Apple iPhone 15 Pro long-term review
Introduction
It’s been seven months since the launch of Apple’s premiere smartphone. The iPhone 15 Pro has been in regular service with us every day since then, put through the daily grind just like any other phone. We didn’t even bother putting on a case just to see how that titanium holds up, even though we had Apple’s fancy new FineWoven case at hand.
At this point, the iPhone 15 Pro needs no introduction. It’s the phone you get when you are either seemingly made out of money, have been part of Apple’s ecosystem for years, or want a break from Android (while also being made out of money). And we wouldn’t blame you for it; the 15 Pro, along with its Max, variant was listed in six out of ten of our top phones of 2023 lists across all our editors so clearly Apple was onto something this generation.
That something doesn’t have to be any one particular thing but rather a combination of several things done at once. After all, you wouldn’t want your expensive flagship device to just be excellent at one thing and mediocre at others. Being an all-round impressive device is really what you should be hoping for after paying that much and few smartphones do it as well as the iPhone, especially in the Pro range.
So with that out of the way, let’s see what the iPhone 15 Pro does so well in a way that makes it the crowd favorite while also unpacking the less savory things that you only learn after living with something for months.
Design
The design of the iPhone 15 Pro remains special in one specific way: size. In a world where compact smartphones are now on the endangered species list, Apple continues to produce its mainline smartphones in a size almost anyone would find comfortable. Sure, there are always the Plus or Max models if you have dinner plates for hands but the default iPhone or iPhone Pro is always this compact, accessible size.
For anyone who carries their phone in their front pants pocket, the advantages of a compact phone need not be mentioned. It slips into the pocket easily, doesn’t stick out too much when you sit, and there’s even some room left for your AirPods case. Even if you put a case on, the entire device is still more compact and usable than most other phones in this category without a case.
With the iPhone 15 Pro, Apple pushed the accessibility needle further than its predecessor by switching over to titanium. This resulted in almost 20g of weight loss compared to the 14 Pro, which is pretty significant and noticeable when switching between the two phones.
Since we are on the topic of titanium, let’s talk about it a bit further. Titanium is exceptionally strong for its weight but there were some concerns regarding how well the color finish would last on the models that do have color on them. After seven months of use without a case, we can say that the metal and the color of our Blue Titanium variant look as good as they did when it was new. Aside from being prone to attracting smudges, the metal shows no signs of damage nor has the color faded or scraped anywhere.
Of course, this may just be the result of taking care and never dropping the device but that’s the bare minimum that is expected from you as the user of a super-premium device.
But while we do appreciate the weight savings of the titanium over the stainless steel and the fact that it comes at no loss to durability, the material just does not feel special in hand. If we were never told that it was titanium we most likely would have assumed it was just aluminum. That’s what made the stainless steel body of the previous models so good as there was a jewelry-like quality to them that made them look and feel special. The titanium just feels ordinary in hand and the bland colors with matte brushed finish don’t help.
The camera bump is also not particularly pleasant to look at. While the use of a different texture to the glass surrounding the lenses is a nice touch (even though it’s the same as the rest of the back glass panel), the three lenses jut out too much. We also find having to clean all three lenses individually a bit annoying as on most other phones there is a single, easy-to-clean glass covering all the lens elements, and the design is definitely starting to show its age.
What’s not showing its age is the flat-sided design. While many other phones recently have adopted this shape, it only really works well on a compact design like the iPhone 15 Pro as you can grip the entire phone properly, and feels impractical on larger devices. Also, the way Apple manages to make the two glass panels seamlessly meld into the metal frame is truly artful. There is no lip or raised edge to feel here as you slide your finger around the corners; one second your finger is gliding over glass, the next metal, and once again glass like it was nothing. It’s not easy to achieve this without affecting the structural integrity of the glass but Apple gets it done somehow.
The inclusion of the Action button on the side was something new for this generation. After trying out the various preset options and even messing around with the Shortcuts feature to assign a custom workflow (like launching a new Safari tab, for example), we eventually just settled on using it as a mute switch the old-fashioned way. The old alert slider was a legendary feature for a reason and remains a very handy tool that we wish more phones had. So while the customizable aspect of the Action button is nice, mute still seems like the best fit for this button.
The last exterior feature we want to touch upon is the inclusion of USB-C. It’s hard to imagine now after seven months just how much ink was spilled on this one aspect before and immediately after the iPhone 15 Pro was launched.
Looking at it now, it just feels like a normal feature you’d find on a normal phone, which is a good thing because it makes the iPhone 15 Pro feel like a normal phone that blends into your life and workflow instead of being a special princess that demanded its own special accessories that didn’t work with anything else. Going on a trip somewhere with your laptop, camera, and phone? Guess what, you can now just charge all of them with the same cable. Want to borrow a stranger’s charger because you forgot your own? Well, you can do that now because they probably have a USB-C charger, too.
Why it took this long and the looming threat of a government body intervening to get here is beyond us but we are glad it finally happened. Let’s never talk about Lightning again.
Display
The display on the iPhone 15 Pro is unchanged from the previous generation model. You get the same 6.1-inch, 2556 x 1179 resolution 120Hz OLED panel with a peak brightness of up to 2000 nits.
The way Apple handles the displays on its devices is definitely something to take inspiration from as the company rarely ever misses. We already have all the numbers in our full review from last year but the sheer accuracy of the colors and the way it handles wide color content is something every phone manufacturer should take lessons from. There are no color presets to fiddle with; the colors always look the way they should, provided you don’t have True Tone or Night Shift enabled.
