Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max Review: The Best, Boringest iPhone

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1,199

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Apple’s latest, most expensive, best iPhone is better than the iPhone 14 Pro Max. It’s a little lighter, a little faster, a little better camera, a little more convenient.

And yet, it’s hard not to feel decidedly underwhelmed. After days of use and a battery of tests, I can’t help but feel bored with it. All the improvements are welcome, but they’re largely uninspired. It’s as if Apple is out of ideas, or the iPhone is just too important to take any risks with, or all the company’s best efforts have been spent working on Apple Vision Pro.

The best case one can make for the latest iPhone is that it’s an iPhone—it runs iOS, it runs iPhone apps, it’s fairly privacy-minded, and it works great with other Apple products and services. But you can say that of every modern iPhone, so why choose this one?

Because, though somewhat uninspired, it’s still the best iPhone. And if you want the best iPhone, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is it.

Design and build

• Lighter titanium frame
• Action button
• USB-C

The first thing you’ll notice upon picking up an iPhone 15 Pro Max (or the regular Pro model) is how much lighter it feels than previous Pro phones. Apple’s switch from stainless steel to titanium for the outer frame has only reduced weight by about 10 percent, but all that weight comes from the outer edges, so it seems like an even bigger weight reduction.

This doesn’t really make it a light phone, mind you. Other premium smartphones of this size – the Pixel 8 Pro and the Galaxy S23+ for example – have been lighter than the iPhone Pro Max models for some time, and this change brings Apple in line with them. It’s welcome, but not revolutionary, or even a competitive advantage.

You also won’t find that the titanium (bonded to aluminum) frame offers better durability. It’s not more scratch-resistant, harder to dent or ding, or really less prone to showing fingerprints–though the natural titanium color seems to hide them well. Otherwise, the brushed and matte finish of the titanium sides feels a little nicer than the glossy stainless steel, and the corners are smoothed out a little, making the phone a little nicer to hold without a case on it.

Speaking of colors, they’re all a bit boring, though that’s not uncommon in the Pro models. Gold is gone, replaced by a Natural Titanium color that is… grey… but looks quite handsome and sophisticated. White and black are still available, but white isn’t as bright, and black isn’t as dark as previous iterations. So three of the four colors are shades of grey, more or less. This year’s special color is Blue Titanium, a dark blue shade that feels classy but conservative.

Much has been made of Apple’s move away from the Lightning port, replacing it with USB-C. Apple isn’t giving us faster charging than the iPhone 14 Pro Max, but the USB-C port is quite a bit more convenient to use the same cable to charge your iPhone, MacBook, and likely most of your other digital devices. On the Pro models, this port supports USB3 transfer speeds, handy for offloading lots of video.

You can plug in an external drive and shoot video directly to it–in fact, this is required to shoot 4K/60 ProRaw format (shooting to internal storage tops out at 30fps). You can plug in an external display straight into your iPhone and get a very low-latency mirror, perfect for playing premium games that are made for using a paired Bluetooth controller. You can read photos off a USB-C card reader. I plugged in my USB-C to Ethernet adapter and got online without WiFi. USB audio interfaces work too, provided they get enough power.

It’s all very convenient, and very frustrating that Apple only made this leap when forced to by EU regulations (which they opposed). The switch to USB-C is unequivocally an improvement, and one Apple could have easily made years ago. This is far from cutting-edge technology and has been standard in Android phones for a very long time. It’s hard to give points to Apple for doing better by its customers only under protest.

The move to USB-C isn’t the only way in which Apple has made the iPhone 15 Pro more convenient. The on/off mute switch has been replaced with what Apple calls the Action Button. Press and hold it for a second to mute or unmute, with a distinct vibration pattern so you can switch between modes without looking. You can also change the button to perform a variety of different actions in Settings: set a Focus mode, launch the Camera app (and act as a shutter), turn on the flashlight, start recording a voice memo, launch the magnifier, turn on an Accessibility feature, or launch a Shortcut.

That last option is perhaps the most powerful if you know how to make shortcuts (if not you can copy one you find online). It provides almost infinite flexibility to make the Action Button do whatever you want. You can launch any app instantly, and even perform some actions within. You can make it conditional, so it does different things at different locations.

Changing a switch into a button isn’t exactly what I would call a creative innovation – OnePlus and Samsung have dabbled with this in the past – but it is well-executed.

One oddity: The settings menu to adjust the Action Button looks oddly out of place, stylistically completely different from any other Settings menu, but it’s simple to understand. Perhaps best of all, because the functions of the button are defined by software, the Action Button’s capabilities can (and should) be improved in further iOS software updates. However, it’s hard to understand why the Action Button is a “Pro” feature and wasn’t brought to the standard iPhone 15 models as well. It feels arbitrary and capricious.

