iPhone 15 Pro Review - Better than you think.

if you zoom out to 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 is no one big defining feature that puts them on the map like the dynamic Island was on the iPhone 14 Pros or the 120 hertz Pro motion displays on the iPhone 13 Pros the famous summary page that Apple makes for each of their new products for this phone half of it was filled with features that were already well used to there's not even a bold new color to aesthetically differentiate itself this is the single driest selection in recent memory for me but it's only now that I've started Living with it that I've realized so many little things things that are easy to miss things that Apple didn't even mention that all add up to make this a more surprising more immediately beneficial experience than I would say I've had with any iPhone I've tested before this especially when it comes to cameras in case you're wondering by the way this is what you get when you order a 15 Pro it's fairly standard Apple fare no longer a black box that you used to get with Pros I imagine to use less ink inside you get the phone the new USBC cable and the little insert which has your sim ejector tool manual and a couple of Apple stickers now this cable is a bit of an upgrade with this woven fiber around it which is going to make it more durable and is very very resistant to tangling but just know that it isn't a fast cable the iPhone 15 Pros are capable of USB 3 speeds I.E 20 times faster than lightning used to be but with the default cable you will not get them this is pretty standard for most phones though okay so the first thing about these phones which I guess I didn't realize the full potential of until switching to the pro Max is the action button this brand new programmable button that sits in place of the Ring silent switch that you can set to whatever trigger you want and my heart take when I first saw this was well you can already program things to a triple tap of your power button why bother doing the same thing to a button that's just much harder to reach and the hard to reach part that hasn't changed it still makes no sense to me why a button designed around being a shortcut is so far out of the radius of where your fingers can reach in a normal grip unless you use it for the camera I would say that 80 of photos that I take on my phone I do so in landscape mode and and that works really well with the action button because when you go like this your finger is naturally resting on it the button is designed so that you have to hold for half a second or so to activate I guess to reduce accidental presses and then that activation can take you immediately to not just the camera but exactly the camera mode that you want to be the default and then if you do that the action button will also double as your shutter button when you get there which means this is now the fastest way to be able to quickly record a clip when the opportunity unexpectedly arises it's not perfect because let's say If instead of here the button was actually up here that would mean that you could properly grip the phone without worrying that you're actually covering the thing that's shooting the photos plus you might find that for a lot of commands it's actually much easier to map them to the power button or even the backtab feature which every iPhone has but the point is action button solid new feature has its uses and also something Apple didn't really mention but just kind of showed as part of one of their slides was that the iPhone 15 Pros are coming with a new thread radio which may well make them better at communicating with other Apple Smart Home devices so I have no doubt that people will find cool ways to use this action button to even control the home okay this is a phone let's talk about call Quality we don't talk about call Quality very much mostly because it doesn't tend to change between Generations but there is a really cool new Improvement here to voice isolation so I've got my fiance drisha on the line right now she's using a 15 Pro and it sounds terrible yeah okay so let's try the voice isolation [Music] without any noise it literally feels like you've turned the tap off that's crazy there's a lot and while the voice isolation won't improve the quality of your speech it will pretty much erase all background noise without reducing it and then just like the new FaceTime video effects what's quite cool is that these voice effects because they're happening on a hardware level they persist whatever the software you're using whether it's a normal call a FaceTime call or a zoom call what I would love is to be able to get this working with Voice Notes too because I mean clearly it can and that is like 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 Benchmark the CPU in this new a17 Pro chip is coming out about 10 faster and the graphic score is up by 20 from last year which is solid and in a way a bit surreal because it's actually approaching the graphics performance of the M2 powered MacBooks but then at the same time if we zoom out and look at what's happening in the General market these are not out of the ordinary generational leaps in power but what was genuinely surprising is that after a long time it finally feels that we have something to do with that power what you're seeing right now is Resident Evil Village playing on an iPhone and we've seen plenty of pretty phone games before like Genji impact but what is crazy about this is that this is not Resident Evil Village mobile this is Resident Evil the same Resident Evil that you've seen on consoles all the assets and the textures are taken straight from the PlayStation 4 