The iPhone 15 Pro has been my daily phone for the past couple of weeks, and I’ve got to be honest with you: it’s one of my favorite phones of the entire year.
But what makes it my favorite phone might not be appealing to you or to everyone else. I switched to the 15 Pro from a 14 Pro Max (I’m a tech journalist—I’ve gotta have the latest stuff, ya know?), primarily because I wanted a smaller phone. I got tired of lugging around a 240-gram brick of stainless steel and glass everywhere I went, and it annoyed me that I couldn’t type out messages with one hand.
So, the iPhone 15 Pro was dropped into my shopping bag at T-Mobile on preorder day, eight days prior to receiving it on a rainy New Jersey day. It isn’t technically the best iPhone you can buy, but for fans of smaller flagship phones, it’s probably the most well-rounded device you’ll find on the market.
For this year, I’d like to share a much shorter version of my typical iPhone review. In the midst of all the chaos of Techtober (the tech community’s shared nickname for October, one of the busiest months for product launches), I don’t have time to plunk out a full 3,200+ word review. And by now, many of you have sifted through the reviews of the iPhone 15 series and decided which one is right for you.
But I still want to be part of the conversation, and so typed while in the back of a Greyhound bus heading to New York City for the Google Pixel 8 event (and finished the Saturday afterward), here’s what I have to say.
TITANIUM BABY
That’s all Apple seems to care about with the iPhone 15 Pro: titanium. It’s a fine material, sure, but it’s nothing revolutionary. On the device, it feels really nice, mostly because it makes the phones lighter than they were last year. That’s my primary reason for liking titanium so much: personally, I think the stainless steel of the 14 Pro series looked more premium, but there’s no question that the titanium frame of the 15 Pro feels high-end.
Y’know, as long as you don’t strap a case to it, which is exactly what I did. Luckily, you can find plenty of high-quality cases out there that give you a premium feel in the hand, like Nomad’s Modern Leather case, my immediate go-to for the new 15 Pro. It’s sleek, covered in genuine Horween leather, and comes with fancy aluminum buttons. This isn’t an ad, by the way—I genuinely am obsessed with their cases.
Oh, and I know there was some controversy around the colors this year, so let me clear that up: the best ones are White Titanium (the finish I chose for my personal phone) and Natural Titanium. The Black Titanium looks super stealthy, so I can see why some would choose it, but the Blue Titanium picks up so many fingerprints that it’s simply impossible to keep it from looking gross. If you use your phone naked, I recommend a brighter color.
I wish the Action button did more
I love the Action button! I really thought I was gonna miss the mute switch since it always was one of the reasons I liked iPhones so much, but I really don’t. Being able to program it to do whatever I want is fantastic, and all it takes to jump whatever action you want is a long-press.
But like many other reviewers, I wish it did more. When you press it once, it barks at you and tells you to hold it down. Apple was obviously smart to block the single-press gesture so you don’t get any accidental triggers, but how about a double-press? Keep the long press for certain actions, and a double-press for another action. It would be abundanty useful to have multiple functions programmed to this thing.
Until then, I’ll keep long-pressing it to open the camera app and visiting Control Center to toggle between ring and mute.
USB-C All The Things
I’ve been saying it for years, but for the people in the back—USB-C ALL THE THINGS.
I’m obviously very happy there’s a USB-C port on the iPhone, something I never thought I’d be able to say. I can finally use all the USB-C cords I carry around to charge my other stuff to charge my iPhone, which is a bigger convenience than I can sum up into words.
The port also enables a few neat tricks like the ability to output your iPhone’s screen to an external monitor without an adapter, the ability to charge other devices you own like an Apple Watch or AirPods with your phone’s battery, and the ability to store photos and videos to external drives as you capture them. That also means you can plug in basically any USB-C external drive you want to read the files on it in the Files app, which is pretty cool.
It’s not perfect, as is typical for new iPhone features. You don’t get faster charging speeds with the new port, which means you’re stuck at 20W-29W depending on the iPhone you buy,. Data transfer speeds are capped at 10Gbps which won’t please everyone, but should be enough for most creative professionals.
