No, no, no, no, no.
After being one of the first iPhones to excite me in years,
the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max
are absolutely mired in controversy right now.
Everything from overheating
to Apple providing weird advice regarding charging cables
to even a new bend gate.
But that doesn't mean
that I don't still wanna check them out.
So let's take a look at not just the phones,
but also this fun little report card
that the Labs team put together for me.
Right out of the gate, boy, are they ever pretty.
And the beauty is more than just skin deep.
They feature an aluminum-titanium hybrid frame.
We'll get into that a little bit more later.
A 6.7 or 6.1 inch display,
depending on whether you go for the Pro or the Pro Max.
Apple's new A17 Pro, no longer bionic,
chipset featuring two performance cores,
four efficiency cores, and six GPU cores,
along with eight gigs of LPDDR5 memory
and all the wireless fixings,
Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC,
and their ultra wideband chip
that has some cool new tricks up its sleeve,
like the ability to find your friends,
just like you can find an Apple AirTag
in a crowd of people.
That is legitimately pretty useful if you have friends.
Of course, for the folks whose best friends are their dogs
or their cars, there's the cameras.
Each has a 48 megapixel main shooter,
along with two 12 megapixel auxiliary shooters,
one ultra wide and one telephoto.
That telephoto is 5X optical zoom on the Pro Max
and 3X on the regular Pro.
For the avid photographers, I could see that being enough,
especially when you combine that
with some of the new software enabled capabilities,
like the ability to record log raw footage,
even to an external storage device
via the all new 10 gigabit per second USB-C port,
the ability to take a regular photo,
and then convert it to portrait after the fact,
so you don't have to make the decision at the time,
and the ability to record spatial video
for viewing on the upcoming Apple Vision Pro headset.
There's, of course, some other physical things.
In addition to that USB-C port,
we get our usual volume buttons,
and, okay, I'm legitimately so excited about this,
and it should just be on everything
the action button.
Gone is the toggle switch for vibrate in ring mode,
and here is the action button.
Just click it to see what mode you're in,
and hold it if you wanna switch between ring and silent.
Or if you're not into that,
you can reconfigure it to just about anything you want.
I have no idea how to do this.
Let's see how quickly I can figure it out.
It's not here for some reason,
although that would be fairly obvious to me.
Nope, I guess we need to dig
into the old fashioned settings app.
All right, well, that wasn't that hard to find.
Ooh, configurability.
Choose a shortcut.
This is so much more robust already
than what I've seen with things
like the stupid Bixby button
that Samsung made extremely difficult
when they first introduced it
to just do whatever the crap I want with it.
Okay, this is an example.
Even things like the double press the lock button
to open the camera functionality
that's on some Android phones.
The lack of configurability for that kind of thing.
This puts it to shame.
No recognized music, man.
Can you configure it though to use it in different ways?
Press, hold, double press, that would be next level.
Oh, accessibility features.
In some cases, that's just Apple's way
of saying features that you wanted,
but we won't admit are a good idea.
Like the mouse support that they added on the iPad
as an accessibility feature forever.
And then we're like, okay, fine, it's a good idea.
Quick camera launching on the iPhone, yes.
Look, I know from the lock screen,
I know you can do this, I know.
Okay, watch this, watch this, watch, okay, quick draw.
I press the action button, oh, camera's open already.
I'm ready, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap.
Oh, I like it.
I gotta be honest with you guys.
So far, I still kind of love it.
It's amazing how used to giant phones I've gotten
though the Pro Max doesn't even feel unreasonably big.
I think this is probably the route I'd go.
Though for gamers, that might not actually
be the best option.
You see, both of them have the same 460 PPI pixel density.
Both of them will run it anywhere from 10 to 120 Hertz
with adaptive refresh rate technology.
So they'll feel smooth when they need to feel smooth
and can save power when they need to save power.
But because the size of the screen of the Pro Max
is so much greater, we actually found in our game testing
that our 1% lows were significantly lower.
Meaning that in periods of intense action,
you could experience significantly lower dips,
which could result in you getting killed.
I mean, not in real life in the game,
but you get the point, right?
The brightness of these screens is flipping outstanding.
Okay, in SDR, we got 250 nits full screen in a dark room,
a thousand nits outdoors.
And in an 18% window, we got 2200 nits in SDR.
