Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPhone 15 Pro & Pro Max: light, camera, action button (and USB-C)”.
Sometimes, technological progress is Big, sometimes it’s small, but those small changes can add up to a lot and with enough of them incremental progress can be kind of a big deal. It also helps when EU Regulators get involved and enforce a universal charging standard. That’S how we ended up here, the first uspc iPhone. That’S it! The new charging port is a big deal, but that’s not the first thing.
You notice about the iPhone 15 Pro in the 15 Pro Max, whether you’re just taking a look or picking them up. You’Re going to notice the new titanium, exterior and frosted glass, it looks sleek. The sides have a brushed finish, it’s more comfortable to hold and, most importantly, it’s quite a bit lighter than the stainless steel that came before it on the Pro Models.
It makes the 15 pro and pro Max 19 grams lighter than their predecessors. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot, but you notice it especially on the pro Mac. That might be the thing that impacts your experience using these phones more than anything else Apple did this year and if you want the bigger phone this year, you’ll have to pay up.
The 15 Pro starts at 9.99, but the pro Max jumps up to 11.99. You get 256 gigabytes of storage at that price, which is what it costs last year, but there’s no 128 gigabyte model. So that’s the new starting price there’s a lot more to cover, but there’s one word: I’ve been thinking about over the past week and that’s Pro. These are the pro models, of course, and apple even renamed, the a17 chipset Pro. But what exactly does it mean? I mean it’s short for a professional, but what’s a professional phone we’ve been poking fun at this, since Apple started, putting the word Pro on everything, but it makes more sense if you think of it as standing for Progress, we’ll come back to that. Just keep it in mind for now.
Let’S look at one of the big new hardware features this year, not the charging port, the action button, it’s next to the volume buttons and it takes the place of the long-standing mute switch by default. It does the same thing as a mute, switch, long press it to turn all your sounds off and then long press it again to turn them back on, but you can also make it do other things just open up the settings menu it randomly goes really hard With these oddly mesmerizing animations and you can program the action button to open the camera or turn on your flashlight or trigger an accessibility feature, it can also run shortcuts, which means it can be your order me a PSL button if you want to just in theory, Yeah, that’s it. Is it perfect? Not quite I wish I could program it to do a secondary action when you double press it and on the pro Max it’s in kind of an awkward spot to reach in the camera app. You can use it as a shutter, but it’s a little weird because you feel like you’re holding the camera upside down, but it’s nice to be able to customize this button and do just about anything you wanted to, especially since Apple isn’t exactly known for customization options. It’S you know: progress, okay, let’s get to the port, because that’s something that’s going to affect everyone who buys this phone.
It is exactly what it looks like a USBC connector, just like the ones on basically every other modern Android phone on the Pro Models. It’S USB 3, which enables faster transfer speeds at up to 10 gigabits per second look at that cable separately. Of course, you can do quite a bit with it too plug in a hub, an SD card. Reader, ethernet Apple, hasn’t done a lot of its usual gatekeeping.
Here so most things just work: how they should progress, just don’t plug your phone into a display and expect to run a whole desktop environment. This isn’t Dex for some people. This will mean you just need to pick up an extra USBC charging brick because you know you’re not getting one in the box, but even if it’s a little inconvenient right now, this is overwhelmingly a good change. You can pack one charger for your MacBook, your iPad. Your phone and whatever other modern devices you carry around, there’s still three cameras on the back of both Pro phones, but one of them got an upgrade. The telephoto on the 15 Pro Max is now a five times lens or 120 millimeter equivalent. The 15 Pro still has a three times zoom and there’s nothing really new about it. The jump from 3x to 5x is a noticeable one in it opens up some interesting possibilities for what you can do with Framing and compression that you don’t really get with a shorter lens.
This is Apple’s first attempt at a long, telephoto lens, and it’s a good one. There’S plenty of detail on good lighting and like sensorship stabilizer, which also does double duty for autofocus, seems to help in dim light things get a little muddy and low light. But it’s a small sensor, so that’s not too surprising Apple’s really playing ketchup here. The pixel 7 Pro has a five times.
Zoom and Samsung has put 10x Zoom cameras on its phones for years. But overall I like this five time lens on the 15 Pro Max. The two times crop on the main camera is good enough for shorter telephoto shots, so a dedicated 3x lens feels a little redundant. You don’t get the wow factor of something like Samsung’s 10x lens, but it’s you know.
Progress Becca will have another video coming out soon. Diving deeper into all of that, so stay tuned. For now, I’m happy with the changes Apple made here feels like a much more flexible system with the new Zoom options, and I find myself taking more shots that I would have otherwise skipped without the long telephoto lens. That’S the big news on the hardware front, the main 48 megapixel camera in the ultra wide are basically on change from the 14 pro, but there are a few interesting things happening in the software too.
