iPhone 15 Pro review – updated design, USB-C and faster platform

The new iPhone 15 Pro continues the evolutionary development of Apple’s smartphone lineup, adjusted for the intervention of EU lawmakers who nevertheless forced the company to switch to the USB-C port. This innovation, as well as a faster platform and the use of a titanium frame, make this year’s iPhone 15 Pro not a big upgrade on the one hand, but on the other more interesting than last year’s iPhone 14 Pro. So, in this review, I’ll talk about how the new device performs in everyday use.

iPhone 15 Pro specifications

Scope of Delivery

It’s unchanged and traditionally austere, with the new smartphone users only receive a charging cable. This time it’s for a USB-C connector, and it’s worth noting that its quality has improved. As in the latest MacBook models, the charging cable now has a fabric braid, which should increase its service life.

Design and materials

For the last three years, Apple has been making minimal changes to the design of the Pro version of the iPhone, reducing the notch in the screen for Face ID sensors and increasing the camera modules. This year’s innovations were not radical either, the Dynamic Island remained the same, but the size of the camera unit increased slightly again. But the change in frame material did affect the design of the smartphone.

The iPhone 15 Pro has the same “sandwich” design, with tempered Ceramic Shield glass covering the display, the back covered with frosted colored glass, and a titanium frame in the middle, which is slightly rounded at the edges.

For users who carry their smartphones without a case, this change will be quite pleasant, as the device really does feel better in the hand. However, users who are used to relying on a protective case will quickly forget about this design innovation.

But what you really feel immediately is the lighter weight of the iPhone 15 Pro compared to its predecessor. On paper, the difference is not too great: 187 grams for the new product versus 206 grams for the iPhone 14 Pro, but after using it, this is the only thing I can really call an advantage of the new smartphone case.

Unfortunately, the expectation that the titanium frame would collect fewer fingerprints than steel did in previous models did not materialize. At least not completely. After all, while the Natural Titanium color resists traces of use better, my test Blue Titanium was covered with prints very quickly. Most likely, the situation will be similar with the darker Black Titanium color, and the white White Titanium should be better in this regard.

Changes in the design of the iPhone 15 Pro also affect the size of the bezels around the screen, they have become smaller. With the same display diagonal, this reduced the size of the case to 146.6×70.6 mm, which is slightly smaller than last year’s iPhone 14 Pro – 147.5×71.5 mm. However, the novelty has become thicker: 8.3 mm versus 7.85 mm.

Like previous Apple smartphone models, the iPhone 15 Pro is IP68 water and dust resistant.

Action Button

The familiar iPhone mute switch, which has been present in Apple smartphones since the very first model, has been replaced by a new Action Button. This innovation, in my opinion, is more in line with the modern use of Apple smartphones, when smartwatches and improvements to the iPhone interface make it easy to mute the sound even without a separate physical switch on the case. Or not turn it on at all, as users, including me, often do.

At the same time, a separate multifunctional key really adds convenience, as it can be assigned to an action that the user needs. In the case of the Action Button, a long press can also mute or unmute notifications by default, but in the settings you can change this to launch a flashlight, turn on sleep mode, a voice recorder, a translator, accessibility features, a camera, and quick commands. The latter means that you can basically assign almost any action to the Action Button.

This approach personally impresses me much more, so I definitely won’t miss the silent mode switch. In general, after using the Motorola ThinkPhone and iPhone 15 Pro, I believe that an additional physical button with the ability to assign different functions to it is very convenient and should be available in all smartphones.

Apple’s implementation of Action Button is quite convenient, but the company added it with the utmost care. You have one button and it is triggered by a single long press, no double, triple, or longer presses to which you could assign additional functions. Here, the company can be understood, because it has changed one of the fundamental elements of the usability of its smartphones. However, I don’t think that iPhone users are so unwilling to accept the changes that they would have trouble figuring out the number of taps.

It seems that the company has saved the expansion of Action Button capabilities for next year. This would be quite in the spirit of Apple.

USB-C

Thanks to the efforts of the European Commission, this year’s iPhone 15 lineup has replaced the Lightning port, which first debuted with the iPhone 5, with the more versatile USB-C. And while the basic models have USB 2, the Pro versions have the faster USB 3, which allows the iPhone 15 Pro to transfer data at speeds up to 10 Gbps. For a smartphone, this is very fast, and it means, for example, that the user can connect an external USB 3 SSD drive to the smartphone and record video directly to it at 4K 60 FPS without clogging up the smartphone’s internal memory.

