iPhone 15 Pro: 3 Months Later!
– So this here is my Titanium iPhone 15 Pro that I’ve been using with no case for 88 days, or about three months now. I wanna do more longer term reviews. Not that three months is a super long time to have a phone, but in the usual smartphone review space, at least, for me, it’s one to two weeks with a phone before I’m summarizing everything from my experience and putting it into a review. And so the longer I use a phone, the more I’m able to actually uncover about it, especially about the way I use
it. So as someone who carries two phones all the time and the iPhone typically is in my pocket for a long time, I have a lot more stuff for this iPhone. So first things first, I haven’t put my phone in a case since the day I bought it. Sometimes I regret this, sometimes I don’t. It’s pretty rare that I actually drop my phone and this one also hasn’t yet been dropped, but it does show some pretty normal signs of wear and tear. But it’s nothing too concerning. Like, I always start to get some bigger cuts,
like this, on my front display glass because of my refusal to put on a screen protector. And these here aren’t any more or less than usual despite, you know, the fancy ceramic
went with. Now, long-term behavior, there are three really interesting things about this phone. Two of them, I feel like I’m using way less than I thought I would and one of them, I’m using basically exactly as much as I thought I would. So first of all, in the camera of the Pro iPhone, this was the first year Apple announced this sort of neat multiple focal lengths feature. So you can hit that 1x button three different times and get three different focal lengths, 24 millimeters, then 28 millimeters, then 35 millimeter focal lengths, all with the same
quality. I pretty much never use this feature. I don’t know if that means I’m, like, not a true smartphone photographer, but I always just frame things at 1x and that seems to be the end of it for me. So I just don’t use that feature, even though our testing does show that it works. But I still think the new button they added to iOS 17, where if you zoom in on a photo, a crop button appears and that actually crops the photo. That’s significantly more useful of a feature for me and I actually think for
a lot of other people. But then the action button is another one. So this is a pretty big headlining feature on this year’s Pro iPhones, this rare ability to actually customize something on your iPhone. So I definitely feel like the UI that they built into the settings is still one of the weirdest most un-Apple-like stapled in pieces of UI I’ve ever seen them do. But hey, it works, it’s great. You can map the button to basically almost anything you want. But a lot of people made a great observation about the placement of this button when
the phone first launched, which is, like, the reason that mute switch that we used to have was so great, is ’cause it was sort of tucked up in the corner and out of the way. So you could just never even think about it. Just leave your phone on mute forever and be fine. But Apple is very stubborn about placing this action button in the exact same spot where the mute switch used to be, which does mean it’s kind of out of the way. It’s a little bit, annoyingly, not very reachable, especially when you use the
phone with one hand. So when I first got the phone, I mean, I was going nuts with all the possibilities of the crazy things that I could think of to do with it. First thing I did was map it to Google Assistant, since I never use Siri, but having a quick toggle to the better assistant is hilarious and more useful to me. Then I later briefly switched it to toggle starting a new voice conversation with ChatGPT. So the ChatGPT chatbot has its own voice and you can have a voice conversation with it and it’s really
cool, but it isn’t the most useful thing in the world. Like, it’s cool that it can do complex math and reasoning and generate new things for you, but then it can’t see your calendar or tell you the weather or do anything current events related. So that didn’t last long. So then I switched to starting a new dialogue box for a new task in my to-do list app of choice, TickTick, and this one’s pretty cool. You hit the button and it literally opens a text box and you just start typing a new task. Really, really nice
if you just happen to remember something somewhere. But I also totally still have the muscle memory to just go home and open the app whenever I need it. I also have a lock screen task to do that. So it was a little bit redundant for me. So I’ve ended up with my action button just being set to open the camera and that’s the fastest, most convenient way to get to the camera for me. Yes, there is a lock screen shortcut also, but I just find that if I am doing something and I just need to
quickly get a picture of something that’s happening or something’s about to go away, I don’t wanna miss it. Like, I just have this muscle memory now to just hit that button and just take the photo. You can actually have it open to take a selfie or take some other types of photos or videos. I just have it open to viewfinder and I’m good. So then, of course, USB Type-C was the biggest headlining feature of this newest generation of iPhones, hilariously enough. Slow USB 2.0 speeds on the base iPhone 15, but then USB 3.2 speeds on
