To kinda just spoil the whole damn piece: I regret buying it. It has things I like, but for the most part the things I bought it for have all but proven to be nothingburgers.
It was actually kind of an accident
Going into this I didn’t really intend to buy one. My 13 Pro had been doing fine enough, having done two years (and still sitting pretty at 94% battery health, I mention this for a reason) and aging like a fine wine. I had long since been wanting to go back to a Pro Max-tier device, if only because I really wanted the battery life that came with it. The 13 Pro was quickly becoming a phone that I could run down VERY quickly when recording video and taking lots of pictures, which I do. Quite a bit. So something with more endurance? Yes please.
The 15 preorders went up and I decided, well, why not see what the numbers are, how much I’d pay out of pocket, and where everything landed. What I didn’t expect–like most financing things–was it just going straight to charging my card, rather than presenting one final screen asking me to confirm everything looked good (and that I was approved). Oops.
Now presented with a situation, my brain decided, clearly, the best course of action would be to just send it, so I quickly arranged a deal to sell my iPad to a friend of mine and that was the costs of the 15 Pro Max covered.
What was quite interesting though was that–despite being on Visible–I was able to just select T-Mobile at checkout and not verify that I was actually a T-Mobile customer. Some time ago Apple actually changed things up such that if you’re buying a phone not on one of the big three carriers, you have to buy it full price. Meh.
The phone did ask me to sign into a T-Mobile account when it arrived, but that was easily bypassed.
So, what do you like about it?
USB 3.1 (in tandem with USB-C) is one of the nicer things. When I first set my phone up, it didn’t take the better part of an hour to sync my local media (about 30GB or so). Rather, the whole thing was done and dusted in four minutes. Holy moly.
USB-C is excellent too, and might be one of the reasons why I haven’t just sold this thing off and downgraded to a 13 Pro Max. Being able to carry one charger for my MacBook and my iPhone is lovely. Being able to use damn near the entire world of USB-C accessories is also awesome. When testing a network jack install, I was able to just plug an Ethernet dongle into my iPhone and use that as opposed to having to scare up a laptop with an Ethernet port on it (an increasingly rare sight). The convenience factor is just *chefs kiss*
iPhone 15 Pros can also record video directly to USB-C SSDs, which is another nice boon to iPhones finally getting on board with USB-C.
The only gotcha here is that the iPhone ships with a USB 2.0 cable. You have to bring your own USB 3.1 cable, and those are not the cheapest thing, either.
Beefed up communications: Wi-Fi and 5G both seem much better over my 13 Pro, with Wi-Fi able to pull down 1.4Gbps from Speedtest on a 2Gbps connection (the 13 Pro would manage half that with 6 feet of range and line of sight to my Wi-Fi 6 router). 5G can go well over a gigabit when I test it on Visible+ in an ultra wideband area that’s seemingly unloaded (early morning/late night), speeds I never saw on my 13 Pro. Network upgrades can influence this, but it felt like the 13 Pro really had to try to even come close to cracking a gigabit, whereas the 15 Pro Max can just do it with ease. (And, to be honest, I know this is a mostly useless metric, most people aren’t going to be using gigabit speeds on their phones, but still.)
The color: Well, kind of. I wish we had more saturated colors like the 12 Pros did, but the blue titanium on mine reminds me of the kinda blue-tinted slate color on the iPhone 5. I loved that color so much. It does look better to my eyes than the Sierra Blue of my 13 Pro, which looked so bright it might as well had been white and silver to my eyes.
The Dynamic Island is neat, albeit underutilized: I do like having things like timers being always visible, but it really feels like few of the apps I use actually take advantage of both the Island and the Live Activities API. The only two I’ve really seen in my use are Instagram, and…Burger King? Though this is very much an “in the eye of the beholder” type thing. You might use plenty of apps that tap into the Island and use it effectively. I, unfortunately, don’t.
Despite that, I do think–even though it arguably costs more screen real estate, because the island extends further into the screen than the notch did–Apple leaning into the display cutout like this and turning something that would otherwise be considered a compromise into a feature was a damn clever idea.
And what don’t you like about it?
The camera: This felt like the greatest step back, for me. I never got to experience the 14 Pro, so this is my first time shaking hands with the new 42MP sensor that Apple makes use of. While it does kick out some pretty nice photos when allowed to strut its stuff, it feels simultaneously held back. I take plenty of indoor photos, too. Sometimes I get close up. Not close up to consider it macro, but, say, within a foot of something laying on a table, or something. The 13 Pro was fine at this, and even when it wasn’t, it could just hand off to the ultrawide for macro mode. Because all three cameras on the 13 Pros were 12MP, they all felt in sync with eachother, like you weren’t taking a hit on quality when the iPhone’s camera system swapped between modules.
With the 14 Pro and 15 Pro, however, only the main camera is 42MP. The telephoto and ultrawide are still 12MP (and from what I understand pretty much unchanged from the 13 Pro). This means whenever your phone has to swap to another module (because you got too close to something) you’re now shooting with a worse sensor with not as much resolution. Splendid.
