No need to beat around the bush: Last year’s iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max models were “bigger” updates than this year’s new announcements for the top of the line iPhone models. That’s because the Dynamic Island and always-on display made more meaningful changes to the way customers use an iPhone. This year’s enhancements are less dramatic, but are nonetheless excellent updates to the mature iPhone platform.
Let’s start with a new metal. Rather than aluminum, used on the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, or the stainless steel frame used on the last several Pro and Pro Max models, this year the iPhone switches to titanium. This improves the strength-to-weight ratio of the frame material, and should make these models noticeably lighter. That’s good news to anyone who’s held one of the high-end iPhones from the past few years. Those things had gotten heavy.
The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max also come with the new A17 Pro chip, which Apple rightly brags about as being the industry’s first 3-nanometer chip. The term “3-nanometer” is part science and part marketing (and this time not entirely on Apple’s part), but in general it means that the chip manufacturer is capable of putting more transistors on each chip than with prior manufacturing processes, so this increases chip performance. Down the road, this gives us an early peak at what kind of performance improvements we can expect on future M-series chips for the Mac. Apple really touted the benefits this will have for iPhone gaming. For the first time, an Apple chip is capable of hardware-based ray-tracing, meaning it’ll produce more photorealistic environments and lighting in games. Apple even announced that the full console versions of the latest Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed games will come to iPhone. That’s genuinely impressive for a smart phone, though we’ll have to wait to see how those games perform on the iPhone 15 Pro when they launch.
While USB-C is coming to the entire line of new iPhones, the Pro iPhones will be getting USB-3 data transfer speeds while (as I expected) the non-Pro iPhones will be limited to USB-2 speeds. That’s not really going to matter much to regular iPhone users, but for users who are using iPhone 15 Pro for professional photography and videography, this will make the task of getting these files offloaded to the Mac much faster. The biggest disappointment here being that full Thunderbolt 4 transfer speeds won’t be available, and it’s not immediately clear why Apple didn’t feel the need to go that far.
As you’d expect, the cameras are meaningfully improved over the previous generation. This year you’ll be able to select 24 mm, 28 mm, and 35 mm focal lengths when using the main camera, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is getting a 5x optical zoom at 120 mm, which is the best optical zoom ever available on iPhone. This is great, but unfortunately only the Max iPhone is getting this, meaning customers who prioritize camera quality when buying a new iPhone will have to weigh their options and decide whether or not they can live with the larger iPhone so that they can get the best possible photos.
As we can say every year around this time, the iPhone Pro and Pro Max models are better this year than the ones that came last year. That’s kind of a “duh” statement, but it should serve as an antidote for those who are seemingly only impressed when a new iPhone looks meaningfully different on the outside.