I think many people expect that when they buy an iPhone 15 Pro, they can simply take the cable out of the box and enjoy all the benefits of USB 3, but this is not the case. The bundled cable that comes in the box with all new iPhones only supports USB 2 data transfer speeds. At the same time, to directly shoot 4K video from the iPhone 15 Pro to a Mac with an Apple Silicon processor, for example, for live streaming, you will need a Thunderbolt 4 cable. As you can see, USB-C only simplifies the charging of new Apple smartphones; you will need to figure out fast data transfer and, most likely, buy more than one cable.

But you can now charge the iPhone 15 Pro from any power supply with a USB-C cable, and the smartphone controller automatically reduces the charge to 27 watts, even if you connect a more powerful charger, such as a laptop. I charged Apple’s flagship with a 25W Samsung charger, and everything worked fine, so at least that’s how the competitors became friends.

There are no problems with Apple CarPlay in the car either, and we managed to connect the iPhone 15 Pro with a regular inexpensive USB-C cable. So, once again, we should thank EU lawmakers.

Display

The 6.1-inch LTPO Super Retina XDR OLED screen in the iPhone 15 Pro has not been updated this year. It still has a resolution of 2556×1179 pixels, an aspect ratio of 19.5:9, a refresh rate that automatically changes from 1 to 120 Hz, and a maximum brightness of 2000 nits.

As in the previous generation, Apple’s flagship offers an always-on screen that displays the time and several widgets in addition to notifications. This, of course, affects the battery life of the smartphone, but on the other hand, it allows you to activate the screen less often when the device is on the table, because you can see all notifications at once.

The proprietary notch in the screen for the front camera and Face ID, which Apple has beaten with the Dynamic Island software solution, is actually an interesting addition to the interface. For supported applications, it allows displaying useful information in a small field around the notch. Thus, on the one hand, hiding it, and on the other hand, providing the user with another option for managing music, sound recording, timer, and other compatible applications that may require indication.

Speed and heating

In addition to design changes, the iPhone 15 Pro platform received the most updates. For the first time, Apple has used a processor with the Pro prefix instead of the usual Bionic in a smartphone, the A17 Pro chip. Now it is even interesting whether it will be included in the basic iPhone models next year, whether the company will finally split the processor lines, or whether the Pro prefix will be quietly removed from its name. In general, it will be interesting to see.

As for the A17 Pro, it’s a 3-nanometer chip with 2 fast cores running at up to 3.78 GHz, 4 energy-saving cores running at up to 2.11 GHz, 16 neural cores for machine learning computing, and 6-core 1.4 GHz graphics that can use up to 6 GB of memory. Looking ahead, this is a very fast processor. It is complemented by 8 GB of RAM and storage, the choice of which has not changed this year – 128, 256, 512 GB, or 1 TB.

If you make a rough comparison in the synthetic Geekbench 6 test, the A17 Pro already outperforms the M2 chip in the basic MacBook Air in single-threaded tasks, but the laptop still wins in multi-threaded tasks and in the performance of the built-in graphics.

iPhone 15 Pro results:

MacBook Air M2 results:

The fact that I can now directly compare the speed of a smartphone and an Apple laptop speaks to the company’s remarkable progress in designing and manufacturing its own chips. Without exaggeration, the iPhone 15 Pro is a very fast smartphone that can handle any iOS application without any problems. But here we cannot help but notice the “elephant in the room” in the form of overheating problems, which users began to report almost immediately after the start of sales of the smartphone. Apple has already responded to these complaints, reporting poor optimization of some third-party applications and releasing the first iOS update that should improve the situation.

During testing, I personally did not encounter the problem of excessive heating of the iPhone 15 Pro, and I think that most users will not have to urgently put their new iPhone in the freezer either. But this doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist, quite the contrary. The A17 Pro’s processor turned out to be too hot for a device like a smartphone. Apparently, Apple, on the one hand, was chasing a greater performance gain, as evidenced by the console game demo at the presentation, but on the other hand, did not think through the design of the cooling system sufficiently. This can be clearly seen in the 3DMark tests.

As you can see from the graph, in the first 20 seconds, the iPhone 15 Pro holds the load very well, but then it starts to trot due to heating.

