Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPhone 15 / 15 Plus Review – Suspiciously Good!”.
Thousands of Engineers have spent the last year of their lives, working on the iPhone 15 and 15 plus what have they changed from the 14.? That is genuinely what it looks like on the face of it, but I have to say pick the phones up and use them, and you realize this is such a jump that no one should ever buy an iPhone 14 from this point on, although there’s also a Few weird slightly sus things going on that we need to talk about okay, so I know I joke about these phones looking like basically the same thing as the iPhone 14s, but honestly, apart from the colors, which are very washed out this time around, I think the Iphone 15 is an upgrade from every single angle. The Frosted back feels way more luxury and now I’d say, suits the prices being charged for these phones. It’S called to the touch. The Finish almost feels satin like Smooth matte sides. It actually feels very Pro, whilst having the convenience of being highly resistant to fingerprints. You can’t see them, even if you try that’s partly because of these washed out colors the front, and the back now also have rounded edges very subtle to look at. But if you ever get the chance to go into an actual Apple Store and hold one of these versus last year’s iPhone, you also can’t not notice how much better it feels I’ve recently come from the iPhone 14 pro Max and using this iPhone 15 plus. It’S the same screen size, but just noticeably Slimmer. A massive amount lighter more rounded softer to the touch. I didn’t expect how much I’d like it.
It’S kind of felt like when Sony releases a slim version of their PlayStations a few years after the originals and and you look back at the original after that’s out thinking. If you could come in this size. What on Earth were they doing in this size, and what I was maybe most surprised to see is that this whole time I’ve been using the case from my iPhone 14 on my iPhone 15..
Every button and cutout has worked 100 as intended so worth a try, but that might not be the case for every iPhone 14 case. Aside from the feel, the notch has been replaced by Dynamic Island, which I think looks better and has some functional perks too. Like being able to see your ongoing egg timer, while looking up the recipe for eggs and then at the bottom, you’ve got the new USBC Port, also color matched to your phone, and I would say so long as you don’t already have like a suite of gadgets Made for the old lightning Port, it is a good thing.
It won’t be very long until every Gadget is USBC powered and so being on the same standard as them just means you can carry one cable around for everything and also that you can use the iPhone 15s to charge. Other small gadgets, like my PS5 controller, was running out the other day and so the ability to just stick it into my phone and not have to plug it into the PS5 itself and sit 20 centimeters away from my screen. It felt nice to be a part of the wider ecosystem, and it also means you can do fun stuff like plug it straight into most good. Modern monitors get a latency free, 60 frame per second connection load up a game on it, connect to PS5 controller via Bluetooth and play. This is not a new feature to smartphones as a whole, but it is new to the iPhone right.
Let’S talk about these screens, the iPhone 15 has a 6.1 inch screen and by 2023 standards feels pretty compact. The iPhone 15 plus has a 6.7 inch screen, which sounds like a small difference, but in terms of screen area is a just over 20 bigger and by well I mean anyone’s standards. Really it’s a big one. I’Ve seen a lot of discourse around the fact that these are 60hz displays and not Ultra fluid 120hz displays, meaning that, unlike most high-end phones today, whose screen refreshes 120 times per second, which makes them appear, buttery smooth.
The screens here refresh only 60, which would have been the industry standard, but just from like 2015., I’ve seen a lot of people like 799 phone in 2023. Without a 120 hertz display it’s an outrage, it’s a con, it’s a joke and then the other side. That’S like well, actually, the average consumer doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Why would Apple bother and the way I see it, they’re both right in a way the iPhone 15 and 15 plus should have a 90 Hertz or 120 hertz High refresh rate screen they’re the most expensive current smartphones that don’t have one and yeah I wouldn’t be Doing my job, if I didn’t say it was a little jarring for me at the start, feeling all the way around this phone thinking, damn the base iPhone actually feels like a flagship.
This time, oh wait, oh, never mind coming from what I’m used to for the first couple of days. It felt laggy, especially when changing between the different camera lenses, but then also the fact that these phones don’t have 120hz displays. It doesn’t immediately make them some sort of scam like Twitter might make. It seem like I handed drisha my fiance one phone with 120 hertz and one phone with 60 hertz and she could only tell which was which, when I told her and my parents can’t tell the difference.
Even when I tell them, and if you don’t notice, it you’re missing out on zero functionality of your phone by not having it, so I also wouldn’t be doing my job. If I said to these people don’t buy this phone because it is a 60hz display. Now there is one caveat to this and that’s standby mode. If you stick an iPhone on charge and flip it horizontally.