the 15 Pro and Pro Max, which makes a pretty big difference when importing tons of ProRes footage, even if it isn’t Thunderbolt speeds yet. First of all, thank you, Europe, it’s about damn time. Even as someone who is a pretty heavy wireless charger user, I do have to say, it is much nicer. It’s been great to just have one cable to charge almost everything from this iPhone to any Android phone to the iPad Pro to my laptop. But unfortunately, I have not been able to get rid of my lightning cable just yet because there are
still other things in my ecosystem, in Apple’s ecosystem, that haven’t switched to USB-C quite yet. Mostly because AirPods Max is my headphones for traveling of choice and I still have to carry the lightning cable everywhere just to charge those. But there’s also still the Magic keyboard and the Apple Magic Trackpad. I really don’t know how long it’s gonna take Apple to go through and also update all of these things to be USB Type-C, but I guess my lightning cables are sticking around a little while longer until they refresh all that stuff. The AirPods Max came
out at the end of 2020, so word on the street is they may be due for a refresh sometime soon, but we don’t know. Definitely get subscribed to see the review of the new ones whenever they do come out, but as of right now, they’re still lightning. So there have been several software updates to the iPhone 15 lineup since it came out. It launched on iOS 17, which made all types of headlines, but then we’ve already made it to iOS 17.2. The new Journal app is live now, which I have a few friends that use,
but I don’t use it. There’s, of course, been a bunch of bug fixes and optimizations since we heard about, you know, the Instagram app and those random heat problems. Those seem to also be fixed and gone. And there’s also a curious new little button in the camera app. So if you go to Settings and then Camera and then under Formats, there’s a new toggle to be able to record spatial video for the Apple Vision Pro. So things seem to be lining up interestingly for the Vision Pro to actually launch sometime in January or February, which
should be pretty cool. And if you remember watching that one demo of spatial videos on the Vision Pro, yes, you can record them on the headset, which looks hilarious, but you can also record them on an iPhone, specifically only on an iPhone 15 or 15 Pro so far because of the horizontal alignment of the main and ultra-wide cameras. So if you go into the camera app with that new check toggled, in video, there’s a little headset icon, and if I select that, I’m now shooting that special spatial video, which means a few things. First of
all, you must turn your iPhone sideways to landscape because your eyes are next to each other and not on top of each other. And it also will limit you to 1080p 30fps because it’s actually processing two streams of video at once, one from the primary camera that you can see, but then the other one from the ultra-wide camera for your other eye. So you can go crazy right now and just go out and start shooting a bunch of spatial videos on your iPhone. But if you go watch them on your phone, they will look just
like normal videos because it’s only gonna play back the video from the main camera. If you wanna see and appreciate the spatialness of the video, you will need an Apple Vision Pro. Now, I’ve actually gotten to experience the App Vision Pro a few more times since that initial preview video that I did from Apple Park, flex, I know. But what I’ve actually gotten to do with it is shoot a bunch of my own spatial videos and then watch them back on the headset. And the main thing I really learned is they look okay. I think
the dramatic part is, like, when you get the subject within two, three, four feet of the camera, then it’s, like, really dramatic, kind of like a 3D movie. Then you see things popping out at you. So Pro tip, if you’re gonna take a bunch of spatial videos now, that’s the sweet spot for it to actually be worth it. Oh, and also, another Pro tip, it took me months to learn this, but if you ever have anything happening on the Dynamic Island, you can swipe across it to hide it or change the view style, in case
you’re annoyed by, like, a train ticket or an Uber delivery that’s taken up space up there or something you just don’t wanna see up there anymore. So go ahead and swipe, the more you know. So clearly, you don’t have to upgrade your phone every year or every two years or very often at all. But the more I use this phone, the 15 Pro, the more I’m confident that this is one of the good years to upgrade, from the updated cameras to the USB Type-C to the titanium. Like, there’s the concept of an upgrade sweet spot,
and I feel like this phone hit it, especially for people with much older iPhones. So I’ll leave you with this. In the original iPhone 15 Pro Review, I compared this phone to the Porsche 911 in that the design doesn’t really change a whole lot from generation to generation. They, instead, spend a really long time refining and honing in on a slightly better version of the same thing. So I just turned 30 recently. Still weird saying that out loud, but for my 30th birthday, I decided to take that plunge too. Yes, it is matte black, but
I can now say that once you start living with a 911, you actually appreciate that strategy just a little bit more. It is not flashy, it’s not dramatic, it’s boring, it’s predictable, it’s familiar, confidence inspiring. Also, this entire video, every single shot was shot on an iPhone 15 Pro. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys on the next one, peace. (bright upbeat music)
