iPhone 15 Pro Max - The Truth! (4 months later...)

the iPhone 15 Pro Max is now halfway through its life cycle and I've been using my iPhone 15 Pro Max as my main phone so I want to talk about how it's been over these past 6 months and talk about how well it's held up with its new titanium frame talk about some of the camera features I like and some of the camera features I think need improvements on and how the battery life has ultimately been on my Pro Max and most importantly is the iPhone 15 Pro Max still worth it after 6 month of using it or should you just wait and buy an iPhone 16 Pro now one problem I had with my iPhone 15 Pro is I needed a new charger when traveling and if you're in the Apple ecosystem like me you need a travel friendly way to charge your iPhone your Apple watch and of course your airpods thankfully our friends at ankor have the all-in-one solution with their new anchor Mago wireless charging station foldable 3 in1 first of all this has to be the coolest most ingenious portable charger ever on the market because look at this it has a full-speed 15w MAG saave charger charger which is two times faster than the normal 7.5 wireless chargers you can get and just as fast as Apple's official mag safe charger and then it folds open to reveal another 5w wireless charging pad where you can place your airpods on and then on the bottom you can flip out another Apple watch fast charging puck for full Apple watch charging speeds that can charge an Apple Watch series 9 to 47% in just 30 minutes and just like that this small charger that weighs about the same as an iPhone 15 plus and is as compact as Apple's Magic Mouse can charge your iPhone 15 a pair of airpods and your Apple watch all with a single cable connection for a really neat setup so to get the ultimate 3 in1 portable charger check out the link in the description below to learn more about ankor Mago and thank you to Anker for keeping my devices charged and for sponsoring this video okay so one of the biggest design anticipations for me for the iPhone 15 Pro was the new titanium frame and honestly this has to be a big feature because Apple literally uses it as the tagline in their advertising personally I really wanted a lighter weight body for my iPhone but I still wanted something that felt premium and most importantly I wanted something that was still durable but with the launch craze of the iPhone 15 Pro there were a lot of clickbait videos coming out bashing the titanium frame as a weakness now this criticism came in two separate areas one was durab ility where a viral video by Jerry rig everything showed the iPhone 15 Pro Max backglass shattering when he did a bend test these tests I always take with a big grain of salt because there's way too many variables and factors that can go into a phone's durability and any of his previous test could have weakened the frame of that phone and for me uh the iPhone 15 Pro Max and I feel like for a lot of people uh has held up really well there's no cracks on my display uh either the front or back and the titanium sides are pretty much or I guess completely scratch free I'm just looking at it now and yeah I don't think there's any scratches on the titanium frame which is not something I can say for the stainless steel frames on previous iPhones those always got little scratches uh on them by the time I was done using them and definitely within a six-month use period so this phone still looks like it did on day one uh minus the dust in the camera lens and some of some little smudges on the sides right uh the other controversy was reports of you know users iPhones overheating and some users thought that maybe this was due to the new titanium material being used on the 15 Pro but that wasn't exactly the case because the overheating uh during the initial launch was due to a software bug that Apple has already fixed so that again did not turn out to be anything wrong with the titanium so the titanium frame overall has been a huge quality of life upgrade to the iPhone 15 Pro Max it feels so much better in the hands it is less slippery way more comfortable and way lighter than the iPhone 15 Pro Max or at least it feels that way and ultimately I think it looks more more premium than even the stainless steel body the way this thing looks when like the light hits it just it looks so beautiful like this is like one of the most beautiful pieces of technology that I have ever used and it looks and feels Precision engineered and even after 6 months I still pick up this phone and every time I'm delighted like I'm just like this is such a good-look and Good Feeling phone and you can't say that for everything so I'm I'm really happy with this phone's design I really don't know how they make this design better going forward it's going to be interesting to see what they do with future iPhone revisions and I think this design is pretty popular because I've seen that the s24 ultra is also adopting titanium in the frame and the pixel 9 Pro just kind of had some leaks and it looks like they're kind of going for a similar look so it looks like Apple's kind of leading the industry again now one thing I'm always questioning with the iPhone 15 Pro Max is if it's too large now in previous years the heavy stainless steel of the iPhone 14 pro Max always felt way too dense and way too heavy and I can finally say I do not feel that with my 15 Pro Max however I still don't like the bigger size I think ultimately I would like a smaller phone uh the big issue I have with the size of the 15 Pro Max is when I have to put it in my pocket if I'm wearing pants that are a little loose fitting or don't have Deep Pockets there's been a few times where my 15 Pro Max has slid out of my pants when I sit down thankfully not any like on any hard surfaces or anything like that but yeah you know falls in the couch or something like that so you know the size of this is still not ideal but I am happy to make the sacrifice uh in this size for the better battery life on the pro Max models I have been really happy with the battery performance on my 15 Pro Max on most days I am able to get a full days worth of battery life with about 20% to spare uh by the time I'm putting it on the charger and that's after heavy usage and my battery health after 6 months is still at 100% in terms of General use the iPhone 15 Pro hasn't really changed the game right um there's