Apple iPhone 15 Pro review

Refinement. That’s what I’d pick if I had to sum up all the changes to the iPhone 15 Pro in a single word. You might pick iterative or samey, if that’s even a word. Whichever way you cut it, the iPhone 15 Pro isn’t that different from the phones that came before it. It’s the same, but better.

Features & Design

• Titanium + aluminium frame
• Action button
• USB-C

It certainly looks the same, but under that iconic skin there are a lot of changes. The first thing you notice when you pick up an iPhone 15 Pro is how light it feels. It’s about 19g lighter than the iPhone 14 Pro and it makes a big difference, much more so than you’d expect.

By the time you’ve added a case, which almost everyone will, it’s still only 213g – just a few grams heavier than a caseless iPhone 14 Pro.

It’s a bit of a shame to cover up the lovely brushed finish, and the blue review phone Apple sent is especially nice. Being matt, it doesn’t collect fingerprints either.

You might assume titanium is more resistant to scratches or damage than aluminium so you don’t need a case, but you’d be wrong. Titanium’s trump card is its strength. It’s actually heavier than aluminium, but you need much less of it for the same amount of strength, which is why you tend to think of lightness when anyone mentions titanium.

The first thing you notice when you pick up an iPhone 15 Pro is how light it feels.

The other big design change is the replacement of the mute switch for the action button. You can pick what happens when you press it: mute, launch the camera, change focus mode, switch on the torch, start a voice recording and more. You can also pick a Shortcut, which means you can do just about anything such as launching an app playing or listening to your favourite playlist.

You get the same haptic feedback with the Action Button as with the old mute switch, and haptics are as premium as ever. It’s a pain you can’t easily adjust their strength, though. It’s possible but only if you know where to look in the Accessibility settings.

Getting back to the button, it does feel like a missed opportunity as it can do only one thing. If you set it to launch the camera, for example, it can’t also be a mute button. But it would be easy to define different actions when you double-press or long-press it. Maybe this will come in an iOS update. Here’s hoping.

A more significant change is that the proprietary Lightning port is gone and there’s a USB-C in its place. This brings a variety of benefits, the biggest of all being that you can charge the iPhone 15 Pro with any USB-C cable. Plus, they’re easily and cheaply available if you lose or break the one that comes in the box.

You can also use the new port to charge other devices such as an Apple Watch, AirPods, or some non-Apple earbuds from the iPhone’s battery. Plus, you can connect external displays and SSDs.

Screen & speakers

• 6.1-inch OLED display
• Up to 2000 nits of brightness

With a slightly thinner bezel, the iPhone 15 Pro is fractionally smaller than previous Pro models despite having the same 6.1-inch screen.

Resolution remains the same at 2556 x 1179 pixels, but Apple has bumped peak brightness to 2000 nits. Before the 15 Pro I was using a 14 Pro, and the difference in brightness is quite amazing. Normally, if I was outdoors on a sunny day, I wouldn’t expect to be able to see the screen clearly for framing photos or playing games. But the iPhone 15 Pro’s display goes so bright, you can still see it on the brightest of days.

And as you’d expect, it’s a top-quality screen with fantastic colours and viewing angles. Like the iPhone 14 Pro, it has an always-on mode that shows the time, date and notifications.

Dynamic Island – the black pill-shaped cutout at the top – is so-called because it changes shape according to the information it’s displaying. This is a common feature across the entire iPhone 15 range now, and isn’t a gimmick. I really like how it shows useful information while you’re using other apps.

It shows the duration of a phone call, a tiny thumbnail of whatever music or podcast you’re listening to and even a countdown timer before an upcoming flight. It’s interactive, too: you can tap on it to go to the relevant app.

The display glass has extra protection because of Ceramic Shield, a material that contains ceramic crystals. Its proven itself pretty impressive on the iPhone 14 Pro in drop tests, but it’s worth noting that the iPhone 15 Pro’s screen curves ever so slightly at the edges where the iPhone 14’s screen was completely flat.