It’Ll open this brand new screen saver type interface that I’m actually really starting to rate, but because these iPhone 15 screens are locked at 60 hertz. As opposed to the pros, they can scale up to 120 hertz, but also down to one Hertz. I guess Apple decided that these non-pro phones would drain too much energy by staying on. So the main perk of this whole standby feature kind of disappears, but, broadly speaking, for this whole display debate, I would say this: if the concept of 120 hertz is something that you’re very aware of, then you’ll probably also notice the difference, and if that’s something that You know you want. There are plenty of great androids at this price like the Galaxy s23 or the Google pixel, and then, if you really want an iPhone, you can just try and find last year’s 14 pro for around the same price as the 15. And then, if 60 hertz is something you’re already used to and you’re completely happy with Slash you’re thinking, what on Earth is this guy going on about? Then you’ll probably actually be quite impressed with the screens.
This time, they’re extremely sharp and very bright. You might not notice it in most normal environments, but so long as you have auto brightness on the next time you’re in harsh Sun. You absolutely will, plus I’ve already had two quite scary – collisions with these phones with some damage to the body, but zero to the screens themselves, they’re very crack resistant. The way I think about the durability of recent iPhones is they’re not particularly hard to damage, but they are very hard to break every iPhone that I’ve used for a year or so they all end up with scratches in pretty much all areas.
Apart from the camera lenses, which, in my experience, are pretty well protected by the outer rims and the sapphire eating, but I’ve never broken one, at least not accidentally, charging is, on the slower end for 2023.. It takes about an hour and a half to fully recharge. The 15. two hours on the plus and that’s using my macbook’s power, brick so you’re still on one of these bad boys, it’s gon na be even longer.
I’Ve noticed it, but it hasn’t really been a problem for me. So far. I think ultra high speed charging is cool, but the main reason that I’m not upset it’s absent here is that you probably won’t need it. The iPhone 15 has better battery life than any base iPhone.
I’Ve ever used before not by a landslide you’re, not getting Pro Max battery here, but it is better than the normal sized 15 Pro, which I do find quite amusing, and you will get six to seven hours of screen on time in a day. Easy, which is on par with the expectation for an Enthusiast phone, which I know this isn’t. But it’s priced like one. So it should be judged by the same standard and then the 15 plus better than any phone I’ve ever used on a day-to-day basis before big numbers, like the kind of numbers that, when I did my battery test, which I’ll link from this video and it slaughtered.
My 15 Pro Max made me want to say: forget that triple cameras forget titanium and how much do I really need the latest chip, because I want this battery just like I want to butter Apple in the subscriber race. So if you want to help us to get there, then a sub to the channel would be that’s a really good, yeah. Okay, we need to talk about the cameras. I feel like cameras on iPhones and what you’re actually getting on each model is nowhere near as clear as it used to be, because in a way with these phones, what you’re getting is less than what you might expect. But in a way it’s a lot lot. More so one of the headline features of the iPhone 15 is a new 48 megapixel camera sensor, and so I imagine what most people will do is look at that and then look at the pro iPhones, which also have a 48 megapixel camera sensor and think they’re.
The same thing: that’s actually what I initially assume too, but we would be wrong. The 48 megapixel sensor on the iPhone 15 is a decent amount smaller than the one on the 15 pros and actually the 14 Pros, which in theory should be a pretty major con. But I kid you not in practice the software improvements are so massive that I would genuinely rather use an iPhone 15 or 15 plus to capture my entire photos and videos from now on than last year’s Pro Max just to be clear. Yes, I’m saying that I think the iPhone 15’s camera is better than last year’s Pro phones. That’S not a claim. I make lightly.
The one thing that you lose is zoom. The pro iPhones have always had a proper telephoto camera which lets you do this. The base iPhones have always had no telephoto camera, so you can only do this, but because you’ve now got four times the number of pixels as the last iPhone on the main camera at 48 megapixels. You can actually zoom in two times into that to cut out half the image on the top and the bottom and half the image on the sides and still end up with a 12 megapixel area in the middle, which is the same res. That all of the iPhone 14s shot at just using their normal one-time Zoom mode.
Now it’s not exactly the same thing as having a proper zoom camera, but the results are better than you might think for a phone that doesn’t have a zoom camera. But then these new phones start to pull ahead in a very serious way. For starters, they take 24 megapixel photos, even though the 14 Pros also had a 48 megapixel sensor.