version of the game and then it's pairing that with some of the tech from the PS5 version of the game like HDR which is a much higher brightness range than last gen consoles could support now as someone who has played this game on current gen consoles holding it in my hand not even on one of those bulky handheld PCS with a battery life of two hours on a smartphone is very impressive it is only running at 720p resolution as opposed to the 900p that the PlayStation 4 runs the game at but still the fact that it is 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 display the surround sound speakers and everything else built in it has definitely felt like one of those feet of Technology moments excuse the the dazzling so many times when I'm away somewhere the only Gadget I have with me is my phone and I just wish that I could have some proper meaty offline single player games that I could sink my teeth into so if this whole console gaming on a phone thing actually catches on now I'm gonna be a very happy guy and you probably won't see many Tech videos but we don't know if it will yet there's only four console games like this currently announced exclusively for the pro iPhone 15s one of them is the latest Assassin's Creed which is very cool and surreal because that game looks like this but one of the games that I spent growing up with on my PlayStation Portable was also Assassin's Creed and that looked like this but it does raise questions like how easy is it to Port over a PlayStation 4 game to an iPhone how many will come after this initial honeymoon period and will they also come to Android phones later on because powerful as this is the graphics performance on the iPhone is not dissimilar to what you get on the latest Samsung we have no idea there is also support for Wi-Fi 6E base into that package which is basically a less congested version of Wi-Fi 6 but does need a router specifically with that technology in mind okay let's talk about the design right now where we are with the iPhone 15 Pros High Point we've just come from a set of phones that were pretty yes but very heavy and not comfy to a set of phones that are just as pretty but more comfortable thanks to the new contoured edges much lighter thanks to the material swap to Titanium not to mention more practical thanks to having a matte finish all the way around with the iPhone 14 pro that I used to use the fingerprinty stainless steel sides the couple of marks I've got near my charging port from where I've well missed and the dust in the mute slider are the only giveaways that this is a well used phone but with these I mean obviously we'll need about three months to say anything conclusively but it feels like the combination of having both matte and brushed side rails should help to hide that it's not the dream though because even though the material does hide scratches better it does look like it can be scratched easier and also fingerprints on these darker phones tend to show up as a light area which means that around your buttons you tend to almost get this haloing effect from past fingerprints that you struggle to wipe away they're not permanent marks they'll come off straight away if you go in there with a cloth but you can't be doing that every day so you will notice it from time to time zooming out a little I still think the most comfortable shape that a phone can be is pebble-like I've asked my whole family and every person agreed that the iPhone 11 Pro is more comfy to hold and use than the 15 Pro but then I suppose that thing has its own set of issues because the curved nature of the phone introduces a bulge around the screen and that's actually something the new phones do especially well the bezels are really really Slim So it's one of those things that of course you will 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 anytime you get a hint of perspective like seeing anyone else's older iPhone it does make you reappreciate what I think is a bit of a design feat okay so I mentioned that cameras are something pretty special on these phones and let's be very clear about something what makes these cameras special is no one thing in isolation it's not about the ultroid camera that lets in a bit more light it's not about the new coating that helps reduce the amount of lens flares on this lens because honestly you still get enough lens flares on the main camera to account for both it's not any of these pieces on their own but it's how the whole thing works together as a system that's even better than the sum of its parts and this is the thing that I've only now realized having used the phones so for starters the iPhone 15 Pros take 24 megapixel photos again that doesn't sound very impressive when you think that the latest Samsung can take up 200 megapixel shot but it's the fact that the iPhone can do this 24 megapixel by default that's the key thing that it takes 24 megapixel in in auto mode with no perceptible compromise that I can see not in terms of the time taken to capture not in terms of the dynamic range of the image not in terms of the amount of post-processing that happens afterwards it's actually faster here to take a 24 megapixel shot than it is for most phones to take a 12 megapixel shot which is the industry standard default even four phones which have 200 megapixel camera sensors so that's one part of it but then you've got the file format most phones when they take photos they output those photos as JPEG images for quite a few years though the iPhone instead uses a file format called Heat which is really similar to JPEG and image quality but with smaller file sizes actually about half the size now that the resolution of the