No, no, no, no, no. After being one of the first iPhones to excite me in years, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are absolutely mired in controversy right now. Everything from overheating to Apple providing weird advice regarding charging cables to even a new bend gate. But that doesn't mean that I don't still wanna check them out. So let's take a look at not just the phones, but also this fun little report card that the Labs team put together for me. Right out of the gate, boy, are they ever pretty. And the beauty is more than just skin deep. They feature an aluminum-titanium hybrid frame. We'll get into that a little bit more later. A 6.7 or 6.1 inch display, depending on whether you go for the Pro or the Pro Max. Apple's new A17 Pro, no longer bionic, chipset featuring two performance cores, four efficiency cores, and six GPU cores, along with eight gigs of LPDDR5 memory and all the wireless fixings, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, and their ultra wideband chip that has some cool new tricks up its sleeve, like the ability to find your friends, just like you can find an Apple AirTag in a crowd of people. That is legitimately pretty useful if you have friends. Of course, for the folks whose best friends are their dogs or their cars, there's the cameras. Each has a 48 megapixel main shooter, along with two 12 megapixel auxiliary shooters, one ultra wide and one telephoto. That telephoto is 5X optical zoom on the Pro Max and 3X on the regular Pro. For the avid photographers, I could see that being enough, especially when you combine that with some of the new software enabled capabilities, like the ability to record log raw footage, even to an external storage device via the all new 10 gigabit per second USB-C port, the ability to take a regular photo, and then convert it to portrait after the fact, so you don't have to make the decision at the time, and the ability to record spatial video for viewing on the upcoming Apple Vision Pro headset. There's, of course, some other physical things. In addition to that USB-C port, we get our usual volume buttons, and, okay, I'm legitimately so excited about this, and it should just be on everything the action button. Gone is the toggle switch for vibrate in ring mode, and here is the action button. Just click it to see what mode you're in, and hold it if you wanna switch between ring and silent. Or if you're not into that, you can reconfigure it to just about anything you want. I have no idea how to do this. Let's see how quickly I can figure it out. It's not here for some reason, although that would be fairly obvious to me. Nope, I guess we need to dig into the old fashioned settings app. All right, well, that wasn't that hard to find. Ooh, configurability. Choose a shortcut. This is so much more robust already than what I've seen with things like the stupid Bixby button that Samsung made extremely difficult when they first introduced it to just do whatever the crap I want with it. Okay, this is an example. Even things like the double press the lock button to open the camera functionality that's on some Android phones. The lack of configurability for that kind of thing. This puts it to shame. No recognized music, man. Can you configure it though to use it in different ways? Press, hold, double press, that would be next level. Oh, accessibility features. In some cases, that's just Apple's way of saying features that you wanted, but we won't admit are a good idea. Like the mouse support that they added on the iPad as an accessibility feature forever. And then we're like, okay, fine, it's a good idea. Quick camera launching on the iPhone, yes. Look, I know from the lock screen, I know you can do this, I know. Okay, watch this, watch this, watch, okay, quick draw. I press the action button, oh, camera's open already. I'm ready, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. Oh, I like it. I gotta be honest with you guys. So far, I still kind of love it. It's amazing how used to giant phones I've gotten though the Pro Max doesn't even feel unreasonably big. I think this is probably the route I'd go. Though for gamers, that might not actually be the best option. You see, both of them have the same 460 PPI pixel density. Both of them will run it anywhere from 10 to 120 Hertz with adaptive refresh rate technology. So they'll feel smooth when they need to feel smooth and can save power when they need to save power. But because the size of the screen of the Pro Max is so much greater, we actually found in our game testing that our 1% lows were significantly lower. Meaning that in periods of intense action, you could experience significantly lower dips, which could result in you getting killed. I mean, not in real life in the game, but you get the point, right? The brightness of these screens is flipping