The same is true for the system stability test, in which 3DMark loads the smartphone in a circle 20 times. In the first round, the device shows a score of 4234 points, but in the second and subsequent rounds, it scores over 2800 points.

Even with this level of trotting, the iPhone 15 Pro is still better than last year’s iPhone 14 Pro, but you can imagine what it could be if Apple had managed to implement a better cooling system. Those who plan to actively play on the 15 Pro, no joke, buy an external cooler, it will allow you to get the maximum level of performance longer.

As I mentioned above, I don’t think this situation will be a big problem for Apple, with the next updates the company can at least cut the processor frequencies for certain scenarios. But perhaps better optimization of the operating system and software will indeed prevent the smartphone from overheating.

As for the other features of the iPhone 15 Pro, compared to last year’s 14 Pro, some of the wireless modules have not changed, we have Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, and Emergency SOS satellite communication. The update touched on Wi-Fi, now Wi-Fi 6E, and UWB 2 ultra-wideband, which will allow the smartphone to more accurately locate compatible accessories, such as AirPods or AirTag, and find the device itself via Find My.

Camera capabilities

This year, Apple again split the Pro models, with only the iPhone 15 Pro Max getting the new telephoto module, making the smaller version less attractive to users who plan to take a lot of photos.

In this regard, the iPhone 15 Pro really won’t surprise you with anything, the camera set hasn’t changed compared to the 14 Pro:

• 48 MP wide-angle, ƒ/1.78, 24 mm, 1/1.28″, second generation Sensor-shift;
• 12 MP ultra-wide-angle, ƒ/2.2, 13 mm and 120° angle of view;
• 12 MP telephoto, ƒ/2.8, 77 mm, optical stabilization system and 3x optical zoom.

However, there are some changes to the iPhone 15 Pro’s camera capabilities. The main 48-megapixel camera now allows you to take not only 12-megapixel but also 24-megapixel pictures by default. Apple notes that the new A17 Pro processor and the “pipeline” of post-processing algorithms allows the new smartphone’s camera to shoot faster in higher resolution and provide more detail in the photo.

An example of images taken with a 48 MP wide-angle camera:

12 MP ultra-wide-angle camera:

12 MP telephoto:

In fact, Apple is not exaggerating here. If you put the iPhone 15 Pro and 14 Pro side by side and look at the photos, the difference will only be noticeable when you zoom in. The pictures from the new model are indeed a bit more detailed. Also, in addition to the standard switching between cameras, which is marked in the interface as 0.6x, 1x, 2x and 3x, the smartphone now offers simulated focal lengths of 24, 28 and 35 mm, which are provided by the crop from the main 48 MP module.

I also note that the digital zoom, which in the iPhone 15 Pro allows you to take photos with a zoom of 15x, has become much better. In good light, it really allows you to get more details in the picture, although it is clear that this is the maximum for the sensor.

The iPhone 15 Pro can shoot video in 4K 60 FPS, with the ability to switch between cameras, and the smartphone provides a good level of stabilization on the go.

I’m not a great video maker, so I can’t really appreciate the addition of ProRes Log recording in iOS 17, but you can already find quite a few short films on YouTube that showcase the capabilities of this format on a smartphone and the cinematic mode.

The front camera of the iPhone 15 Pro hasn’t changed either, it’s a 12-megapixel module with ƒ/1.9 aperture, which is enough for selfies and video calls.

In general, despite the lack of physical changes in the cameras, the new Apple smartphone offers smart software additions and still provides good image quality and extensive photo and video capabilities.

Battery life and charging

Apple traditionally does not disclose the capacity of the built-in battery, but it is already known that the company used a 3274 mAh battery, which is slightly more than the iPhone 14 Pro with its 3200 mAh. It’s still hard to say what the battery life of the smartphone will be after all the iOS optimizations and heat management, but during the test, with fairly active use, I consistently got more than a day of battery life. Users can expect 8-9 hours of active screen time, depending on the usage scenario.

The iPhone 15 Pro can be charged via USB-C up to 27W, via the MagSafe magnetic connector up to 15W, and via wireless charging up to 7.5W. With a 20W power supply, the smartphone can be recharged from 0 to 50% in 30 minutes. In general, both wired and wireless charging are not very fast, but Apple insists that this reduces battery wear.

Now users even have the option of limiting charging to 80% of the battery to extend battery life.