An iPhone display with the perfect size
The 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display on the iPhone 15 Pro is stupendous. Because of course it is. It’s one of the most color-accurate smartphone screens on the market, it’s bright (reaching 2,000 nits, to be exact), it’s fast thanks to the 120Hz refresh rate, and it’s sharp as a tack. Apple continues to deliver my favorite screen on any smartphone.
Plus, it’s the pefect size. 6.1 inches is the best smartphone size, and I’ll fight anyone who disagrees. I’m with my buddy Allison here—if you want a good default phone size, this is it.
I love the cameras, and you will too
Is there a huge difference between the iPhone 15 Pro’s cameras and last year’s 14 Pro cameras? No, not really. Every time I open the camera app and snap a photo, the resulting image is one that feels like it came out of my 14 Pro Max. But there are some key improvements in the details, which help make this camera system one of the best on the market.
The 48MP main lens got an upgrade so it can let in more light than before, which also means it can capture more detail. It’s also being binned and processed differently than it was on the 14 Pro: now, instead of a 12MP image, the iPhone 15 Pro will capture a 24MP image, which takes up slightly more room on your phone. With this setting, Apple is able to snag a few extra details and help photos look crisper and more pleasing, especially when you look at them on a larger screen.
That’s always been a problem for me. When I take a picture on my phone and look at it on my phone screen, it looks great. But blow it up on a 27-inch 4K monitor? It looks kinda crappy, mostly due to the poor processing and low-ish resolution. With the 15 Pro, some of that crappiness goes away: colors aren’t as bland or mushy, fine detail in things like clothing or brick buildings is maintained, and every photo feels brighter and more vibrant.
I also appreciate Apple’s new “lens” options in the camera app. Tap on the 1x button and you’ll jump between 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm equivalent shooting modes, all of which can give you a different look and feel to the photo you capture. According to Apple, each mode has its own processing pipeline that utilizes the megapixels in the middle of the sensor. Without going too far into the weeds, photo quality is consistent across each mode.
You also still get a 2x button that uses the middle 24 megapixels for a lossless crop, as well as a 3x zoom option that uses the 12MP telephoto. I didn’t notice many differences in quality with the telephoto on the 15 Pro, which means each picture I captured was just as good—if not better—than they would’ve been on the 14 Pro.
That’s good, but if you wanted more from your zoom lens, you’re out of luck. Apple reserved its fancy 5x telephoto lens for the 15 Pro Max, which the company said it was able to do thanks to the extra space in the bigger phone. I’d bet a lot of money that the feature comes to the standard-size 16 Pro next year, but for this year, those with the standard Pro are stuck with 3x. Whatever.
The 12MP ultra-wide camera is basically unchanged from last year, save for a new coating on the lens that reduces lens flairs. That’s a really nice upgrade, but for anyone looking for a sharper ultra-wide to play with, you’re not getting it here. Still, photo quality is perfectly fine.
Across all three lenses, you’ll be perfectly happy with nighttime shooting. Apple still doesn’t match the Google Pixel in the world of astrophotography, but for casual captures in a dim bar or while on a boat in the Hudson, you’ll get some great shots.
Portrait photos got an upgrade this year to make blurry backgrounds look nicer, and I’m here to say that they do. It’s also great that you can go back to a photo you captured in standard mode and turn it into a portrait photo after the fact—it’s a feature other phones have had for years, so it’s great to see Apple finally bring it to the iPhone.
Okay, here are some more samples.
Some final notes:
- Video quality is still excellent, and you can now shoot in LOG format if you’re a serious videographer and use your iPhone to shoot films.
- The selfie camera is unchanged, for better or worse.
- Where is the professional shooting mode for photos? I feel like that should be a thing by now.
Performance is exactly what you’d expect
The 3-nanometer A17 Pro processor is a world-class chipset, hands down. I’m not sure how to use the full extent of its power since iOS is a pretty simple operating system and there aren’t a lot of apps that require this much horsepower (I guess X feels a bit snappier? I don’t know), but it’s blazing-fast and reliably snappy—just as you’d expect.
I ran Geekbench 6 on the A17 Pro versus Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 from the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and… yeah, the iPhone won by a pretty big margin. Apple’s A17 Pro encroaches on numbers we’ve seen from its M1 processor, which is crazy to think about since this is a phone processor.