This could end up being its downfall if you prefer your phone without a case because it means the screen is slightly proud of the frame, leaving it more exposed in a fall.

Cameras

• Improved wide, ultrawide & 3x telephoto lenses
• Option to shoot in RAW and ProRes

Just as the iPhone 15 Pro’s design is basically unchanged, it can appear that the cameras have been copied and pasted from the 14 Pro. Look at the specs and it’s hard to disagree. Apple says new lens coatings have helped to reduce the flare problem, but it’s still there when there are light sources visible in the frame.

Even if the sensors and lenses are the same, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that all leads to better portrait and night photos, and slightly better photos overall. Macro photos are awesome, and video is sublime.

For general pointing and shooting, the main rear camera now saves 24-megapixel photos instead of 12, while using only about 1.5x the storage space. You have to zoom right in to see the extra detail compared to, say, an iPhone 14 Pro photo, but the improvement is there.

Here are a selection of unedited photos from all the cameras:

The crucial thing about any phone camera is its ability to focus quickly and accurately time after time, and that’s exactly what the main camera does here. It’s only at night when trying to photograph moving objects that you can end up with blurry results.

However, if you can get your subject to stay still, you can get great photos – even portrait photos when there’s not much light.

Here’s the full zoom range from ultra-wide to 3x:

Portrait photos, whether from the main camera or front-facing selfie, are very good. Edge detection remains a challenge and the software still blurs things that should be in focus,  but the fact you can decide later to turn a photo into a portrait is a nice bonus. It applies only when a person, cat or dog has been detected, but it’s also great that your pet shots can now have lovely bokeh.

I can’t imagine many people will do it, but you can dig into the settings (in the Settings app – not the camera app) to enable RAW mode for photos and ProRes for videos. You can even shoot video in Log and use a USB-C cable to hook up an external SSD and record 4K60 directly to it.

Along with the new A17 Pro chip, this is another genuinely ‘pro’ feature.

There are a few new features, such as being able to tap the 1x button in the camera app to toggle between 24, 28 and 35mm, or at least the digital equivalent of these popular focal lengths. Again, in the settings you can pick which of these is your default shooting mode, as well as disabling either or both of the 28 and 35mm modes.

Similarly, the 2x you see in the camera app also uses digital cropping rather than a physical lens, but there are enough pixels to make it seem as though there is one.

If there’s a disappointment, it’s that the new 5x periscope lens is exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. That means if you want the smaller, lighter Pro you’ll have to live with 3x.

Performance

The A17 Pro chip is the first to ditch the “Bionic” moniker, but that’s the least important detail. It’s not massively faster than the A16 Bionic – Geekbench 6 reveals it’s around a 15% increase – but the A16 Bionic was already massively fast. The A17 Pro eclipses everything else currently available – even Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is going to struggle to keep up.

The bigger news with the A17 Pro, though, is in graphics performance.

Apple says the iPhone 15 Pro is the “best games console” as its GPU is now powerful enough to do real-time ray-tracing. Put simply, this elevates the look and feel of games to console level, hence the claim. Specifically ray-tracing makes lighting and shadows look much more realistic.

Unfortunately, the AAA titles which support ray-tracing aren’t coming out until later this year, so I couldn’t see what they look like first hand, nor check whether the iPhone 15 Pro can handle playing them without overheating or throttling performance to avoid getting too hot.

Not many will buy the 15 Pro specifically to play games, but it’s still impressive that you can effectively play PlayStation games on your phone.

Perhaps a few years down the road, the A17 Pro’s headroom will come into play: right now it’s certainly more powerful than you need it to be

You won’t necessarily notice the increased power elsewhere if you’re coming from a recent iPhone, but it’s still enabling things like the 24-megapixel camera mode, the ability to turn any photo into a portait later and the new voice isolation feature which removes background noise from video and phone calls.

