Check this out
See that? It’s really useful. Now the first thing you want to do
is obviously configure the Action button And to do that, you go in here
You want to go into Shortcuts and create a new folder. Call it Action Button.
Now within that Action Button Folder, you can create some shortcuts.
For example, create a new family note, FaceTime someone or one of my favourites, ask ChatGPT
Now you press the Action button, you get this nice control center look. With lots of useful options.
For example I can make Siri even more powerful with this.
There’s more where that came from. You know, I’ve been pouring hours and hours
of testing and research… and comparisons between the 15 Pro Max other phones,
and I’ve been hacking my brain to try and fit everything I learned so far in this one video.
But I also wanted to give you something that is useful so you can get more out of your iPhone!
So I came up with the idea to split the video in two parts for you.
In the first part of this video I will share with you my experience in this month and a half,
as someone who’s trying to give the iPhone… a second chance.
I will take you through a very brief summary of the things are annoying me… And what new
features I found that are actually making me go… ok.. fair enough. There are a few of those!
And in the second part of this video,
I will show you what I’ve done… to make the iPhone way more useful.
This is going to be really important for you..
.if you find yourself… getting bored with the iPhone, like I am.
And most importantly, I will answer the question…
has Apple done enough for me to go back to having the iPhone as my main device?
In other words: you’re getting two videos for the price of one!
I am Alex and I do down to earth tech videos.
At first, it was the shiny new toy right? And it’s an iPhone,
it’s always exciting to try it and see what Apple has been cooking for a year.
And cooking… was something that my iPhone 15 Pro
Max was certainly doing! Reaching above 40 degree Celsius whilst sitting idle charging.
Yeah…
But then… Apple did something. Arguably they should have done
that in their own internal testing, but let’s brush that aside for now.
That little bump in the road seems to have gone now,
but it was definitely happening up to about two weeks ago.
And now, after a few updates, the iPhone has been pretty stable.
Which gives us a good opportunity to assess the device on its merits
without focusing on the early overheating issues I was having.
We are about a month away from getting AAA games on the iPhone
but there are enough games out there that can indeed push the A17 Pro.
In fact, as I was editing this video, Resident Evil village came out and as I predicted,
it didn’t take long for the iPhone to get really warm.
I will need more time to really test this in anger, but yes, after about half an hour of
playing, the phone did get really warm and that battery was putting in some work, for sure.
And my experience so far? It’s impressive. I’ve been testing lots of phones in the
last few years and you know… you can tell when a device has a decent processor in it.
Cooling aside, even when it does get a bit warm, during gaming, you don’t see any lags.
The last time I did see lags on iPhones, was on the 12 Pro Max. Playing this very game.
Wasn’t so much a lag, but the screen dimmed hugely after about an hour of playing this game.
No issues here on the 15 Pro Max, as you can see, all the settings are on the highest possible.
If this was an Amazon style review, performance would get 5 stars from me . So far.
By the way… something else that gets a 5 star from me are these cases from channel sponsors, Caudabe!
If you like an elegant and minimalist look for your iPhone, Caudabe has the perfect cases
for your iPhone. And whilst design and looks are important, protection comes first right?
Caudabe offer great options for the iPhone 15 Series,
including options with and WITHOUT the Action Button cover.
We will be talking a lot about the Action Button today so this is a really nice touch here,
giving customer the option to have a cover or a cut-out option.
This… very thoughtful approach runs through the company,
from talking to me in detail.. .and answering my questions about the products… to offering
customers multiple options, without compromising on quality or protection.
Excellent protection not just on the shock absorbing material that they use,
called ShockLite… but as you can see here, a really high
quality fibre lining internally…to protect the back of the iPhone too.
More about Caudabe a little bit later in the video. I am really enjoying their cases right now!
When it comes to the software on the iPhone… this is where I realised we have a big problem.
Regardless of whether you’re coming from iPhones or Android,
but… ESPECIALLY if you’ve used Android before.
Why is that? Because iOS at the moment still feels limiting in
comparison. Ultimately we probably don’t want iOS to become Android,
but there are a couple of things that I believe should be on the iPhone.
I just got VERY used to doing more with my smartphone you know?