photos has gone up though the image size has gone up with it but even though the resolution has doubled the image size has only gone up one point five times which leaves you with this bizarre situation where the 24 megapixel shots taken here take up less space than the 12 megapixel shots on other phones oh and that smaller file now also includes both the portrait mode data and the live photo data at the same time this is kind of where it really started to click with me because I think like motion photos in general are an amazing feature I was making a little video for drisher and I's anniversary recently and the only way that video was possible was because for every photo I take an obvious the phone was also storing the entire scene just before that shot was captured and so long as you're doing that it is super quick to then save that motion as its own video which you can put into a longer project then I also love portrait mode every single time I'm trying to take a nice photo for someone else I will take like three normal shots and then I'll take a separate set of three portrait shots to let them decide which one they prefer because they're almost two very different propositions the normal shot is very practical and utilitarian and then the portrait shot is very cinematic all of that extra time all of that faff and all about having to think is just gone 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 pop up when that F pops up you know that you are automatically capturing depth information and that you can go back into the shot after you've taken it to tweak the level of portrait mode you want to apply again in 24 megapixels so double the resolution that portrait mode used to be the F will also come up if you ever tap to focus because then the phone knows that you're trying to focus on something in particular which means that even if you miss focus on that subject in the moment you can go back in afterwards and tweak it and so what I'm really getting to here is that Apple has managed to build with the iPhone 15 Pros a camera system for which all you have to think about is just this one thing is it framed the way that I want it to be the rest is done for you as well as now photonic engine this was introduced last year as a level of processing applied to each image to add in extra detail and fix up the colors but when it was announced it wasn't for all camera modes for things like portraits and night mode which already required a lot of processing that wasn't Headroom to also have the photonic engine going on not anymore it now works in portrait mode it works in night mode it works on the front camera and it works on every single magnification of the rear camera and you can really tell the difference like I went out a couple of days ago to get some shots of the night sky and while sometimes between iPhone Generations you do struggle to notice the difference the improvements here are at a glance instantly recognizable and the other thing that they've addressed is HDR HDR in photos is one of Apple's historic long-running weaknesses I think it originates from the fact that Apple doesn't want to over process images but the truth is in a lot of cases like when you have really harsh backlighting behind you you kind of have to well it's better here I wouldn't say that Apple's completely solved all instances of parts of the image being Overexposed but at the same time I didn't expect a difference this noticeable versus last year's phone you can tell on the rear camera and you can also tell on the front camera so do you kind of see what I'm saying about these cameras this idea that no individual aspect is particularly groundbreaking or new it's just the fact that it all comes together in the highest quality lowest hassle way that I've ever seen with by the way the smoothest operating version of the camera app that I've ever seen on a phone or within like a three megabyte file now is how Apple's trying to pitch this thing as seven lenses in your pocket there's some truth to it but you can't really take that statement at face value see the way it works is the iPhone 15 Pros have a 48 megapixel main camera sensor if you tap on this one time zoom it'll cycle between three different focal lengths between 1X and 1.5 x now because the camera is 48 megapixel and you're outputting images in 24 megapixel you can between 1X and 1.5 x Zoom use different amounts of this full sensor to achieve a result that is still genuinely a 24 megapixel shot and so on the bright side when you take let's say a 35 millimeter photo it is more detailed than if you just took a 1x shot and zoomed in till it looked like a 35 millimeter photo but then the downside is that when you do this you're not using the full extent of your sensor and therefore the image quality isn't as high I wouldn't say the degradation is noticeable but it will be there and it's just a bit icky to call this a 7 lens system when really if you're going to do that you could just add a stop at every single possible different magnification and then call it a thousand camera system as a feature it's fine it does the job but unlike the way it's being presented it is not the same as actually having seven lenses right now let's talk about the new zoom camera so for the iPhone 15 Pro Max only the three times optical zoom lens camera has become a five times optical zoom lens camera and this is a bigger upgrade than it initially seems they've not just taken the zoom camera that was already on the pro and stuck a bigger lens on it the pro Max has a larger sensor and better stabilization than the regular Pro too and let's be very clear even though five times Zoom is not the highest