At a glance, this is recognizably an iPhone Pro model, but casual observers wouldn’t even necessarily know it’s the iPhone 15 Pro without being up-to-date about color options.

Screen and speakers

• 120Hz ProMotion
• 2000 nits peak brightness
• No improvements compared to 14 Pro Max

On the outside, the rest of the iPhone 15 Pro models seem very much like before.

There are no differences in the display’s size or capabilities, though the bezels around it have shrunk ever-so-slightly (making the phone body just a teensy bit smaller). It still boasts nice color accuracy with great HDR quality, peaking at 1,000 nits for standard dynamic range, 1,600 nits for peak bright areas on HDR content, and cranking up to a blistering 2,000 nits for a short time in bright sunlight outdoors, making it very easy to see on a sunny day.

The speakers sound similar, as does the microphone quality. Apple has made some internal design adjustments to make components easier and therefore less costly to repair, which is a nice thing we hope you never have to deal with.

Cameras

• 5x, 120mm zoom is fun
• New 24Mp default offers better detail
• Still sort of over-processed
• New video options are nice but restrictive

Let’s get this out of the way: Most of the cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro Max are identical to those on the iPhone 14 Pro Max. The main 48Mp wide camera, ultra-wide, and front camera remain unchanged. The telephoto camera is a new sensor and periscope lens array that enables 5x optical zoom, equivalent to 120mm. This is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro Max–the iPhone 15 Pro has the same 12MP, 3x optical camera as last year.

That zoom level is nice, and a bit of catch-up to premium Android phones that have employed this technology already. It produces noticeably “zoomier” shots and when you use digital zoom to push in to around 10x, you get a cleaner shot than on the standard iPhone 15 Pro or earlier iPhone Pro models.

It’s not such a super-zoom that you can take awesome photos of very distant or tiny objects…your hummingbird photography game is not going to be forever changed. But it does get you closer to the action for sports, or just getting a nice natural bokeh taking candid pics at a park or cookout or whatever.

It’s the software side of things where photography on the new iPhone 15 Pro models gets interesting. Apple has enabled a new default 2Mp image size with new image processing, and it works in HEIF or JPEG modes. The 48Mp “Pro” shots can now be saved in a “HEIF Max” format instead of requiring ProRaw, which means a little less control if you do lots of post-processing but the images take up about 15 times less storage space.

What’s more, you now have three different options for the standard wide shot. The default 1x is equivalent to 22mm, but tap that “1x” button in the camera app you and can toggle between 28mm and 35mm crops. These new settings still produce 2Mp images but use different sets of pixels from the image sensor through parts of the image processing pipeline. It’s a form of digital zoom, but delivers clearer, sharper results than what you’re used to with digital zoom.

One handy new trick: when you take a photo of a person, dog, or cat, the iPhone 15 recognises that subject and automatically saves the depth map information along with the image. Then, even if you weren’t in Portrait mode, you can go back and enable Portrait mode after the fact in the Photos app, adjusting depth-of-field and selecting the focal point. So for most shots of people or pets (dogs and cats anyway), you won’t have to say “I wish I took a portrait mode shot” or “I wish I didn’t take a portrait mode shot.” Just shoot, and worry about it later. Handy!

Video shooting has two new useful tricks. If you want to shoot ProRaw at 4K and 60fps, you can, provided you plug in an external drive and record directly to it (those files are so big you’re going to want to do that anyway). You’ll need a USB-3 compatible cable to do this; the one that comes in the box is only rated for USB2 speeds, which is typical of nearly every smartphone’s included cable.

More interesting is the ability to shoot in a Log color format. This is a true “Pro” feature, a flattened color gamut that requires post-processing. Apple provides LUTs (look-up-tables) to convert these Log encoded ProRaw videos to HDR, but the idea is that they contain a wider range of data to give you much better control when color grading videos in post-production.

For the Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro crowd, it really is a killer feature. There are just two significant drawbacks. First, playback on your iPhone does not have any sort of LUT applied, so you can only see the flattened color space. You should have the option to see the restored HDR with a default LUT applied (and perhaps tap to change between them). Second, the Log color space option is only available when shooting in ProRaw, which takes an enormous amount of space. I think the flexibility to shoot more compact HEVC files with Log color space would be greatly appreciated and seems like something Apple could easily manage in a software update.

There’s nothing to “wow” you about the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s camera. Apple’s image processing still seems a little aggressive and can give your images a bit of an over-smoothed and over-saturated look, but the bump to 24 megapixels does help give sharp detail without as many sharpening artifacts. But you’re not going to be floored by what you get. There’s no big breakthrough, no never-seen-that-before feature that makes this a must-have.

Battery life and charging

• Similar excellent battery life to the iPhone 14 Pro Max
• USB-C reverse charging can be convenient

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