Not so bad, on the surface, until you consider that as part of the 42MP sensor that Apple is now using, the minimum focus distance of the main camera has increased, so photos that wouldn’t have triggered macro mode on the 13 Pro now do so on the 14 Pro and 15 Pro. This happens to me many, many more times than I care to admit, and it creates this feeling that the camera really doesn’t feel much improved from the 13 Pro that I upgraded from.
(This is particularly diabolical on the regular 15s, which have been blessed with the 42MP sensor as well. Guess what? The regular 15 lacks macro mode. So if you go to take a close up shot that would have came out just fine on your old phone, you may go to look back only to find it a blurry mess. This has happened to my girlfriend quite a lot and it is infuriating.)
You also remember how I said that I used my phone for video, right? In another knock against the camera and for far too long, video recording was broken. This seems to have been an iOS bug (thank Jobs I don’t have to deal with the Genius Bar) but for the first few months of ownership, the camera system would randomly crash when recording a video, leaving you completely unaware unless you were looking at the phone to notice that hey, it’s not recording anymore.
That a bug like this managed to slip by (and remain a problem for so long) really feels like a testament for how far Apple has fallen in software quality as of late. (And also why I’m going to sit out iOS 18 for a good bit. I’m not playing this game again.)
The battery: Remember how I mentioned at the beginning that my 13 Pro ended its tenure at 94% battery health? We’re about a month removed from the 1 year anniversary of the 15 Pro Max and 245 cycles in, and we’re at 94%. (As I’m picking this up almost a month later…we’re now at 92% with 260 cycles. This battery is aging like milk.)
Worse yet, it doesn’t feel like the 15 Pro Max has any sort of battery advantage over the 13 Pro. If I’m having a particularly heavy day, I’m usually dead at the end of the day, just like my 13 Pro. Video kills the 15 just as fast as it did the 13, if I sit down to record a 40 minute long video it’s not uncommon for me to then look and see that I’ve lost 20% of my battery. And that’s only recording 1080p60!
Maybe, just maybe this is something to do with Apple shoving an absolutely overkill chip into the 15 Pros. The A17 Pro seemed quite ridiculous when it was being announced. Maybe it’s just too damn much. Much like I felt when I had an M1 iPad Air. The battery life on that thing blew chunks and I can only assume it’s the fact that a full fledged M1 is powering the thing that it torches through battery (and ran hot) like it did. Compare and contrast with my base-model iPad that sips battery.
But on the other hand, maybe I just have a curse with Pro Max-tier phones. The last one I had was a 11 Pro Max, and similarly that thing’s battery also aged like milk, being down to around 92% when it was traded in for my 13 Pro. (The 11 Pro Max was bought right before the 12 released, so it was just over a year old when it got traded in.)
There is also something to be said for Apple’s battery quality slipping as of the 14s: There have been quite a few reports of iPhone 14s suffering from prematurely degrading batteries, and I can definitely say that my girlfriend’s 11 battery–replaced in February 2023–only lasted a year before it was back down to almost being spent.
Something doesn’t feel right, and given one of the big reasons I got a 15 Pro Max was, well battery life, this has been a big let down.
The titanium finish: It just feels less durable than the outgoing stainless steel. Yeah, matte feels a bit better in the hand, but whenever I go to plug in my USB-C cables, if I miss the port ever so slightly it feels like the connector is digging into the titanium rather than how it would be on stainless steel, where it just kinda glides over the smooth surface and doesn’t feel like you’re tearing a chunk out of it. I know, I know, I’m being dramatic here, but the feel is equal parts great and worrying.
Conclusion
If I could go back and stop myself (especially with all of the everything that has happened this year), I probably would. Sure, the 15 Pro Max might eke out some wins over the 13 Pro (especially for USB-C) but they don’t really feel like they justify the $30 per month that I’m paying for this damn phone.
Maybe I was taken in by Apple’s keynote promising the moon, or something. Because they damn well did with the 13 Pro and delivered. I loved that phone to pieces and getting my first taste of ProMotion was something I wish I could forget and experience again. iOS 15 was a dumpster fire and a half at launch, but the 13 Pro more than made up for it.
I never got that feeling with the 15 Pro Max. For a minute the battery life was great and I was on cloud nine with it, but it felt like as iOS 17’s cycle progressed and the battery began degrading more and more, that battery life advantage quickly disappeared and I was feeling like I was no better off than before.
The camera, as you can probably tell, was the ultimate let down. The keynote made me feel like this thing could almost unseat my Nikon D7200, even! But nope. At the end of the day, the improvements honestly feel marginal, resolution of the main sensor notwithstanding.
At this point, though, I’m in too deep with this phone and kinda have to see it through to the end. I’ve had the intrusive thoughts to sell it and downgrade to a 13 Pro Max (and get my SIM slot back!) but that requires a lot of effort I don’t feel like expending when the 15 Pro Max is okay. I just wish I had never pulled the trigger.