outstanding. Okay, in SDR, we got 250 nits full screen in a dark room, a thousand nits outdoors. And in an 18% window, we got 2200 nits in SDR. 2200 nits on a phone? Are you flipping kidding me? In HDR, we didn't see the same kinds of stratospheric highs, but these are really, really impressive displays. For me, the gaming story of the iPhone 15 family though, is not mobile games like this. It's the AAA games that they were showing off during the announcement. If we actually get developers porting their games to metal for the iPhone, it could be a literal game changer. Since I've been gaming for so long, now seems like as good a time as I need to talk about the first big controversy, thermals. While we didn't extensively test for thermals, we did perform game benchmarking, so we did make some observations. Our devices got as high as 43 degrees on the surface, which is not particularly comfortable, but isn't going to do any kind of harm, while we've seen reports of as high as 46. Our best guess is that it's one of a couple of things. Either those other outlets were charging while performing their testing, and therefore adding some additional thermal load to the device, or there could be some variance, depending on whether these phones were made in China, where the factories have more experience, or made in India. So here's a fun little thing you can do. If you look at the box, you will see blah, blah, blah, assembled in China, something, something, yes, right there. But if you look inside the USB-C port, there's a little engraving that indicates if you got a China or an India unit. So one of our theories, and this may impact some of the other controversies as well, is that there could be some slight differences, whether they're at the factory, or whether they're up the supply chain that are causing these phones to be slightly different. So my iPhone 15 Pro Max that I ordered on launch day is China. Our iPhone 15, which the team has already checked, is a China model. And my iPhone 15 Pro is also China. So I wonder if there's a little bit better consistency in these China models. Like you can just immediately tell. Shot on iPhone looks better. Sorry, Android. Really, I'm one of your people, but gotta give credit where it's due. Now let's talk about the second big controversy, fragility. Apple spent a fair bit of time talking about, the titanium frame, and that sounds really impressive. But in Zach from JerryRigEverything's bend test, he actually found that it failed extremely quickly. I mean, it's not the kind of thing that I think will just happen sitting in your pocket, like we saw with, what was it, the iPhone 6, I think. It should be noted that for Zach, the regular Pro, the non-Max, didn't have any noticeable bending problems. Another thing that happened was Apple Track had the camera bump break off during a drop test. Labs' theory is that the camera module could be introducing a weak point due to the way that the glass curves up from the main body or the flex in the subframe that pushes against the inside of the glass during a drop. The break in the glass is perfectly aligned with the inner frame. Enough about controversy, let's talk good things for a little bit. Both of these managed to achieve 85% charge in just an hour, and that's in spite of the fact that Apple does not support wildly fast charging rates, you know, 60 watts, 100 and plus watts or whatever else like some Android manufacturers do, and they both reached 100% in just over an hour and a half. By contrast, the iPhone 15 non-Pro took over two hours to reach 100%, but it should be noted, also reaches 85% in one hour. So it seems to be just down to the curve that Apple has chosen for topping up the last 15% of the battery. Another good thing, the USB-C port. They've actually given me a little bucket of fun things to attach to the new iPhones. Let's start with a microphone. Wait, did I even mention that dbrand sponsored this video yet? There's no broken glass this time, right? Nope, no broken glass, just iPhone cases. We've all seen cases like this in the past. They start out clear, they end up yellow, junk. dbrand's new ghost case is designed to never yellow. Wow, never is a really big word. Did they use the word never? dbrand seems quite confident they have engineered the case to solve that problem. So much so, in fact, that dbrand is offering free replacements in the event that your ghost case ever turns yellow. This looks absolutely sick. Considering all the torture that they've put me through over the years, I'm kind of hoping they do turn yellow and cause a huge headache. That must be from our sponsorship team. Yeah, pretty much. No, I don't hope they turn yellow because I actually believe in dbrand's approach to product design. I think that they overall do a pretty darn fine job and I'm really excited to no