magnification we've ever seen on a phone by a long shot this is still a very good quality five-time zoom camera which means that in most lighting conditions the shots look pretty good even at 10x and the lens has so much natural foreground background separation that oftentimes you don't even need to rely on portrait mode for that DSLR like separation and check this this is a one-time Zoom portrait taken on the 15 Pro Max notice how much Distortion there is on my face taking a portrait at 3x is far more flattering because you get to be further away and then 5X fsos slightly even more flattering than a 3X so it has a purpose and it's just a fun tool to have because 5x feels like such a distinct image to what a one x image looks like and you don't have to step back as much as I was expecting to fit the person that you're trying to shoot in the frame but it is still very much a trade see the way the main camera sensor on this phone works you can only get so-called lossless zoom in between 1X and 2x and so the entire gap between your 2X and your 5x Zoom range now that relies on pure digital Zoom which is why in these shots the 3x image while fluttering is definitely the weakest quality and as you get to like 4.9 x like just before the 5x optical zoom camera kicks in it does start to look a bit rough also worth bearing in mind the optical zoom cameras on both the pro and the pro max they're not 24 megapixel they're so 12 as is the ultrawide lens which is pretty normal for a phone but it just feels like one of the only slight remaining inconsistencies but camera comparison versus the Samsung coming very shortly so if you want to see that then he's sub to the channel would be Mega pixel now based on some browsing on X people are worried about battery and rightly so the iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max had insane battery for their prospective sizes but then the 14s were not as good and they also seem to degrade faster over time now that could be a few different things it could be the iOS 17 beta that was pretty rough on battery it could be the extra brightness of the screen putting more pressure on the battery and causing more heat on the inside which can permanently degrade your cell whatever it was Apple didn't really acknowledge or address any battery concern so it's not clear if any of those long-term effects will be present but what I can say is that the iPhone 15 Pros are better for sure than the 14 Pros with a bigger battery capacity even more mature software and better heat dissipation which should make that battery last longer over time but as well as a camera test there will also be a very detailed battery test alongside it so there will be a lot to talk about there I am slightly sad to see that the charging speed hasn't gone up which would have been one of the main perks of a USB 3 Port but at least the phone does leverage some of the capability of USBC with the ability to reverse charge your airpods what actually is great news and what I'm really surprised Apple didn't talk about at the event was that it's not just airpods the fact that your iPhone 15s can now deliver power through USBC means that almost anything that you can plug this cable into you can charge which means that for the first time since switching to the iPhone like four years ago I don't have to feel like I'm the battery lead in my friend group I guess the main perk of iPhone being USBC now is some semblance of stability this move was always on the horizon it always felt like it could be just next year when Apple switched over and so now that it has just happened you can safely invest in some USBC accessories that you know won't become outdated for at least a couple of years but probably more I know there's been a lot of rumors about the portless iPhone but honestly I I just think they're a long way off there are so many things that would suffer if Apple made that move anytime soon like being able to listen to proper lossless music being able to transfer massive prores video files which apple is touting as one of the new features that you should use as well as all kinds of really Niche things like using your phone as a screen to Pilot a drone where you need the lowest latency possible in order to bring this all together then we need to consider the prices for the iPhone 15s the pro is staying at its price of 999 and the pro Max is going up by 100 to 11.99 to which I would say I think the normal Pro is in a really good place right now it's an iterator phone but one that ties together a lot of the Loose Ends that Apple has had over the years integrating all the bitty camera features together sanding down the rougher edges of the design and bringing a little lift to the battery while it's at it the pro Max is a bit of a harder pill to swallow since the only additional difference for the extra hundred dollar Gap in price is more storage and your 3x lens becoming a 5x lens which is an upgrade but not a massive one and one that in some situations can leave you with worse shots than the 3x but that does not invalidate it the 15 Pro Max is still the phone for people who want the best iPhone it's the phone that I've already switched to especially because of the battery and also important note the phone isn't actually necessarily more expensive if the quoted prices Apple gives are always us but like 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 okay we'll see you in the comparisons

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 7,053,870

Keywords: iphone, iphone 15 pro, iphone 15 pro max, apple, iphone 15 pro review, iphone 15 pro max review

Id: JwAfHEHQKto

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023