The Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max in the world is the pinnacle of Apple’s smartphone innovation, combining cutting-edge technology with sleek design. The white variant, in particular, stands out with its pristine and sophisticated look, appealing to those who appreciate elegance and style.
This is Apple’s cream of the crop and a phone many people have been waiting for. The iPhone 15 Pro Max, besides bringing all of the goodies that made last year’s Pro Max so successful, has Apple improved this time around and is it worth upgrading to? I’m Will for GSM Arena, and let’s find out in our iPhone Pro Max review.
Details
Apple delivers a consistent high-quality product with each iPhone generation, but what makes this year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max special? Well, there are some interesting changes compared to last year. For one, across the board, Apple has finally changed from a lightning port and cable to USB-C, the standard you find on almost all other mobile devices. Say goodbye to dongles and adapters, unless you want to plug in headphones. But yeah, the phone also features a new programmable action key that evolved from the silencer hardware button. Of course, the iPhone 15 Pro Max packs a new, more powerful chipset, and its improved main camera and new five-times periscope telephoto zoom are very welcome changes. Let’s start, though, by diving into the design.
With a flat back made of matte glass and triple circle camera bump, the looks are quite similar to before, but there are a couple of changes here compared to last year. First off, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is lighter than the previous model, and you can feel it right away. Plus, you get rounded chamfers where the back meets the frame, which lends a more natural in-hand feel. But the biggest change is that the frame is made of titanium rather than stainless steel, so it’s both stronger and lighter. However, while the new material is more premium, it doesn’t quite feel like it; it feels just like the aluminum you get on the cheaper iPhone models, and we sort of miss the cold weightiness provided by a steel frame. On top of that, even though you might imagine that a titanium build would be more durable, based on drop and bend tests online, the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s back is a lot easier to break than the previous model. For whatever reason, at least you can still breathe easy around water; the iPhone 15 Pro Max again brings IP-rated protection against dust and water submersion.
The display of the phone feels lifted straight from last year’s model: a Super Retina XDR OLED with a 120Hz refresh rate protected by ceramic shield glass. The resolution comes out to a sharp 458 PPI, and you get great contrast as well as very accurate colors. There’s support for both HDR video and Dolby Vision, and something interesting is that the HDR playback is quite flexible. The HDR can be applied only to the part of the screen that has the video playing. Just like last year, you get the pill-shaped screen cutout for the selfie cam and the DTF scanner for Face Unlock, and the cutout brings its Dynamic Island functionality as well, with a black bar extending beyond the cutout to display relevant info and letting you easily call up certain apps from the background. This display’s maximum brightness is impressive; we reached nearly 1100 nits of maximum brightness with the manual slider, and this boosted to almost 1900 nits in auto mode when presented with bright light. Promotion is what Apple calls its dynamic 120Hz refresh rate, and it’s meant to provide silky smooth swiping and scrolling, then dial down to 10Hz when idling to save energy.
When it comes to the speakers, the iPhone 15 Pro Max brings what seems like the same system we saw in last year’s model. The stereo speakers have very good loudness and an impressively rich sound output across the board, from bass to vocals and treble. You can check it out for yourself through the provided link. Biometrics are handled through Apple’s Face ID, which is quite secure thanks to the TOF camera on the front. It’s as fast and reliable as ever, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max can come with 256GB, 512GB, or a whole terabyte of storage on board, while that’s not expandable through microSD, you can connect an external drive through USB-C.
The interface of the new iPhone generation is iOS 17. It brings the same experience as the previous version with just a few new features sprinkled in. Just as before, the lock screen houses your notifications and shortcuts for the flashlight and camera. It can also behave as an always-on display. Something new is the optional Standby mode, which is an always-on display in the landscape orientation, which can activate while the phone is charging. There is again plenty of support for widgets, and now you even get interactive widgets—you can tap on these and change things without even going into the app. There is also a new customizable call screen, which Apple calls Contact Posters. For each contact you have, you have plenty of options for how they appear, including photos, emojis, and text.
Some other new features in iOS 17 include password sharing with friends, offline maps, and live voicemail. As I mentioned earlier, the silencer key has become the new action key, which triggers when you long-press it. There are a few predefined actions available, as well as a shortcut button that allows you to assign pretty much whatever you want for your convenience. It could be a bit more convenient, though; the location of the key is up high where the silencer was, not the easiest to reach on the fly.
And I’ll briefly touch upon the USB-C connectivity. While the phone itself supports USB 3.1, the cable that comes in the box only supports USB 2.0 speeds. There’s a Type-C Alt Mode, which allows you to output the phone screen to an external monitor. You can even output video in 4K at 60fps with a proper adapter. Since the aspect ratio matches the phone’s, though, you’ll get letterboxing and black bars for most content, including YouTube. However, some specific apps like Netflix can support full-screen output. There’s also support for USB-C host mode, which allows you to connect things like a mouse or keyboard to the iPhone through the port and even record 4K video directly to external storage.
Now let’s talk about the chipset: Apple’s new A17 Pro. They’ve dropped the Bionic label for this one. The chipset’s GPU features hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which is supposedly four times faster than the software-based ray tracing of last year’s A16 Bionic chip. We see this in graphics benchmarks; in a specific ray tracing test, the improvement is a massive 300%. Otherwise, when it comes to overall CPU and GPU performance, the difference from last year is a modest 10-15% improvement. Still, this makes the iPhone 15 Pro Max one of the most powerful smartphones out there, and Apple believes in its capabilities, lining up popular console-grade game titles for release on iOS.
It’s not all about raw power, though. USB-C connectivity is just as important. In our prolonged CPU stress test, the phone throttled gradually to 70%, which is decent. It could be better, though; last year’s Pro Max maintained much higher max performance in the same test. It seems that something about the software could be affecting it, though, because after updating to iOS 17.0.2, the iPhone 15 Pro Max could only maintain 60% of its max performance compared to 70% previously. But even despite all that, we didn’t encounter any drops or hiccups when gaming and we never experienced the phone becoming unbearably hot, either.
Battery
Even after rigorous testing, the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max is powered by a 4,500mAh battery, a minor increase over the 4,352mAh of the Pro Max. With it, the iPhone 15 Pro Max scored a great total endurance rating of 105 hours, almost the same as the 103 hours of last year’s model. The iPhone doesn’t come with a charger in the box, as expected. With an Apple 20W power adapter, we were able to charge the Pro Max from 0 to 50% in half an hour—nothing exciting and about the same as last year. There’s also support for wireless charging and Massif support for those magnetized wireless chargers.
Camera features
Now let’s get into the cameras. On the back is a 48MP main camera, a 12MP 5x telephoto camera, a 12MP ultra-wide camera, and a 3D TOF LiDAR scanner. The main cam has a bigger sensor this year, and it bins pixels to produce 24MP photos. But it outputs 12MP photos by default, thanks to some computational improvements. In contrast, most 48MP smartphone cameras, including the one on last year’s model, bin pixels into one and produce 12MP photos.
During the day, the default photos from the main camera are quite good, with great contrast, no noise, and wide enough dynamic range. The rendition is typically Apple: the colors are natural-looking, perhaps even a bit boring, and there’s some extra sharpening in fine details when you look up close. You can also take 48MP photos, and when you compare them, you can see that the 48MP ones have more detail, particularly in stationary objects. So, taking photos in 48MP makes sense, especially since the