And when it comes to iOS, I was about to… kind of remove at least a couple of points from my review…
But EVERYTHING changed! When I started to look at the iPhone as if it was an Android
device. Or like an old iPhone. Remember when we used to Jailbreak the iPhone?
What I am about to show you… feels a little bit like that. But in
an official… and supported way. So… get ready for some tweaking!
And don’t worry, I am going to make all these settings available in the description,
but feel free to follow along because some of these are quite easy to do, and they are awesome!
For the purposes of this video, I will share 3 types of configurations that
you can do to give your iPhone a little bit more meaning, varying from easy to advanced.
Starting with the Easy configuration, just…. to have the Action button provide you more
menu options …all you have to do is set the Action button to call out a Siri shortcut.
But before you do that, there’s two things you need to do.
First, open shortcuts and create a folder called Action Button. Or whatever you like,
but this will be important later so don’t make it too random.
Then…Within that folder, let’s create 3 or 4 very basic shortcuts.
Click on the Plus sign on top right, click Add Action, and select FaceTime for example.
Within that shortcut then, select the contact you want to call… and
here you can also change the shortcut name, icon and colour.
Do exactly the same for Creating a note. And you can be a bit clever
here as well by creating a shortcut… for specific folders within the Notes app.
I have a few folders on mine, one for the YouTube channels I run,
one for my business… and one for my family notes.
When you’re creating these Notes shortcuts, just make sure you select Ask Each Time.
So that when you press the Action button and select Create a Note option… it will ask you
to type the title. And you can go from there, as you normally would when you open notes.
And this will work for anything in shortcuts, there’s a huge list of possibilities and I will
share some resources I found in my research so you can go deeper on this if you want.
Now for a medium difficulty, you can do a couple of very cool things. My favourite
is to have ChatGPT answer questions for me, when I can’t get Siri to play ball.
To do that you will need to install ChatGPT, but once you have the app installed,
the principle is very similar, we’re going to use a ShortCut
The key here is to capture what you’re saying and pass that text to ChatGPT.
And then of course, we want to be able to copy the answer so we can use it. To do that,
you need to go a little deeper in the configuration here.
Within the shortcuts app, and inside the Action Button Folder,
click on that plus sign again, and search for Dictate Text.
Then finally add a “Dictate Text” action. This is optional. If you don’t do this,
it just means you have to click the microphone to speak to it.
Next one is to search for Ask ChatGPT. If you don’t see this,
don’t worry it takes a bit of time for this to appear after install.
Select Ask ChatGPT, make sure that both “Start a new chat” and “Continuous Chat” are NOT selected.
And “Show when Run” is selected. Now for the cool part, at the bottom here, search for Quick Look.
Like I showed you earlier, I was able to copy the answer from ChatGPT right?
That is only possible if you show the answer outside of shortcuts, so open the answer in
Quick Look will do exactly that. It lets you copy the answer or save it to your files.
It’s a bit slower than Siri, but a nice change and of course much
more powerful in my opinion, especially if you know the right prompts for it.
Now an advanced way of doing this is to combine what you’ve done so far with Focus Modes.
After you configure your focus modes, you can set the Action button to do different
things… DEPENDING on the Focus Mode. As you can imagine… This unlocks a multitude of options.
You might need to do a bit of planning before setting this up
just to make sure you have your focus modes nailed before you dive in here.
Shoutout to Steven Robles and Brandon Butch who shared all this stuff and I
will leave a link to their stuff down below too.
But once you download the Action Button Menu shortcut from the link
in the description…. without changing anything… you get this neat little
menu. Which already is better than what Apple gives us… out of the box right?
And you can take a step further now… and configure the Action button to
behave differently, depending on the Focus Mode you’re on.
You can customise this as you wish, but here is how I’ve set mine up. To change it,
is very easy actually. I am gonna show my age now,
but it reminds COBOL which is very old school programming you know?
IF (condition) THEN (command). Or in our case here,
IF the Focus mode contains … a certain word in the name RUN this specific action.
And the result is… When you press the Action button,
it will behave differently, depending on the Focus Mode you’re on. Genius right?
When you download this, it will come with some
examples that I adapted from the stuff I found online to suit my own Focus modes.
So just make sure to spend some in here and change
any names that I have in there, to your own Focus Mode names.
And of course, change the actions to whatever action you want it to do too.
I left some instructions in there for you too.