not anything super new that's revolutionary from the iPhone 15 Pro Max like even things like the action button while they're a good idea and concept just really haven't panned out for me as something that I remember to use I I always have to remind myself that it's actually a feature on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and I I forget about it a lot of the times even though I map the camera button to it so a lot of the times I open up my phone and you know I'll go over here and open up the camera this way but I always for I could just hold this down and open the camera so I feel like after 6 months it probably should have grown on me as something that I should be using frequently but I don't know I can't wipe the muscle memory out of my head that this is a mute switch and nothing else so maybe that's just because I'm old and and I don't know how technology works anymore probably not it's probably just that the action button know maybe it's too high on the 15 Pro Max 2 it's a little too high other than that though uh you know there's things that have improved on the phone but most features feel the same right like the screen technology is very similar to the 14 pro Max uh the performance generally feels about the same as the 14 pro Max 2 even though it has the new a17 chip uh at least for day-to-day use uh Apple has added some new software features uh one of the ones I've been using more recently is the journal app which I've been trying to kind of use every night and I really like the streamlined approach to the journal app the interface feels more like your own personal Instagram or Twitter feed rather than a traditional journal and I think that's really smart and apple suggestions for writing prompts or automatically selecting photos for you to go through or just automatically like creating like little mini events in your journal entries just make it an overall easier Habit to kind of pick up and start using uh I'm personally trying to focus a lot on Wellness this year and mental health is a big part of that I can't say if journaling has made a huge impact on me yet since I've really only been doing it for like the past month but it's been fun to record entries at the end of the night and take further time to reflect on my day uh time I've spent with other people and just my progress on certain goals uh that I've been trying to better dayto day now while the a77 might seem like business as usual uh you know Apple's kind of giving us insane smartphone processing power the benchmarks are like off the charts but users really don't take full advantage of it but there is something that has completely changed for me with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and it's where I'm actually starting to see the benefits of Apple shipping these ridiculously powerful chips inside of a smartphone and that is with gaming I've been gaming more on my iPhone 15 Pro Max than I have with any other uh iPhone and that's because of Apple's slow and I and I mean slow push into AAA level console games onto this device and after 6 months we have finally seen a few of these titles actually launch on the iPhone 15 Pro Max uh the titles I'm most interested in were Resident Evil Village and the more recently released Resident Evil 4 remake I am a huge Resident Evil fan so when I saw that these uh graphically demanding games were coming to the iPhone I was really excited if you don't believe I'm a huge Resident Evil fan uh uh you know I literally got Resident Evil Candy like you know Umbrella Corporation candy if you're a Resident Evil fan you know what that is so when I saw that these graphically demanding games were coming to the iPhone uh as a fan of the games I was really excited I spent some time playing these titles and what I'll say is the experience is pretty good the fact that these titles can run on the iPhone at all is a testament to the insane Hardware that Apple has in these devices there's a reason why these games probably aren't launching on Android right but there are some drawbacks first of all to really enjoy these titles that are meant for console and PC gaming you need some kind of controller accessory yes you can play this game with the touch screen but it's a bad experience just listen to me there's way too many virtual buttons I tried it out it was frustrating as heck and like I was dying every single second uh I use this backbone controller for my iPhone which just plugs into the USBC port and it legitimately turns your iPhone into a full mobile console gaming experience and once you solve the controller issue these games are just so much fun to play and it's still amazing to me that I'm able to take a game I literally played on my PlayStation 5 a giant console uh just a few months ago and I'm getting a very similar experience on my iPhone granted the graphics aren't as good as they are on the PS5 version and you can really see the oversharpening in Leon's hair but again this is an iPhone and I am more than willing to forgive this and it makes me excited for the future of the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro those are going to get even more powerful than what this already is so I think this is just the start of what could be a huge shift for the mobile gaming industry the other big change that really impacted the way that I use my iPhone 15 Pro compared to previous years is USBC so just about every device I own except strangely enough the accessories for my Mac at this point charge via USBC so when I travel or go out for the day the only thing I really need to bring is a small charging brick and a USBC cable to charge any of my devices and while that's a nice benefit the real benefit of USBC for me at least isn't really the charging it's the faster data transfer rates you can get on the iPhone 15 Pro you can now get 10 gbit per second transfer speeds through the USBC port and this USBC Port now also supports external drives so this goes in part kind of with the iPhone camera system but I have been using my iPhone a lot for recording videos now and the new Pro reses log footage looks absolutely fantastic but one big issue I have had with previous iPhones with the slow data transfer rate over lightning I would never transfer these large video files over lightning but now that I have USBC it's so quick and so fast to just take the video footage directly off my iPhone