long-term review
The iPhone 15 Pro Max has pretty much been my only phone for the past year. I say pretty much as there was a brief spell when I tried a Pixel 8 Pro – but at my core, I’m an iPhone user through and through.
As the launch of the iPhone 16 looms, I thought now may be a good time to look back at my year with the 15 Pro Max looking at the good & bad points – what I liked and where I felt it may have fallen short of the mark.
Did Apple deliver on their promise and in short – did the iPhone 15 Pro Max deliver?
iPhone 15 Pro Max Design & specs
Even though I am a pretty heavy user, I chose the 256GB model which may be a surprise to you. Well, what may surprise you even more is that I still have 155 GB free!
To my mind that just goes to prove how optimised iOS and apps are – and also how much we all now rely on cloud storage. There are rumours of Apple releasing an iPhone 16 Pro with 2 TB of storage this year. If that rumour is true my question would be who on earth needs that much storage on a phone?
The largest files I shift around on my phone are the Pro Res log video files, but they go directly to my external SSD – so it’s not even as if I need large amounts of temporary storage.
The A17 chip has always felt sharp and snappy. The 8 GB RAM has never been an issue either – but possibly I’m not in a good place to best judge that. I guess gaming would push that envelope and with its 6-core GPU, it was supposed to be the best iPhone yet for gamers. Do you game and how has the experience been?
Speaking of memory all iPhone 16s will be coming with 8 GB of memory as a minimum as we prepare for the dawn of Apple Intelligence.
Titanium
The titanium chassis was great for weight reduction – felt and looked great and there were no more fingerprints. The biggest downside to titanium though was that it turned out not to be a great heat sink – but I’ll come back to that a little later on.
The White Titanium colour I chose has proved a good choice and has aged well. If I had my time again I might have gone for the Natural Titanium, but overall I like the colour – it’s subtle, classy and tasteful. This year’s new colour is rumoured to be Rose Gold which could tempt me so long as it’s not too gaudy in the flesh.
The other exterior changes to the iPhone 15, were the rounded-off edges & the removal of the toggle mute switch which was replaced by the Action Button. The Action Button was heralded as a quick way to flick between various functions such as Focus Modes, the Camera, Torch or even Voice Memos. In truth, I set mine to mute and haven’t touched it since!
Apple missed a trick with this button though. What if they had added double or triple taps to it to make it more useful? Last year the Action Button was only available on the Pros whereas this year it’ll be on all iPhone 16 models.
USBC finally came to the iPhone 15. About the same time I bought my phone, I also switched to MagSafe wireless charging so the only benefit of USB-C to me has been being able to record in log directly to my SSD.
It certainly hasn’t helped with my cable management as I still have to use a lightning cable for the Magic Mouse, keyboard, AirPods Max and Apple TV remote. The full transition to a USB-C life is going to take years.
Display
Surprisingly this was only my second Pro and first Pro Max iPhone. I love large-sized displays be it a desktop, iPad or phone so the large 6.7-inch size display works great for me. The Ceramic Shield front glass however doesn’t wear well and has gathered a tidy amount of micro scratches over the months. I have never been one to use cases or screen protectors, but this is the second time in consecutive years that these have proven a problem so this year I may weaken and start to use a screen protector & case.
Interestingly the Pixel 8 Pro was fine – and it seems this micro-scratch issue is quite a well-known problem if you check out forums on Reddit etc.
The Super Retina XDR OLED panel is lush and even in the bright summer sun – and we’ve actually had some recently in the UK!) The 1000 nits of brightness makes it practical and easy to use.
Now – 120Hz refresh rate – discuss! I know I am very fortunate and the majority of the screens I use are 120Hz displays, but I’m not convinced how much of a big deal it is. Although a lot of my work is pixel-based and intensive, as mentioned I’m not a gamer and not a big scroller which is where 120Hz would shine.
I’d love your thoughts on variable display rates though – are you a fan?
They made a point of talking about the new slim bezels. I guess in as far as I’ve never really noticed them they are doing their job.
The Dynamic Island started to make sense to me over the past few months. In town when I’m using car parks it’s super useful and I also use it with the Podcast and Music app. It’s not right up there as a must-have…but useful nonetheless.
A first for me this year was that I took out Apple Care on my phone. Touch wood I’ve not had to use it and if I end up going the case route this year I may yet decide to drop it moving forward.
This year the phones are going to be getting larger – the Plus & Pro Max will jump from 6.7 inches to 6.9 inches while the 16 & 16 Pro will grow from 6.1 inches to 6.3 inches.
It seems big phones are back in fashion.
Battery
If you look at Apple’s website they claim the Pro Max can get up to 29 hours of video playback. I’d love to know under what circumstances they managed to achieve that as in real life the battery, is at best, average.
