999 and the Pro Max is going up from 100 to 11.99, so I would say I think the regular Pro is in a very good place right now. It is an iterative phone but it ties together many of the loose ends that Apple has. Had over the years integrating all the bitty camera features, sanding down the rougher edges of the design, and lifting the battery a bit while you're at it, the Pro Max is a slightly harder pill to swallow as the only additional difference for the The additional hundred dollar difference in price is more storage and your 3x lens becomes a 5x lens, which is an upgrade but not a huge one and in some situations may leave you with worse shots than the 3x, but that doesn't invalidate the 15 Pro.

Max is still the phone for people who want the best iPhone, it's the phone I already switched to, especially for the battery and also an important note: the phone is not necessarily more expensive if the prices Apple's quotes are always ours, but as here in the UK the 15 Pro Max is the same price as the 14 pro Max and that's the 14 pro Max with half the storage, well, see you in the comparisons.