Now, I can’t talk about the iPhone 15 Pro Max,
and not share with you my experience with the cameras and the battery.
Focusing… not so much on the experience of using the camera,
but on the quality of the photos and videos.
I’ve already done more than 10 videos on the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Which sounds crazy! So I’ve covered a lot already on this device and the cameras.
But the highlight for me is 4K video and the 5X Zoom.
With Zoom for me… it’s seldom been about how close
I can get to stuff. But more about the make up of the photo itself.
The framing that you can get, the background separation and how smooth that is, the bokeh,
how natural it looks and things like that.
On of Apple’s claims…is that we have a 120mm equivalent here within these
lenses. And that’s thanks to TETRA PRISM.
That claim got me thinking. I got a 120mm lens here so why don’t we call their bluff?
Let’s take a couple of shots using the iPhone and this setup and compare them.
Right, back in the studio here.
I’ve covered ProRes in a lot more detail but in these examples here,
hopefully you can see why it’s hard to ignore this camera.
Talking about the cameras, I love the attention to detail
here from Caudabe as well. Awesome protection around the camera lens
so when you put the phone down you’re not going to get your lens scratched.
I’m using their screen protector too which feels great, very smooth on the screen.
Which is surprising for me because usually I avoid screen protectors. Not only it feels nice to the
touch, it doesn’t cause any weird discolouration on the display or anything like that.
And the coolest thing for me is about the brand itself. Not only are they catching the eyes of
some really cool publications out there… but they’ve been lovely to work with…. As I said
earlier, Caudabe paid a lot of attention to detail when it comes to the Action button… And I am
glad I came across them and I hope they continue to grow and innovate even more in this space.
I almost forgot about the most important thing! Caudabe are giving you, all my viewers a 10%
discount. Just head over to caudabe.com forward slash alex10 to get 10% off your order today.
And thanks again Caudabe for sponsoring this video.
Going back to the cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, I think it would have been nice
to have a longer optical Zoom, but this is a decent move in the right direction.
What I’d love to see, is more flexibility within
the camera itself. But luckily… there are apps out there to help us with this.
The one I’d definitely recommend for videos is called BlackMagic
Cam. Awesome app, and the best thing… it’s free!
It will give you so much more flexibility when working with video. You can easily select what
microphone to use, change every setting like you would on a professional camera
And it will even give you more CODECS than Apple themselves.
Funny thing is Apple announced the new M3 MacBook Pros and they filmed
the entire event on the iPhone. That was ballsy!
But guess what app they used? BlackMagic Cam. Yeah..
So thanks Apple for agreeing with me. For once!
I’ve been saying their own app sucks for a while now!
In summary then…after a month, if this was an Amazon style review,
I’d give it a 5 out 5 for Performance. That could change when triple AAA games come out.
3.5… maybe 4 out of 5 on the Display. And that is purely because of that Dynamic Island.
4.5 out of 5 on Software. And that is only because
of the possibilities now with the Action Button and Shortcuts.
To get a 5 out of 5 here, there are two things that for me are a must:
- Split screen - And some sort of Stage Manager capability.
5 out of 5 on the cameras. Really nothing to complain here. Yeah I noticed some artefacts on
the bokeh in some situations, but honestly, hard to fault it really for a smartphone.
If you add something like an ND filter like this one here and set it all to manual,
the results you will be able to get are insane.
Or if you spend 100s of thousands in professional lighting and cinema gear,
you will get results just like Apple did.
And I’d struggle to score the batteries right now. But I am going to try anyway.
I am going to say, 4 and a half stars… Based on the days when I was really busy,
recording ProRes videos, using external SSD drives…and using the phone as normal,
you know… I was really impressed with it.
Does it compare with the S23 Ultra? In my experience,
when I was doing the comparison videos and putting them side by side… the S23
Ultra was going a little bit further in battery, by about 10% difference.
10% in Samsung terms is like… 20 minutes, give or take. So.. not much really.
And like I said in previous videos… Battery is becoming a commodity really in flagship
devices. It’s no longer a decisive factor in my opinion. At this level they are all so good.
Now… Has Apple done enough to for me to go back to having the iPhone as my main device?
Not quite! but they are getting close.
There are about 300 videos that you might enjoy over here,
and YouTube thinks you’re going to like this one. I hope to see you in one of them!