2200 nits on a phone?
Are you flipping kidding me?
In HDR, we didn't see the same kinds of stratospheric highs,
but these are really, really impressive displays.
For me, the gaming story of the iPhone 15 family though,
is not mobile games like this.
It's the AAA games that they were showing off
during the announcement.
If we actually get developers porting their games
to metal for the iPhone, it could be a literal game changer.
Since I've been gaming for so long,
now seems like as good a time as I need to talk about
the first big controversy, thermals.
While we didn't extensively test for thermals,
we did perform game benchmarking,
so we did make some observations.
Our devices got as high as 43 degrees on the surface,
which is not particularly comfortable,
but isn't going to do any kind of harm,
while we've seen reports of as high as 46.
Our best guess is that it's one of a couple of things.
Either those other outlets were charging
while performing their testing,
and therefore adding some additional thermal load
to the device, or there could be some variance,
depending on whether these phones were made in China,
where the factories have more experience, or made in India.
So here's a fun little thing you can do.
If you look at the box, you will see blah, blah, blah,
assembled in China, something, something, yes, right there.
But if you look inside the USB-C port,
there's a little engraving that indicates
if you got a China or an India unit.
So one of our theories, and this may impact
some of the other controversies as well,
is that there could be some slight differences,
whether they're at the factory,
or whether they're up the supply chain
that are causing these phones to be slightly different.
So my iPhone 15 Pro Max that I ordered on launch day
is China.
Our iPhone 15, which the team has already checked,
is a China model.
And my iPhone 15 Pro is also China.
So I wonder if there's a little bit better consistency
in these China models.
Like you can just immediately tell.
Shot on iPhone looks better.
Sorry, Android.
Really, I'm one of your people,
but gotta give credit where it's due.
Now let's talk about the second big controversy, fragility.
Apple spent a fair bit of time talking about,
the titanium frame, and that sounds really impressive.
But in Zach from JerryRigEverything's bend test,
he actually found that it failed extremely quickly.
I mean, it's not the kind of thing that I think
will just happen sitting in your pocket,
like we saw with, what was it, the iPhone 6, I think.
It should be noted that for Zach, the regular Pro,
the non-Max, didn't have any noticeable bending problems.
Another thing that happened was Apple Track
had the camera bump break off during a drop test.
Labs' theory is that the camera module
could be introducing a weak point
due to the way that the glass curves up from the main body
or the flex in the subframe that pushes
against the inside of the glass during a drop.
The break in the glass is perfectly aligned
with the inner frame.
Enough about controversy,
let's talk good things for a little bit.
Both of these managed to achieve 85% charge
in just an hour, and that's in spite of the fact
that Apple does not support wildly fast charging rates,
you know, 60 watts, 100 and plus watts
or whatever else like some Android manufacturers do,
and they both reached 100% in just over an hour and a half.
By contrast, the iPhone 15 non-Pro
took over two hours to reach 100%,
but it should be noted, also reaches 85% in one hour.
So it seems to be just down to the curve
that Apple has chosen for topping up
the last 15% of the battery.
Another good thing, the USB-C port.
They've actually given me a little bucket
of fun things to attach to the new iPhones.
Let's start with a microphone.
Wait, did I even mention
that dbrand sponsored this video yet?
There's no broken glass this time, right?
Nope, no broken glass, just iPhone cases.
We've all seen cases like this in the past.
They start out clear, they end up yellow, junk.
dbrand's new ghost case is designed to never yellow.
Wow, never is a really big word.
Did they use the word never?
dbrand seems quite confident
they have engineered the case to solve that problem.
So much so, in fact, that dbrand is offering
free replacements in the event
that your ghost case ever turns yellow.
This looks absolutely sick.
Considering all the torture
that they've put me through over the years,
I'm kind of hoping they do turn yellow
and cause a huge headache.
That must be from our sponsorship team.
Yeah, pretty much.
No, I don't hope they turn yellow
because I actually believe
in dbrand's approach to product design.
I think that they overall do a pretty darn fine job
and I'm really excited
to no longer see ugly yellow plastic phone cases
because when that happens,
people inevitably throw them away
and we end up just producing more garbage.
It's better to produce some plastic thing once
rather than over and over again.
And this looks freaking awesome.
