The iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max are the biggest update to the lineup since probably the first Pro Max in 2019. The major change has been in the making for years, but the iPhone finally has USB-C. See you, Lightning and hello, universal cables on all platforms!
Professionals get USB 3.0 with speeds up to 10 Gbps. You can use your iPad Pro, MacBook Pro or Galaxy charger and cable to charge your new iPhones. However, Apple hasn’t said anything about faster charging.
Apple has made a series of design updates to the iPhone 15 Pro series. The new Pros have contoured edges and the thinnest bezels ever seen on an iPhone. Apple has managed to reduce the overall size of the phones, while still maintaining the same display size as last year.
Stainless steel is replaced by titanium for the frames, resulting in what Apple claims are the lightest Pro models yet introduced. The difference compared to the 11 Pro duo is only 1 g, but compared to last year’s 14 Pro the new ones lose 19 g.
The specific alloy is grade 5 titanium, which the company says is also used on the Mars rover. Apple has encased the aluminum in the titanium substructure using a new thermomechanical process. The coated aluminum helps with heat dissipation.
The phone’s frames have a brushed texture, achieved through a 14-hour process that includes machining, sanding, brushing, and finally sandblasting the titanium exterior of the phone. The iPhone 15 Pro is available in four finishes: black and white, blue and natural titanium.
The mute switch is now an action button. A long press will put the phone back into silent mode by default, but you can assign one of a number of actions by pressing or double-pressing: You can finally quickly open the camera on an iPhone with a button.
The front of the new iPhone 15 Pro is made of Ceramic Shield glass, just like on the 14 Pro models. The display size has not changed: the iPhone 15 Pro has a 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR OLED with adaptive refresh rate of 120 Hz (ProMotion), HDR10, Dolby Vision and a peak brightness of 2,000 nits. The iPhone 15 Pro Max increases the size to 6.7 inches. The always-on display has been expanded to include Stand-by, an always-on landscape mode for when you’re charging.
The camera system of the new iPhone 15 Pro is completely new. It all starts with the 48MP main camera, which has a larger sensor with 1.22µm pre-binned pixels and second-generation sensor-shift stabilization. The lens is a 24mm f/1.78.
The main camera opens up some imaging possibilities for the iPhone 15 Pro. You can now capture 48MP HEIF images along with 48MP ProRAW. The new larger sensor also allows for 28mm, 35mm, and 48mm digital zoom modes, and the iPhone will let you choose one of these focal lengths by default.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max features the first periscope camera on an iPhone. Thanks to the folded optical design, the Pro Max finally zooms beyond 3x and up to 5x, or 120mm in 35mm equivalent terms. The optical design is unique. Apple calls it a tetraprism, and it reflects light four times from the lens’ pupil opening to the folded sensor. The lens itself is an f/2.8, the brightest on a 120mm camera on a phone, which is pretty specific. There’s also optical stabilization, which Apple says makes 10,000 micro-adjustments per second to neutralize blur.
The iPhone 15 Pro makes do with a 77mm 3x zoom camera with 1µm pixels and an f/2.8 lens, not unlike that of last year’s phone.
Both models share a new 13mm f/2.2 1.4µm ultrawide lens with 100% focusing pixels and macro focus capability.
The A17 Pro chip powers iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. It is the industry’s first chip built on a 3nm process. Inside is a 6-core processor with 2 performance cores, which Apple says are 10% faster than the A16 Bionic, and 4 efficiency cores.
The GPU is a 6-core unit, which Apple says is 20% faster than its predecessor during maximum performance. The GPU enables hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing, which is supposedly 4x faster than the software-based Ray Tracing on last year’s chip. Apple showed off console games like Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage running on the new iPhone 15 Pro – both titles will launch on new iPhone Pro models next year.
The Neural Engine is a 16-core unit that Apple says is twice as fast as last year’s chip for machine learning models.
The A17 Pro SoC features a Display Engine with a dedicated AV1 codec and a ProRes codec. The chip enables the new iPhone 15 Pro models to capture 4K at 60 fps in ProRes RAW, along with support for the industry-standard ACES color profile.
iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max pre-orders will be available this Friday. The 15 Pro starts at $999 for a 128GB base model, while the 15 Pro Max starts at $1,199, but the base model now has 256GB of built-in storage. Prices in Europe are €1,199 for the Pro and €1,449 for the Pro Max: these are the same prices as last year.
Both models will begin shipping next Friday, September 22nd.
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