longer see ugly yellow plastic phone cases because when that happens, people inevitably throw them away and we end up just producing more garbage. It's better to produce some plastic thing once rather than over and over again. And this looks freaking awesome. So I'll be keeping this on the phone while we test out all these cool USB-C peripherals. What do you think are the odds this microphone's just gonna work? I don't think so. There's no way. No. No! Holy crap, it just worked. It just worked. Volume control just working? Is that just the headphone volume control? That's wild. You could just plug this into your iPhone and be recording audio. Oh, oh, we definitely need a Razer Viper 8K gaming mouse though. Does iOS support a mouse? I know iPad OS does, which is a totally different thing. Okay. Oh, no way! I'm a keyboard mouse gamer, folks. What if I lock it in? All right, because Apple arbitrarily decides that, well, iPads need to be locked in landscape mode. iPhones simply don't. What if I do? Apple is apparently warning that using third-party USB-C cables could cause damage to the device. My understanding the last time I looked at this is it was only a handful of stores in China and I don't even know if they were official Apple stores, but there apparently is some validity to it. There's a slightly smaller gap between the single row nine pin and single row 11 pin connectors. Realistically, the same is probably true of anytime you're using a third-party cable. Apple does apparently have a fuse and an identifier chip in their cable to make sure that it's an authentic cable. I mean, that's sort of not the point of USB-C. The point is that we can kind of use any cable we want. As you can see, I'm not having any trouble with it, but who knows, they may reject your warranty claim if you do not use an approved cable, but hey, at least you're getting pretty decent screen on time. We weren't able to get anywhere near the 23 and 29 hours that they advertise for YouTube playback on the regular Pro and the Pro Max respectively, but we did get 17.75 hours and 21 and a half hours, which is pretty darn respectable, and that was at 200 nits. We don't know exactly what Apple's test conditions were. It's possible, for example, that they had cellular turned off or they had the screen at minimum brightness. We're not sure, but those are still very respectable results, and in our stress tests, we saw 3.3 hours. This is running 3DMark Wildlife Extreme on the Pro and four hours on the Pro Max. Those are very respectable results. I wanna hook up a monitor. No, I wanna do what Framework did. This is so cool. They were memeing on their social media, all like, hey, Apple, way ahead of you. We got your USB Type-A adapter. Oh, of course, it's not compatible with the dbrand case. Oh, okay, sorry, dbrand. Love you guys. Go to shortlinus.com to go check it out and get your own ghost case, but for now, we're gonna have to lose it. Let's go ahead and pop this bad boy in. Woo, Type-A port, anyone? Ah, ah. They also showed adding the headphone jack back with their headphone jack module. Of course, that's not what I'm interested in right now. I'm just gonna pop out my laptop's HDMI port and plug that in. How cool is that? HDMI iPhone. HDMI phone? I have no idea what this monitor is. It's an LG something, but I don't know what resolution or what refresh rate it runs at, but what we're about to find out is if the iPhone supports it. Hey, look at that. We got the Chotek USB-C to HDMI cable. Okay, well, sorry, Framework. Investment disclosure. I mean, well, it's not the most elegant thing ever. Ow, you ready, you ready? I think we got this. Hey, even just for doing reviews of iPhones back in the day, I would have given my left testicle for this easy, seamless, flawless freaking screen capture. Just plug this bad boy into a capture card and you are good to freaking go. How did they not go USB-C sooner? This is awesome. I mean, we know why they didn't. So they could collect their licensing and certification fees for the lightning cable, but for the user, how did they not do this sooner? The best part is that it's super mature because iOS and iPadOS, let's face it, not that different. And a lot of this stuff has been awesome in iPadOS for a long time. That's one of the killers for me. It's just like how ahead of the game Apple was on USB-C and then how far behind the iPhone was on it. Not gonna lie, definitely some upscaling going on here that is more noticeable in the larger display, but that looks not bad. Oh, what the hell? So if you touch it, it shows. If you're interacting with it, you can see that. Interesting. Yep, that's rendered on an iPhone, all right. And this video is rendered out. Subscribe to Short Circuit. Don't forget to check out our sponsor, dbrand, with their ghost cases. We've got that linked down below.
