iPhone 15/15 Pro Unboxing and Second Look!
– All right, so this is an iPhone 15 and a 15 Plus and a 15 Pro and a 15 Pro Max, every new phone in the lineup. New colors, new materials, new ports. There’s some good stuff to unbox here, so let’s do it. So starting with iPhone 15 and 15 Plus. This iPhone 15 here is the new blue color, and it is, I’m just gonna go ahead and rename this color to barely blue. I think that’s an appropriate name, because it really is barely giving hints of blue. You can really see it on the side
rails too. But yeah, really subtle colors across the board this year. Anyway, the other things in the box are the paperwork, the single white Apple sticker, and there is no SIM card ejector tool here since they’re all eSIM, at least in the US now. But most importantly, the new cable in the iPhone box for all new iPhones is a single, white, braided USB-C to USB-C cable. I think this is the first time the iPhone is shipping with a braided nice cable like this. So hopefully it’ll be a higher quality and more durable than old cables
we’ve been getting for years. So, cool, USB-C cable, USB-C phone. Now, if we take a look at the Plus, same idea, bigger box, but this new incredibly pale yellow. I mean,
but this time it’s darker and kind of borders on gray when the light hits it from certain angles. Very safe. Same stuff in the box after that though, the paperwork, the white Apple sticker, and the new braided USB-C cable. And then our iPhone 15 Pro Max here is the new Natural Titanium color. And I gotta say, guys, I think this is gonna be the one to get. It’s the best color in person in the hand. I’ll talk more about why in a minute, but there you have it. The slightly new unboxing experience on iPhone 15s
and 15 Pros. So by the time you see this, I’ve been testing these phones for about six days now. Not quite enough time for a review by my standards, but still plenty of time to give you some interesting thoughts, some things that I’ve picked up on, and some quirks. So first of all, these pale colors. I don’t really know how else to say it. Like, this might be totally fine with you. I always get told everyone’s gonna put a case on their phone, which they probably are. But hey, Apple did spend a ton of time
and money making this new softer touch satin finish on the back, and some of us, some of us will carry our phones around with no case, so it’s worth mentioning. For the Pro phones there’s actually an extra layer of interesting though, because they’ve switched that rail material, the part that you actually touch on the outside, from shiny stainless steel to brushed titanium. We’ve all heard about how much lighter it is, and it’s something like 10% lighter, which is enough for me to notice and enjoy. But the other thing is I thought the brushed finish would
sort of eliminate fingerprints on the sides. Absolutely not. I was wrong about that. I mean, it’s less, it’s not as bad as stainless steel, but especially on these darker colors like the black or this blue, you can totally see fingerprints and sort of where your hand oils are marking up the sides of the phone. And then on top of that, this is not anodized like aluminum might be. This is the new PVD coating they talked about on stage. And it’s only been a week here for me, and so I don’t know exactly how well this
will hold up over time, but what I do know is if you get a scratch deep enough into this coating, it’s gotta be the Natural Titanium color underneath, which is very light. And so that might look rough, if you drop this phone with no case and get like a big gash on your dark colored phone and have light marks all over it. All of that to say, I do really think that this Natural Titanium or the light is gonna be the better color to get on the Pros this year. Okay, some things I’ve noticed in
my first week. So first of all, on the Pro, the bezels are technically a little bit thinner, which makes the body a little smaller, but you really don’t notice that much after a few minutes. What you do notice more actually visually is the slightly softer curves all the way around these phones, seriously, on the 15 and 15 Pro. Because on the 14 it was so square, like it just went straight to the edge with a flat display and then it dropped right into the rail at 90 degrees. On these new phones, the edge of the
front glass actually has a little bit of curve at the very edges, so it’s a softer curve into the rail. Then the rail itself has softer curves than the totally sharp corners from last year. So I think it’s a nice hybrid of making it just more comfortable in the hand with these curves, but still keeping the generally boxy look. Now, with USB-C on these phones, we already learned that you can just plug in a cable to charge an accessory, right? So it’s no reverse wireless charging, but you can at least plug in a USB-C cable
straight to AirPods or an Apple Watch MagSafe charger, whatever, and it will charge from your phone’s battery. So that’s already pretty interesting, but I decided it’s worth learning all the rules and behaviors of plugging things into the iPhone 15s. So here they are. So if you plug in any older Lightning iPhone into a USB-C iPhone, regardless of the charge state, the USB-C iPhone will always give battery to the Lightning iPhone, every single time no matter what. Now, if you plug in another USB-C iPhone into your USB-C iPhone, it actually does a handshake where they talk
to each other, figure out which one has the lower battery, and then the one with the higher state of charge goes, “All right, I’m a battery bank, and I will start charging the one with the lower stated of charge,” all the way till you unplug it. So I thought that was pretty interesting and it works pretty well. Then I decided to try a couple of Android phones and see if the same handshake happened. Basically what we found is if you plug into your friend’s Android phone who has more battery than you and that phone has
USB PD, it will actually act like a battery bank. But if the phone doesn’t have USB PD, which is a bunch actually right now, it’s pretty inconsistent and you could end up charging it or it could end up charging you. Literally unplug and try it again. But if it has USB Power Delivery, it will actually do the same handshake that the iPhones do. It’s only 4 1/2 watts out, so it’s not huge. It’s not gonna fast charge or anything. But, you know, it is ideal for accessories. You can literally use the cable in the box