So I'll be keeping this on the phone
while we test out all these cool USB-C peripherals.
What do you think are the odds
this microphone's just gonna work?
I don't think so.
There's no way.
No.
No!
Holy crap, it just worked.
It just worked.
Volume control just working?
Is that just the headphone volume control?
That's wild.
You could just plug this into your iPhone
and be recording audio.
Oh, oh, we definitely need
a Razer Viper 8K gaming mouse though.
Does iOS support a mouse?
I know iPad OS does,
which is a totally different thing.
Okay.
Oh, no way!
I'm a keyboard mouse gamer, folks.
What if I lock it in?
All right, because Apple arbitrarily decides that,
well, iPads need to be locked in landscape mode.
iPhones simply don't.
What if I do?
Apple is apparently warning
that using third-party USB-C cables
could cause damage to the device.
My understanding the last time I looked at this
is it was only a handful of stores in China
and I don't even know if they were official Apple stores,
but there apparently is some validity to it.
There's a slightly smaller gap
between the single row nine pin
and single row 11 pin connectors.
Realistically, the same is probably true
of anytime you're using a third-party cable.
Apple does apparently have a fuse
and an identifier chip in their cable
to make sure that it's an authentic cable.
I mean, that's sort of not the point of USB-C.
The point is that we can kind of use any cable we want.
As you can see, I'm not having any trouble with it,
but who knows, they may reject your warranty claim
if you do not use an approved cable,
but hey, at least you're getting
pretty decent screen on time.
We weren't able to get anywhere near the 23 and 29 hours
that they advertise for YouTube playback
on the regular Pro and the Pro Max respectively,
but we did get 17.75 hours and 21 and a half hours,
which is pretty darn respectable,
and that was at 200 nits.
We don't know exactly what Apple's test conditions were.
It's possible, for example,
that they had cellular turned off
or they had the screen at minimum brightness.
We're not sure,
but those are still very respectable results,
and in our stress tests, we saw 3.3 hours.
This is running 3DMark Wildlife Extreme on the Pro
and four hours on the Pro Max.
Those are very respectable results.
I wanna hook up a monitor.
No, I wanna do what Framework did.
This is so cool.
They were memeing on their social media,
all like, hey, Apple, way ahead of you.
We got your USB Type-A adapter.
Oh, of course, it's not compatible with the dbrand case.
Oh, okay, sorry, dbrand.
Love you guys.
Go to shortlinus.com to go check it out
and get your own ghost case,
but for now, we're gonna have to lose it.
Let's go ahead and pop this bad boy in.
Woo, Type-A port, anyone?
Ah, ah.
They also showed adding the headphone jack back
with their headphone jack module.
Of course, that's not what I'm interested in right now.
I'm just gonna pop out my laptop's HDMI port
and plug that in.
How cool is that?
HDMI iPhone.
HDMI phone?
I have no idea what this monitor is.
It's an LG something,
but I don't know what resolution
or what refresh rate it runs at,
but what we're about to find out
is if the iPhone supports it.
Hey, look at that.
We got the Chotek USB-C to HDMI cable.
Okay, well, sorry, Framework.
Investment disclosure.
I mean, well, it's not the most elegant thing ever.
Ow, you ready, you ready?
I think we got this.
Hey, even just for doing reviews of iPhones
back in the day, I would have given my left testicle
for this easy, seamless, flawless freaking screen capture.
Just plug this bad boy into a capture card
and you are good to freaking go.
How did they not go USB-C sooner?
This is awesome.
I mean, we know why they didn't.
So they could collect their licensing
and certification fees for the lightning cable,
but for the user, how did they not do this sooner?
The best part is that it's super mature
because iOS and iPadOS, let's face it, not that different.
And a lot of this stuff has been awesome
in iPadOS for a long time.
That's one of the killers for me.
It's just like how ahead of the game Apple was on USB-C
and then how far behind the iPhone was on it.
Not gonna lie, definitely some upscaling going on here
that is more noticeable in the larger display,
but that looks not bad.
Oh, what the hell?
So if you touch it, it shows.
If you're interacting with it, you can see that.
Interesting.
Yep, that's rendered on an iPhone, all right.
And this video is rendered out.
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Don't forget to check out our sponsor, dbrand,
with their ghost cases.
We've got that linked down below.