And in general use, the iPhone 15 Pro feels no different to even an iPhone 13 Pro: both phones are more than capable when it comes to scrolling through social media feeds, online shopping and all other stuff you need to do each day.

Perhaps a few years down the road, the A17 Pro’s headroom will come into play: right now it’s certainly more powerful than you need it to be.

I did experience the widely reported overheating problem, albeit just once before the iOS 17.0.3 update came out. After that, I never felt the phone becoming unusually warm.

Connectivity

• Wi-Fi 6E
• Thread radio
• Second-gen ultrawideband chip

 Usually, there wouldn’t be a whole lot to say about wireless but a lot has changed. For starters, there’s Wi-Fi 6E. It’s not the Wi-Fi 7 I’d hoped for, but it’s hardly a surprise given that the iPhone 14 range still used Wi-Fi 6.

Wi-Fi 6E means the iPhone 15 Pro can at least tap into the new 6GHz band which could speed things up when you’re connected to a compatible router.

There’s also a second-gen UWB chip that works up to three times further away when it’s connecting to another device equipped with this chip. That’s why Apple is shouting about Find My Friends being so much better on the iPhone 15, but it does mean those friends need an iPhone 15 as well.

The 15 Pro is also the first phone to have a built-in Thread radio which will allow it to connect directly to Thread devices. This wasn’t enabled at launch, but with so few Thread devices in most homes, it’s another feature that might become useful down the road.

Like the iPhone 14 Pro, the 15 Pro has satellite connectivity for emergencies. The crash detection feature can use that if it can’t make a phone call or text emergency services. There’s also two free years of roadside assistance for US buyers.

Battery life and charging

Here’s one area that Apple hasn’t changed. Battery life is the same as before and ‘fast charging’ is still 20W only. Technically it will draw up to 27W using a USB-C charger but the fact is that the battery can be charged around 30% every 15 minutes.

That might be enough for you, but it feels like a distinct lack of progress compared to some Android phones, although not Google Pixel range which is equally slow.

Talking of USB-C, the bundled USB cable is only USB 2.0, so if you want to take advantage of fast transfer speeds you will, confusingly, need to buy a different USB-C cable. You can find out more in our USB-C cable guide.

As ever, the iPhone 15 Pro can also be charged wirelessly up to 15W using a MagSafe charger, or 7.5W if you only have a Qi charger.

Battery life in the real world varies quite a bit to the point that some days I’d go to bed with more than 40% remaining, but other days I’d be reaching for the charger by 9pm, despite doing basically the same things and having the screen on for about the same amount of time. But as I said, there’s really no improvement here: most days the Low Battery warning would pop up near bedtime, so this is a one-day phone you’ll have to charge virtually every night.

Price & availability

The iPhone 15 Pro costs $999 / £999 for the base 128GB model, rising to $1499 / £1499 for 1TB.

With inflation so high at the moment, it’s great to see Apple keeping last year’s price and even dropping the UK price by £100.

You can buy it from Apple, naturally, but we’ve also put together a separate guide to the best iPhone 15 deals.

If you prefer a contact, those in the UK will find the best deals immediately below.

And if you fancy an upgrade but can’t justify another 24-month contract, or the expensive of buying outright, then do take a look at the best refurbished phone deals, or perhaps some alternative recommendations in our roundup of the best phones.

Should I buy the iPhone 15 Pro?

Although there’s a lot of upgrades and improvements, anyone with an iPhone 14 Pro (and even a 13 Pro) should think twice before upgrading.

Viewed on its own, though, the iPhone 15 Pro is one of the best smartphones money can buy. It’s hard to fault, and even the gripes about fast charging and the lack of Wi-Fi 7 are nit-picking.

Hopefully Apple will bring camera parity to the iPhone 16 Pro range, but as it stands, it’s the absence of the 5x zoom that’s likely to drive more people to buy the 15 Pro Max.. but only if they can accept that phone’s larger size and weight.