to charge up the new AirPods or whatever else you wanna try. But yeah, you can rescue another smartphone in a pinch. So then the new Action button on the Pros. I was very curious about this. I was not sure if it would have some restrictions or if there’s some things that it wouldn’t let you do, and it turns out I haven’t been able to find any so far. It seems like it basically lets you do anything you want, and I’m very happy about that. I mean, this was a feature of a lot of Android phones
in the past. There were some LG phones that did this, some Sony phones, I wanna say some ASUS phones. I’m hoping it starts to make a bit of a comeback here, because on this new iPhone it is great. So you jump into the settings and go to Action button, and it loads up this whole crazy UI that’s just nothing like any of the other settings pages on the iPhone, like they just stapled this in here, but okay. And as I showed you in the impressions video, you can do any number of pre-programmed things with this
button. By default, it is still the mute switch that it replaces, and it has those two different haptic patterns. So when you mute it in your pocket, you know exactly what you’re doing without even checking you did it correctly. But honestly, I don’t know. I leave my phone on mute most of the time anyway. So you can also have it open up the camera in any of the camera modes. But then again, the camera shortcut is, like, right on your lock screen already, and I’m pretty used to that. Same thing with the flashlight. You could
do that, but it’s also already on everyone’s lock screen. I like the voice memo trigger. It’s actually pretty convenient because it immediately starts recording when you press and hold the button. But my favorite by a mile is the Siri Shortcuts function because it basically lets you do anything else. You can stack up a bunch of different functions that are, like, location dependent, or you can have it call a certain contact or do certain things, or if you just wanna literally open any app on your phone with zero lag. So it could be your to-do list
app or your calendar app or just open YouTube with any one button press. Whatever you want. For me, I’m gonna map my Action button on my brand new iPhone to the Google Assistant, the best assistant available on the iPhone. Also, Apple, if you’re listening, I also wish you could map a double press or a triple press of the Action button to a new specific function. Just think about it. Also, I was kind of curious how cases would handle this new Action button. So I asked channel sponsor dbrand to send over their new Ghost case, and
I have it here. Personally, pretty solid. I think this matte black skeleton design looks sick. And yes, I can confirm that even with the case, the Action button still feels nice and clicky. Now, I might be thinking, all right, what’s so special about this clear case? I’ve seen a million clear cases. And between the skeleton and MagSafe, there’s a bunch of other stuff, but my favorite personally is if you’ve ever owned a clear case before, you probably know that after a while it kind of ends up looking like this, which is disgusting and yellow. But
dbrand has promised me that they’ve specifically engineered the Ghost case to be impossible to yellow, and they use those words themselves. So they actually give you a lifetime case replacement guarantee if it every yellows. So that’s either a real promise or free cases for life, the way I see it. Either way, if you’re interested, I’ll leave a link below the like button if you wanna check it out. That’s the dbrand Ghost case. Now, I’ve also been taking some pictures and videos with these new cameras to get a sense of how they perform. I will be
taking many, many more, posting them on on Twitter if you wanna follow me there. Instagram as well. I also fully plan on shooting the next Auto Focus car channel video with this phone, so you already know you can go subscribe over there to see how the video looks, to hear how the microphones sound. One thing that they did mention in the keynote specifically was there was a new coating over the lenses that I immediately thought, oh, does this fix the horrible nighttime flare issues with the iPhone’s video? First thing I did was go to a
dark room, bring it out at night, shoot with some lights. No, it didn’t fix it, unfortunately. I’m sure the coating does some other great stuff during the daytime, but there’s still flare issues, sadly. But also, lastly, I wanna clarify the new camera behavior on the Pro phones. In the impressions video, I was a little down on the whole, like, 1x versus 1.2x versus 1.5x thing, because I thought it was literally just a digital crop, which would be pretty pointless to me. But it’s actually closer to a set of Super Res Zoom presets that you can
actually then digitally zoom between. I’ll detail all of this in the full reviews. And here’s some benchmark scores in case you’re curious about that sort of thing for performance for the A17 Pro, which is actually new. But generally, I think that wraps up my first, second impressions, my second look now that I got ’em in the studio. Really I feel like the base iPhone 15s, if you wanna buy one of these or pre-order ’em, it’s a bigger improvement than it seems on paper. Like, nothing is actually new here, but because it’s bringing things from last
year’s Pro phone, it’s actually a very solid phone. And then the Pro, it’s a lot more interesting because there’s some genuinely new stuff happening. I’ve seen new stuff with the cameras. Also, it seems like someone found out the batteries are slightly bigger across the board, which is good too. We’ll see if that holds up. But generally, let me know what you wanna see in the full reviews in the comment section below, because I will be working on those over the next couple days and weeks, and hopefully you’ll see that soon. Either way, thanks for watching.
Catch you in the next one. Peace. (mellow electronic music)