even with these large file sizes and then import them into editing applications like Final Cut Pro the only issue I kind of noticed with this method though is that when I load my footage into Final Cut it does kind of load like every video I shot my iPhone and after 6 months of dealing with this process now it's a little Annoying like I I I feel like it would be nice if Apple added a feature or a setting change that only showed you recent videos that you haven't imported yet I would I would really appreciate that but yeah overall I'm glad that I can actually import these videos now the other thing that I use the USBC port for is external storage uh after 6 months of shooting on a 512 GB iPhone 15 Pro Max my storage is already full like if I go to try and shoot prores video directly on my iPhone I always get the warning that storage space needs to be freed up before I can record any more video so normally I just try and shoot directly onto an external SSD drive at this point but honestly it can be a little bit annoying sometimes when you're recording and you have a drive dangling out of the USBC Port so you know I'm thinking in future for the iPhone 16 Pro I might actually shift over to the 1 tbte model because I'm really surprised just how quick a 512 GB iPhone has filled up uh with shooting prores video now overall the camera system continues to be the best overall camera system I have used and still photography is really good on this and I've been really surprised with how good the default 24 megapixel pictures look uh it is a great combination of not only resolution but also the onboard computational photography processing that Apple packs into this camera and basically it's it's giving you a really good Default Resolution out of the gate but then also giving you a lot of good colors and a lot of good uh highlight detail and and Shadow detail and HDR processing uh and a lot of the photos I've taken on this device just look so so good without any editing and it's something I haven't seen recent Android flagships do I used the pixel 8 Pro the s24 ultra just came out uh or is about to come out and I believe those phones are still bidding the photos down to 12 megapixels on the default shooting mode that's the mode that most people use so uh I really do like the combination that Apple has here uh for the iPhone 15 Pro and also the iPhone 15 has that 24 megapixel mode too so that's that's really good now the new 5x lens continues to be a welcome addition to the 15 Pro Max I really love the New Perspectives and focal lengths it has allowed me to capture with my smartphone photography and I'm getting interesting photos on my iPhone that just weren't possible before and of course you can also zoom in on something that's farther away which is also nice when you can't get too close to your subject however after using the 5x lens for the past 6 months I really think there are some areas for improvement and that has to do with the Default Resolution this is still a 12 megapixel sensor so when you digital Zoom or crop past the 5x lens it starts to lose detail really fast and if you're not in ideal lighting situations it it doesn't look all that great other Flagship smartphones like the s24 ultra and the pixel8 pro I just bashed on them before now I'm going to praise them uh have higher 50 megapixel resolution sensors on their 5x lens which is similar to the 48 megapixel main wide-angle lens on the iPhone that I was just praising so that means when you are digitally zooming on a 5x shot with those phones you get even more detail and more resolution so you can actually crop in past 5x and get a more usable shot so this is something I would like to see improved on future iPhone models still in terms of overall picture quality and video quality I have yet to find another phone that matches the iPhone 15 Pro Max and if you value both photos and videos you definitely have to take a look at getting the 15 Pro Max because that prores video really elevates this Smartphone to really make your footage not look exactly like smartphone footage like you lose all of that extra sharpening and processing when you're using prores video and it just looks so so good and it's just more flexible footage to work with if you know how to edit it and you can do some really really amazing things with the 15 Pros camera system just make sure you get an external SSD or honestly enough internal storage to shoot these prores videos don't make the same mistake I did if you shoot a lot of video all right so is the iPhone 15 Pro Max still worth it after 6 months of use well listen this has been one of my favorite iPhone experiences to date and a lot of my complaints about the iPhone 14 pro Max and previous iPhones were solved with this phone obviously any future iPhone 16 Pro or whatever is going to have more features if you wait but I really still think this is a good time to upgrade if you are interested in the iPhone 15 Pro Max after 6 months it is still a really good phone and honestly 6 months to wait for a new phone is still a pretty long time so if you need a new phone with good build quality battery life performance and a stellar camera system you are going to love the 15 Pro Max all right let me know what do you think of the iPhone 15 Pro Max in the comments below do you agree with me that it is one of the best iPhone experien as ever do you like the new titanium frame do you like the camera system I want to hear in the comments below if you like this video make sure you give me a like if you want to see more from the channel make sure you're subscribed it's going to be a very exciting 2024 and as always thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you all hopefully not in the next six months but hopefully I will see you in the next video take care everyone

Channel: GregsGadgets

Views: 34,320

Keywords: iPhone 15, iPhone 15 pro max, iPhone 15 pro max 6 months later, iPhone 15 pro max long term review, iPhone 15 pro max camera, iPhone 15 pro max battery, iPhone 15 pro max battery life, iPhone 15 pro max features, iPhone 15 pro max 24 megapixel, iPhone 14 Pro Max proves, iPhone 15 pro max 6 months later review, magsafe, wireless charger, iPhone charger, anker maggo/ 3-in-1- wireless charger, portable magsafe 3 in 1 charger, charging station for iphone watch and airpods

Id: uxtKCSAlGbE

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024