If I spend the day in London for instance, it struggles to last out with Bluetooth, Satnav, and Music running. In 2024 battery anxiety is still a real thing on iPhones!
Checking my battery health, I’ve had around 250 charging cycles with the battery health being 93% which is a little below average. Partly that may be due to my having disabled the 80% charging limit. I did that safe in the knowledge that I’d only be running this phone as a daily for a year but I’d suggest preserving your battery by leaving the optimised charging option turned on though.
I have not experienced the overheating issues that many have complained about. Sure, it gets warm but noticeably or worryingly so. But, it may run a little cooler if it wasn’t for the Titanium rail as I mentioned earlier. Pretty as it is, it’s not very good as a heat sink. As I expect we are sticking with Titanium for the Pros I wonder if active cooling could be coming to iPhones at any time?
This year it’s rumoured that we may be getting a graphite sheet inside and a metal battery design as well all to help with heat management and ultimately battery life.
Charging is improving on the iPhone 16s with wired charging jumping from 27W-40W and wireless charging up from 15W-20W.
Camera
The camera is always the star of any new phone – and the cameras on my iPhone 15 Pro Max continue to impress.
It has a 48-megapixel quad-pixel sensor camera with options of .5/1x/2x/5x. However, new to the 15 Pro Max were the seven focal lengths that you get
to choose from – 13mm/24mm/28mm/35mm/48mm/77mm/120mm. The range of options that you have at your disposal makes it the most complete camera of any iPhone.
The 5x lens has become so popular that it looks highly likely that it may be coming to all iPhone 16s in a few weeks. I’m not a big user of it, but then again I’m probably not the target audience. If you have kids in school plays, or playing sports, that’s where I’d imagine the 5x would come into its own.
There were supposed to be improvements to low-light photography, but if there were they were tiny – I couldn’t notice them at any rate.
The big one for me though was that we can now shoot LOG on the 15 Pro Max.
Unlike with the 14 Pro where shooting ProRes was rendered useless by the woeful transfer speeds of the Lightning cable, now with the USB-C port on the 15 Pros shooting ProRes and LOG has become viable – and it’s something I use virtually every week with amazing results.
The Final Cut Camera app that was recently released is Apple’s answer to the Black Magic app that I’ve used over the past year or so. It works great in my Final Cut Pro editing workflow but I can’t help but wonder if Apple now uses their app when making their event videos rather than the Black Magic app.
As an aside – if you haven’t tried the Multicam option in FCP on the iPad – give it a go. I can’t rave about it enough.
This year we are getting a new capture button taking the iPhone one step nearer to becoming a full-blown DSLR. I think Apple is trying to push us to take more landscape videos that can then be used for Spatial Videos with the Vision Pro.
It’ll be similar to a focus button on a DSLR camera – so you’ll half-press it to focus and then roll over it to zoom in and out. Considering how much I use the camera I’m looking forward to these changes.
By the way, a moment ago I mentioned Spatial Video on the Vision Pro. I went for my demo in London a few weeks back and my mind is still blown. Whether it catches on only time will tell – but geez is it special?
Apple Intelligence is coming
This year the main reason that many may be tempted to trade-up will be for Apple Intelligence. A major re-design and overhaul is coming to Siri but at launch, only a handful of Apple Intelligence tools will be ready to ship with the phone and iOS 18.
Some of the tools I’m most looking forward to are the writing tools such as Rewrite, Grammar Check & Spell Check which as a writer will be a huge help.
But I can’t help thinking that Apple is taking a chance to release the phone when most of the major features such as the ChatGPT integration, Image Playground, Genmoji or the Clean-Up feature in the Photos app won’t be ready for some months.
They are already very late to the AI party and can’t afford to get this release wrong for fear of (fairly) being ridiculed.
Into 2025
And the iPhone 16 fun won’t stop at the (suspected) 10th September event either!
Early next year we’re expecting to get an iPhone 16SE which will be priced at around $500. If that turns out to be the case the SE will be flying off the shelves – mark my words.
Later next year when the 17 comes out we could get a brand new model – the iPhone Air. It will be the slimmest iPhone ever – possibly as slim as the new M4 iPad Pro with a super thin titanium-hybrid chassis. It will also be the most expensive starting at $1299.
It will be lower spec’d than the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max which is odd – but there will be some niche features of the phone. The display will fall in between the Pro & Pro Max with a rumoured 6.6-inch OLED display, it will be the first iPhone to house Apple’s custom 5G modem and will have a variable aperture single camera in the centre-top of the phone.
Conclusions
This has been the best phone I’ve owned – without question. The battery could be improved and heat management better sorted but overall, the iPhone 15 Pro Max delivered on nearly all of Apple’s promises.
What are your thoughts? What has your year with the iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max been like and will you be tempted with the 16 Pro Max?