There are new 28 millimeter and 35 millimeter modes for the main camera you can cycle between them by tapping the one time zoom option. These aren’t the result of basic digital Zoom. Upresing Apple actually has a separate processing pipeline for each of them. You can even change the default focal length to 28 or 35 if 24 feels too wide to you, and I know several of you who are going to do that immediately when you get this phone.
Another neat update is that you can apply portrait mode to certain photos after you take them now, anytime, the camera detects a person, a cat, a dog or whenever you tap to focus in the frame, a little f-stop icon appears on the screen to let you know That it’s saving depth information when you edit in the photos app, you can turn the portrait effect on and even change the focus point. This is a huge victory for anyone. Who’S ever struggled switching modes, while your pet or your kid does something cute and you totally miss the moment. So there are some changes in video mode too.
Take it away, V, hello! So this year, on the iPhone 15 Pro and the pro Max, you have the ability to shoot in log, meaning that you can record video without a color profile baked into your footage. Why does that matter? Because, folks, like me, video creators can take advantage of more dynamic range and they can easily manipulate colors and match them to other cameras too so yeah. This is what log looks like. It looks flat, there’s no color, no or sharpening, which is to say that I love it, but let’s actually add some color here, so a little transition. So, in order to do what I just did, you would have to use a desktop app like Premiere or DaVinci or Apple’s own Final Cut Pro. There will be support for Final Cut Pro on the iPad and other apps as well, and you can download Apple’s provided Luts from their developer websites right. Let’S go back and edit some footage. Okay, a few things that you should know in order to film and log.
You can only film in prores and those files can get pretty large. Our review unit of the phone has one terabyte of storage, which gives you a little over 150 or 160 minutes of filming, but hey. We have USBC Port now, so you can just connect an external drive for as much of storage as you need. Actually you’ll have to record straight into an SSD drive.
If you want to shoot past 4K, 30s, meaning 4K 60.. Everything else 24 and 30 will work straight onto the device. I love having an option to shoot Pros log on the phone, if you’re an Apple device with an M1 chip or an M2 Chip editing. These will actually be super Breezy because there’s a dedicated, prores accelerator and the results are really good and just to be clear, prores and log don’t magically make your footage much better. You’Ll still get similar performance out of the cameras when it comes to things like noise, but having that flexibility to make your Clips More, You Is Awesome, and I think this is the part where I declare progress, but not the other Pro word: professional Apple being Apple. The camera interface didn’t change here.
You won’t get the professional user interface where you can manually set shutter ISO and white balance for that you’ll have to wait for some more third-party apps, which we’re told will support block filming progress. Lastly, log doesn’t work in cinematic mode, which I guess is to be expected, but it does work on all three separate sensors. There are no gotcha moments here and overall, I’m impressed with how much you can do here, especially with the main lens things, do sort of fall. Apart with the 5x Zoom, there’s just a bit too much noise in low light and there’s this overall crunchiness in the image, even with sufficient light. But the main lesson prores log has pleasantly surprised me all right, Allison you’re. Next progress, progress, there’s a grab bag of other updates worth mentioning like the new 17 Pro chipset.
You heard that right, it’s not the 17 bionic, it’s the 17 Pro, because you know it features a brand new GPU that enables hardware-based Ray tracing. So you can enjoy console quality gaming on your phone, which is honestly really impressive. Personally, I don’t think Resident Evil Villages for me more of a Sim City girl, but yeah. It looks really good.
Our new old friend, Dynamic island is still here and more third-party apps, like doordash, are coming on board soon, Apple isn’t making any claims of improved battery life just that it’ll get through a full day of use. We’Ve been putting the pro Max through a lot and I did get through an entire day with lots of video recording, but the battery was right down to the single digits that night. We noticed a lot of complaints from 14 pro owners saying that their maximum battery capacity is degraded from 100 to 90 or even lower. Just in one year, which is pretty concerning Apple hasn’t mentioned any improvements to overall battery health.
So that might be something to look out for on the 15 Pro there’s a new Ultra wide man chip. So you can find your stuff or your friends with more Precision, provided they have an iPhone 15 or one of the new Apple watches too, and and that they want you to know where they are Apple’s, adding roadside assistance to the emergency, SOS roster and we’re still Waiting to find out how much that emergency satellite service is bundled with is gon na cost. In the meantime, iPhone 15 owners will get two free years of access. Apple wants us to believe that the 15 Pro represents a kind of technological progress that will open up new possibilities and push boundaries. I think for most of us it’s just progress. It’S the next thing, that’s a little better than the last, sometimes in significant ways, but mostly in small ways.
I can list a handful of things that weren’t on the 14 pro that I appreciate having here nothing huge but plenty of small conveniences that I’m enjoying that’s not as exciting as a big leap forward. But sometimes that’s just what progress looks like and we can take it from. Oh, you got coffee all over your shirt. I’M just kidding. Oh my God.
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