Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max Preview

I ordered an iPhone 15 Pro Max Friday morning when Apple opened up its online store, and it went as poorly as always. After refreshing the site on multiple tabs until well past the promised 8:00 a.m. ET opening, I finally got through, but my iPhone won’t arrive this coming Friday as I had originally expected and hoped. It will arrive sometime between October 4 and 9, which is up to two weeks later. Ah well.

As I wrote in It Was Always Going to Be the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, I had long intended to go with a bigger iPhone whenever I upgraded—the 6.1-inch display on my iPhone 13 Pro is just too small for me—and with all the rumors ahead of last week’s announcement, I figured this was the time. USB-C is a big deal, obviously, but the camera improvements put it over the top.

On one level, I wasn’t happy with the price bump: the iPhone 15 Pro Max starts at $100 more than the cost last year. But on the other hand, I expected price bumps across the lineup, and perhaps even a $200 increase on the Pro Max. And so this was one of the positives that came out of Apple’s muted announcement last week. It could have been worse.

Tied to this, I’ve never needed more than 128 GB of storage in a smartphone to date—my Pixel 7 Pro, for example, still has 60 percent of its 128 GB of storage, or 51 GB, sitting empty—and it’s likely that I would have stuck with this configuration had Apple not bumped up the base model iPhone 15 Pro Max to 256 GB. But this may work out, as the new main lens enables both 24 and 48 MP photos, compared to just 12 MP on my current iPhone. (Apple justified the price increase by noting that the base iPhone 15 Pro Max is justified by this storage increase, as last year’s iPhone 14 Pro Max cost the same in that configuration.)

And so that’s what I ordered, an iPhone 15 Pro Max in Natural Titanium with 256 GB of storage. I also grabbed an Apple FineWoven Case with MagSafe in Evergreen (this kind of “forest green” color is a favorite), a 20-watt USB-C power adapter, and a 60-watt USB-C charging cable, for a total cost of, gulp, $1382.24 after taxes and shipping. And I am trading in my current iPhone, with Apple offering (up to) $480 for that, so my total should be about $900 after the dust settles. Still a lot of money, but not too horrible for a new flagship iPhone.

Related to this, it’s going to be an expensive fall. I’ll be upgrading to a Pixel 8 Pro when Google announces it next on October 4 as well, and I will trade in my Pixel 7 Pro towards that. This is part of the reason the late shipping on my iPhone is so frustrating: I had hoped for more time with it before the Pixel arrived. I really do want to test it thoroughly.

Much of what I’ll be looking at is obvious enough. The camera, of course. Transfer speeds off the USB-C port with various cables. Battery life. Charging time. And even iOS 17, though I put my current iPhone in the public beta over the summer, have upgraded along with each pre-release, and can’t say that I’ve noticed anything all that dramatic. So I’ll need to dive into that and see whether there’s anything notable that will impact my own usage.

(Speaking of which, iOS 17 debuts today on existing iPhones.)

Less obvious, there are some niceties from the iPhone that I do miss when using the Pixel, and to be clear, these are specific to my use/needs. For example, thanks to AirPlay 3 compatibility, I can control my Sonos speakers from the apps I want to use, especially YouTube Music. But on Pixel/Android, I’m stuck using the crappy Sonos app because Google and Sonos are engaged in a messy legal battle. And even with my limited engagement with the broader Apple ecosystem, I do enjoy some minor lock-in/integration benefits. Apple defaults to using another of your Apple devices to approve purchases or make account-related changes, and when I rent a movie on the Apple TV, or whatever, I now have to run and find my iPad or iPhone to approve it.

These and other similar integrations are not game-changers. But it would be more compelling if I were using a Mac or, God help me, iCloud storage for my documents and photos. For now, these are just little hints at how this kind of seamless integration can be beneficial. I do get it.

And then there are the little bits that Apple didn’t communicate (or at least did so only fleetingly) during its announcement last week. The iPhone 15 Pro/Max supports Qi2 wireless charging (in addition to MagSafe), for example, which is a standard and will introduce interoperability and expand the availability of charging peripherals. (It still charges at 15 watts, however.) It supports Wi-Fi 6E (up from Wi-Fi 6) and Thread, the wireless smart home networking protocol that’s part of Matter. There are lots of little photography improvements, like a 48 MP HEIF Max option and the ability to change the focus on portrait shots after the fact (something that Pixel users can already do). And it can output to native resolution 4K HDR displays at 60 Hz via its USB-C port, which could open up a variety of iPad/desktop-like scenarios. (It’s unclear yet what capabilities are present, perhaps just screen mirroring for now.)

Related to that last bit, I’ve also made some major changes to my video gaming habits this year—I haven’t turned on my Xbox console since March 1 or 2, I can’t recall—and have been playing less overall and experimenting with the PC and mobile devices. Apple has publicly claimed that the iPhone 15 Pro/Max will be “the best game console” thanks in large part to its A17 Pro chipset (with its 6-core GPU), hardware-accelerated ray tracing, high refresh rate display

And Apple has pointed to the availability of four recent AAA games—Death Stranding, Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil Village, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage—and in terrifically high quality as evidence of this claim. I am not interested in playing games like this on such a relatively tiny display (compared to a TV or large 27-inch display, as with a console or PC). But the new Pro’s ability to output to 4K HDR displays via HDR could enable entirely new scenarios for gaming. And perhaps do what even the latest Apple TV, which is powered by a less powerful A12 Bionic chipset, cannot and bring console-class gaming into the living room.

If this works in any way, this could be an example of one device that does two things well, and it comes with the same benefits that any mobile devices have in that you will no longer be locked to a single place, in this case for playing games. With an Xbox console or Apple TV, you’re pretty much stuck. (Yes, there are streaming solutions, etc.) It’s something I am curious about. (And I suspect future iPad Pros will bring this capability to mobile devices with much bigger integrated displays soon. Also interesting.)

And I of course have worries about the Pixel 8 Pro. How could I not?

I’m excited by some of the changes we expected in this handset, especially the long-overdue flat display and what I assume will be reasonable camera upgrades. But given the history, I will approach this new handset carefully. And I still have some concerns. Google’s Tensor chipset push has resulted in what I would call just mainstream day-to-day performance, which is OK, but also hotter operating temperatures, relatively poor battery life, and slow charging. And based on the rumors so far, it’s not clear that the Tensor G3 coming in the Pixel 8 Pro will fully solve these issues.

But it should at least be an improvement. It allegedly uses Samsung’s 4-nm manufacturing process, compared to 5-nm for its predecessor (and 3-nm for the A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pros), and that could help with heat and power efficiency. Google is also supposedly changing the mix of big/little cores in this generation Tensor, and improving the GPU, all of which could be related to improving performance and/or efficiency. And it will likely support UFS 4.0 storage, which is obviously faster than UFS 3.0 and should help improve overall performance as well.

We’ll see.

Generally speaking, I move between smartphones a few times each year, and I don’t see that changing. But I’m curious about which of these new phones I prefer after using each side-by-side. Right now, it’s not clear that either has the edge.