Apple‘s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max might well be the brand’s most metal phones yet. We don’t mean that in a George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher kind of way either, even though George really is a delightful human being. We’re talking literally. Apple’s headliners for the next twelve months are fashioned from titanium rather than the aluminium we’ve all come to expect.
What that means is that these handsets are both lighter and tougher, yet are somehow not more expensive. In America, at least, where launch prices for the Pro and Pro Max remain unchanged compared to last year. Here at home, the exchange rate has probably wrought all sorts of changes that we can’t calculate this late in the evening. Still, titanium iPhone good, yes?
It’s tough on screen
If Apple’s minions are to be believed, the newly toughened chassis just brings the iPhone 15 Pro and its brother Max up to parity with the lineup’s displays. As with the standard iPhone 15, the Pro and Pro Max are divided into two screen sizes. And as with the stock phone(s), those sizes are 6.1in and 6.7in. That’s handy for Apple, since these Super Retina XDR displays are all the same but mostly you’ll be telling these phones apart before the “slower” phones arrive in bright, happy shades and these are all semi-gothic metal hues. No matter which you select, though, they’re packing Apple’s Ceramic Shield and as usual the company won’t shut up about how it’s the best, most toughest glass, and it can definitely beat up your dad.
Counting upward continues
As usual, Apple has announced a new mobile chip but there’s a slight wrinkle in there. The A17 Pro chipset, an industry-first 3nm chip, suggests that next year the iPhone 16 will get a plain old A17 Bionic. We’re mostly guessing here but it sounds like something Apple would do. To keep people from just waiting for next year’s basic phone instead of buying this shiny new thing, we mean.
Performance increases are a given, with Apple saying that users can expect a 10% performance increase in terms of pure speed. That’s… not much, but since several previous or about-to-be console games are actually launching on this phone next year, maybe the GPU upgrade is worth paying attention to. Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and a new The Division title, among others, will turn up on the iPhone 15 Pro series in 2024.
Prism sentence
The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, of course, have Apple’s most advanced cameras to date. What would be the point otherwise? There’s a fancy new 48MP main sensor in both handsets but it’s the telephoto for the Pro Max that’s the most interesting of the lot. For the first time, Apple is including 5x optical zoom in a phone. This one’s facilitated by something called a tetra prism design, which sends incoming light on a longer path by shunting it around a little. To make up for this, there’s a very advanced optical image stabilisation system in there. No, really, watch the showcase.
Other camera features include the ability to take shots at 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm focal lengths, manually defining which of the three lenses is the default, or capturing something called Spatial Video, a feature that’ll launch after the phone does and owners film content that can later be watched on Apple’s Vision Pro headset. Because they were always going to talk about that too.
What else does the iPhone 15 Pro do?
It’s entirely possible that we missed something in Apple’s announcement but we doubt it. Eskom can’t slow us down that much. The handset launches with a USB-C charge port, which is totally Apple’s idea, you guys. It had nothing to do with the EU at all. Okay? There’s also a new Action button, which is a little key – a bit like a shutter that will be whatever you want it to be, depending on how you interact with it.
This only leaves the local launch date and pricing, something that’ll come when the local iStore gets done chatting to ICASA. Probably. You can bet that it’ll be soon and that the launch date will be announced a short while before pricing because that’s just how we roll here in SA. But, like we said, don’t expect that launch price to remain as stable as it is in the States. We’re not quite that lucky. But we’re still set to be pretty metal when this is all over.