The default photos that you get in auto mode are scaled down to a 12 megapixel shot, but the 15s take photos in two times that resolution it’s a massive win in daylight conditions like this absolutely pastes. My 14 pro Max in detail when the sun’s out and you’d kind of expect that Gap to fall the more that the light falls right as then it becomes less about the amount of pixels. You have more about how much of the limited light you can let in which this should let more in of, except that, thanks to the new phones, having an extra layer of image, processing, called photonic engine happening with night mode photos, the Gap in a way actually Becomes bigger, I almost could not believe what I was seeing when I took these samples and then the final key new software perk that this generations of iPhones get is depth information when you take a photo of a person or a pet, the phones use both of Their cameras, at the same time, to figure out how far away things are and they store that data as part of the photo file, which means anytime. You fancy, you can come back, you can hit edit on one of them add the portrait mode effect and also refocus them. All of this is really cool, but it just does raise one question, which is that: why is all of this stuff? The 24 megapixel capture the extra processing in night mode, the ability to capture depth information and refocus afterwards. Why is it not also available on last year’s 14 Pros? The usual answer with most phones is that well, it’s a next-gen product Within next-gen chipset and all the features require that next-gen chipset and its intelligence to work.
But the iPhone 15s have the same chip as the 14 pros and in fact the 14 Pros have better camera hardware, and also they have a lidar sensor which is specifically built to capture depth information, since these are almost all software features that presumably could be ported Over it just feels strange that, at least at the time of filming, nothing has been said about that older iPhones will be able to refocus shots if taken on portrait mode, but they won’t be able to capture the depth of information without being on portrait mode. Like the 15’s cap, but overall I am really happy with the cameras on the iPhone 15s in some ways that you’ll actively notice like how it copes with challenging lighting and in other ways that you might not. But it’s a nice reassurance to have like just knowing that your memories are there in very high resolution. Should you ever want to print them out or make a slideshow or crop in to post somewhere that you can refocus them to make them just right and that the live photo information is captured by default? So you also get that little snippet of video and sound one of the other things that now separates base iPhone turns from their Pro counterparts is the performance.
The way Apple tends to do things now, with their Pro phones. You’Ll get the very latest Cutting Edge chip with the base phones, you get last year’s chip and I have a feeling that this Gap will only widen over time, because historically, Apple’s chips have been pretty simple. You have the A14, the A50 and the a16, but this year apple called the chip on the 15 Pros. The a17 pro, which makes me very strongly suspect that next year, the base phones won’t get the same chip they’re not going to give the non-pro phones a chip that has Pro in the name right. So I’m gon na guess the iPhone 16s will get a trimmed down version of it just called the a17 point.
Being. I think that the growth in power on the base iPhones is going to Peter out over the next few years, because in the same way, that Apple sees 120hz displays as optional for the mainstream. Well, what does the average user need more power for, however, this jump that we’ve just had from the a15 and the iPhone 14s to the a60 and the iPhone 15s is a pretty big one.
You can expect these phones to be about 20 faster than the 14.. Alongside all the other perks of having a more recent chip, they’re slightly less powerful than what you would get in similarly priced current Androids, but in use it never feels like you’ve got the short end of the stick. I mean basically anything that I’ve wanted to play on this. I played on this no problem.
The only thing that you will miss out on is the console games that Apple’s specifically getting made for the 15 Pros. So, with all of this in mind, are the iPhone 15s worth it well to make a judgment on value, we need to factor in the prices they’re unchanged from last year, if you’re in the US, but if you’re in the UK, both the iPhone 15 and the 15 plus are 50 pounds cheaper than the iPhone 14s were at launch, which makes it feel like they are back in line and yeah with it. In fact, the iPhone 15s make the iPhone 14 look like genuinely terrible value for money right now, because Apple does still sell the iPhone 14 for 6.99 compared to the 799 for the 15. But for that extra 100 you get a phone that looks better, feels a lot better.
It’S faster takes significantly better photos and lasts longer. I wouldn’t rush to buy it if you’re already on a 14, but if you’ve been holding out for the next iPhone. You have my blessing. This is one of the best times to upgrade right. Just before you head off. I want to show you something very cool for these phones, so this is Taurus and they’ve got three tiers of phone case each one cooler than the last.
So the base is the u-pro o sound, which is a super protective case it has Maxi built in, but also that magsafe ring can flip out and become a kickstand, a kickstand that when it’s folded away, you don’t even realize is there. But then you can step that up with the: U pro o stand R, which has the same magnetic kickstand, but also adds in the element of full 360 rotation. So you can angle the kickstand. Whichever way you want to bear in mind, these cases are also super customizable too, like they all come with a free set of replaceable buttons, including dark, green and orange colors, and then this is me and my cat Milo got carried away, but then what I think Is the craziest case? This is the O stand SS and it has built-in airbags. No, really, this entire outer layer is a vacuum.
Sealed air chamber which cushions phone drops by 92 versus not having one and what’s also really cool, is the insta-fit installation for their Diamond Shield, screen protectors, it’s very quick, there’s, no bubbles or dust on your screen. You just slap your iPhone 15 into the frame, and the mechanism will do the rest and if you use our link and code in the description, this is pretty cool. We actually managed to get a full 20 off their normal prices. .