Obviously, the big pitch with the A17 Pro is improved gaming performance thanks to a new six-core GPU. I am not a mobile gamer by any means, so if you want some thoughts from actual gamers, IGN has some in its review. The tech that Apple packs in is quite impressive, though: there’s hardware-accelerated ray tracing for improved graphics fluidity, MetalFX UPscaling for higher-resolution graphics, improved efficiency, and more.
Of course, there’s plenty of cool tech for doing regular stuff, too. Like I said, this is a 3-nanometer processor, the first for any smartphone. It’s about 10 percent faster than the A16 Bionic processor and boasts a 2x faster Neural Engine for performing more on-device tasks per second (Apple says it’s capable of nearly 35 trillion operations per second).
In day-to-day usage, it feels like a new iPhone should: fast—really fast. Because of all this power, the 15 Pro series has enough headroom to last well into the future.
Battery life and overheating
I’m not disappointed by the iPhone 15 Pro’s battery life, but it’s a bit underwhelming. I thought the combination of the A17 Pro’s increased efficiency and the 15 Pro’s physically larger battery would make it last considerably longer than the 14 Pro, potentially matching the excellent battery life of the 13 Pro from a couple of years ago.
Nope. At the beginning of my day to the time I go to bed, I can get this phone down to 15-20 percent, sometimes even less if I take a lot of pictures. Yes, this is technically all-day battery life, but it’s pretty tight and doesn’t give you a lot of wiggle room if you have a longer-than-average day. The 15 Pro Max remains the Pro iPhone to get if you want long battery life.
One of the most viral topics around the iPhone 15 Pro is the conversation around overheating. There have been plenty of reports of 15 Pros sporatically overheating over no apparent reason, such as when scrolling Instagram or streaming music over Bluetooth. I’ve personally experienced both of those problems, as well as other instances where my iPhone shouldn’t get hot by any means (how much power does it take to check the weather?).
Fortunately, Apple didn’t let this issue go to the wayside unaddressed. Not only did it start pushing app developers to fix issues within their apps that caused overheating, but it also sent out iOS 17.0.3 with a root fix for the problem. Since I installed the update, I haven’t had a single instance where my phone got warm, other than times it normally gets warm like when I’m checking Apple Maps in the blazing New York City sun.
Other users continue to report issues with heat on the 15 Pro even after updating to iOS 17.0.3, but at least on my unit, it seems that those issues have been patched up.
iOS 17 is… fine
This will be shortest part of the review because I literally don’t care about iOS 17 almost at all. It hasn’t made any significant improvements in my day-to-day life, and none of the new features have resonated with me. I guess StandBy is pretty cool, as is Live Voicemail for screening calls. But, like, that’s kind of it. I only recommend upgrading so you stay current with the latest security patches and bug fixes.
I think Apple made another great phone in the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s extremely well-rounded, it has amazing cameras, the best performance on any smartphone, a beautiful screen, and nice bonuses like a titanium frame and USB-C.
Will this be the iPhone to convince Android users to switch? I have no idea, but I will say that the inclusion of the USB-C port could do just that. I know a lot of folks who hate Lightning and don’t want anything to do with it, and those folks might find sovereignce in one of Apple’s latest smartphones. It’s not as big a deal as, say, Apple adopting RCS (which will never happen, let’s be honest), but it’s an important change that could convince users of Google’s platform to give the iPhone a shot.
For everyone else, it’s another iPhone. If you own an iPhone 13 Pro or 14 Pro, I don’t think it makes sense to buy an iPhone 15 Pro—unless you’re in dire need of a higher-resolution camera or a USB-C port. But if you own an iPhone 12 Pro or earlier, this is the time to buy. You’ll get Dynamic Island, the USB-C port, better cameras, faster performance, and a refreshed design.
The iPhone 15 Pro is another iPhone—the best iPhone, according to Apple. They say that about every new iPhone, but with the USB-C port and excellent camera system, I can see why they think that. It’s one of my favorite iPhones I’ve ever used, and I’m excited to use it for the next year as my daily driver.
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