Despite a host of new features, there have been lots of issues raised by users and the media on the Apple iPhone 15 series. So despite that, should you buy one?
This is the new iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the new thing that everyone’s talking about is the USB-C port. There are so many things you can do now, like plugging your phone straight into your TV.
This is the most contentious issue, and in fact, Apple already tried to fix this with iOS 17.0.2. We got this phone after the update, so we can’t tell you whether it’s any better than before. Some people will say that the overheating issues are caused by the titanium frame. Titanium doesn’t dissipate heat as well as, say, aluminium, and the theory is that this is causing the phone to trap heat inside.
Apple claims this is the first smartphone chip to be built on a 3nm process, but the biggest news is support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. It’s amazing that such a feature came to an A-series chip first, before the Mac with the new M3 chips. Dial up the graphic settings and you’ll run into another issue—the 15 Pro Max’s thermal performance just isn’t up to the task. All too often, the iPhone would stutter and freeze as it heated up, and occasionally during cutscenes, the game would slow down so much that the audio would go out of sync.is not the only game suffering from thermal issues. Even on regular mobile games, you’ll see slowdowns very often, which is not exactly typical for an iPhone. And it runs very hot.
You can even activate the Google Assistant! The fact that you can use a physical button to bring up the Google Assistant on an iPhone and not a Samsung phone is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen in tech. Well, yes and no. In Malaysia, you’re still limited to the usual timer and voice memo…and Spotify. You still don’t get turn-by-turn navigation with either Waze or Google Maps. Like, what’s the hold up?One thing that has changed is that Grab now supports Live Activities, so it shows up on the Dynamic Island. That means if you order food and you long-press the island, you’ll be able to track the delivery of the order.
Right, time for the big question. We’ve heard a few complaints about the cameras, so are they really not as good as before? The second is that Apple is providing different “focal lengths” by cropping into the massive sensor. You can choose from either the standard 24mm equivalent, 28mm or 35mm, and you can even set one of these as the default for the main camera. That’s one way to appease people complaining about ever wider main cameras, as I did previously.
All this is well and good, but how does it translate to the real world? Well, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, the main camera is fantastic. Only in Night mode does the iPhone default back to 12MP mode, and that’s where the excess sharpening starts to show. More importantly, however, night shots still look like night shots, unlike the overwhelmingly bright photos coming from the S23 Ultra—even though the iPhone’s images are still brighter than reality.
Now we come to the bad part of the cameras, and that’s selfies. The iPhone 15 Pro Max continues to use a 12MP camera with an f/1.9 aperture, so the hardware is the same as last year. But many people have complained about how it handles colours, and in particular skin tones, especially compared to previous iPhones.
It’s all a bit subjective. Sharil says he prefers the look of the 15 Pro Max because it doesn’t make his skin look flat, but most other people in the office don’t really like it. What’s clear is that the 15 Pro Max’s cameras won’t flatter you like previous iPhones did, and it’s really up to you whether that’s a good thing or not.
And by the way, this happened not just on this iPhone 15 Pro Max, but also on the iPhone 15 Plus and even a retail iPhone 15 Pro belonging to our social media head Levy. So, it wasn’t just a problem on this particular unit, but all iPhone 15 models. There are many possible reasons, like the fact that the phone runs hotter than before and that the A17 Pro’s higher performance ceiling means it might be using more power in certain tasks such as gaming. Overall, you can expect the iPhone 15 Pro Max to last about a day and a half of use, but no more than that.
Of course, you can simply plug it in to charge, but you’ll be missing out on lots of cool things. There’s all the usual stuff, like connecting a monitor or an external drive. Then there’s the stuff that Apple has already mentioned, like reverse-wired charging and recording videos directly to an external drive. In fact, recording ProRes videos at 60fps requires you to plug in an external drive in the first place.
And as expected, there’s no indicator to show you whether your cable can actually support those write speeds. Though to be fair, that’s more the USB standard’s fault than Apple’s. Now, to its credit, the soft fabric part of the case—the bit everyone keeps complaining about—has held up reasonably well. Yeah, it stains quite easily, but generally you can clean it simply by using a wet tissue and be on your way. And it still feels plush and high quality.
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