Even better is the handling of HDR content, although this may be controversial. HDR content always loads in high brightness and Apple takes advantage of the phone’s display to make the non-video parts of the screen maintain its original SDR brightness levels. This means you can have an HDR video playing in a portion of the screen in the Instagram app and while the video will be searing bright, the rest of the UI around it will maintain the same brightness as non-HDR content. At times it almost looks like the rest of the screen has dimmed but that’s only because your eyes have adjusted to the brighter HDR content on screen.
The reason this is controversial is that people don’t like being flashbanged by random HDR videos on their timelines while just scrolling through Instagram in bed at night. Instagram supports Apple’s HDR video and because iPhones that can record in Dolby Vision have the feature enabled by default (without most people realizing), a lot of video content on the app is now unintentionally in Dolby Vision, which can get seriously bright as it appears out of the blue on your feed. At present, neither Instagram nor Apple provide a way to disable viewing this content in HDR, which annoys a lot of people.
The display’s high brightness does come in handy outdoors, as the iPhone 15 Pro has exceptional visibility under direct sunlight. The display seems completely unaffected by the fact that it is competing with a star for brightness and remains exceedingly clear outdoors no matter how bright it gets.
The 15 Pro also benefits from the smallest bezels yet on an iPhone. These are some of the thinnest bezels we have come across and a lot of the time it feels like just holding the screen as the bezels just meld into the dark body of our Titanium Blue model.
As for the Face ID pill at the top, it becomes second nature to ignore it when using the phone normally in portrait orientation. It’s only when you turn the phone around and hold it sideways to watch videos or play games do you notice it and then it’s hard to ignore. It especially takes up more space on the smaller iPhone 15 Pro than it does on the Max model since it’s the same size regardless of the phone. If you are someone who regularly uses your phone for videos or games then this is another reason to go for the bigger model.
One thing we noted over our time using the phone was the oleophobic coating slowly eroding around the bottom left and bottom edge of the phone. These are usually the places you tend to swipe from to go back and to go home and there were permanent smudges there. For now, these are just tiny slivers around the edges of the glass and are barely visible but could grow over time.
Lastly, we had a few notes regarding the refresh rate behavior. While it’s cool that Apple got on the high refresh rate train a few years back with the iPhone, the way it’s enforced does leave something to be desired. It seems Apple does leave it up to the developer to implement high refresh rate the way they see fit. We have come across apps that either don’t support it at all or do so where some animations are clearly taking place at 60Hz even if the rest of the app is animating at 120Hz. These can be quite distracting and we have yet to come upon anything similar on Android, where an app either supports high refresh rates totally or not at all.
Having said that, Apple’s own apps and many of the well-made apps work just fine. Even the default Camera app refreshes at 120Hz, something you’ll never see on Android where the camera app is usually locked to 60Hz resulting in choppy UI. Also, a lot more games support high refresh rates on iOS than they do on Android. Games like Genshin Impact don’t even have high refresh rate support on Android but can go up to 120Hz on the iPhone. It’s just another reason why you would want to be on Apple’s platforms if you are into mobile gaming.
Software
The iPhone 15 Pro shipped with iOS 17 last year and is running 17.4.1 at the time of this writing.
iOS 17 has been less than ideal at times during our usage. We have seen iOS stability slip a few times in the past and there have been some legendary releases that are now known only for being buggy (we are looking at you, iOS 13). While iOS 17 has been nowhere near as bad, it has been far from reliable. While most of the issues can best be described as minor, the overall frequency of them has been notable and unbecoming of a phone at this price point.
Many of the other gripes are not necessarily with iOS 17 specifically but with iOS in general. It’s one thing that the launcher does not let you arrange icons with empty spaces (although we hear that may be changing soon) but it’s another how frustrating it is to move icons wherever you want. It often feels impossible to move an icon to where another icon already is and have that icon move to make space. Instead, the OS keeps assuming you want to make a new folder. And if you want to move an icon inside the folder, the folder just refuses to open and instead moves around to make space. It’s as if no actual human has ever used this basic feature before shipping it as there is no other explanation why it is so incredibly frustrating and hard to use.
The OS is also filled with animations that take far too long to end. Swiped to a picture in the Photos app and quickly want to double tap to zoom? Too bad, it won’t work because the photo is still slowly sliding into place even though it looked like it stopped moving. Only when the animation completely stops will it accept the double tap gesture to zoom and it’s hard to tell when exactly it stops.
Then there is the lockscreen. Never mind the fact that the flashlight and camera icons can neither be removed nor replaced, but why does the camera icon exist at all? You can swipe left on the lockscreen to launch the camera, a gesture all iPhone users are familiar with because of how often you accidentally trigger it by simply holding the phone in your hand while walking (it happens less often if you use a case). So why is there a button that needs to be pressed and held to do the exact same thing but slower?
Maybe this is also a good time to mention how a down swipe on the homescreen brings up Spotlight, a gesture that has existed on the iPhone forever but has rarely ever made sense as most people would rather access the Notification Center or the Control Center instead. To this day there is no way to change this gesture so instead we had to resort to using the double and triple-tap accessibility gestures on the back of the phone to access notifications and settings. The only problem is that these gestures trigger far too easily when you don’t want to and not easily enough when you want to.
We also had issues with many of the third-party apps for the platform. Just to preface this, Apple has several clearly laid out human interface guidelines for its developer community, and many developers out there are making exceptional apps for the platform that are some of the finest, period. However, a lot of the apps on the platform come from regions where Android is predominant, and the developers there seem to simply not understand that navigation on iOS works fundamentally differently.
iOS relies on the back swipe gesture by the app for navigation. It’s also not the same as the back swipe gesture on Android, which simply emulates a back button press and is handled by the OS. On Android, an app doesn’t have to have a back navigation gesture because the OS takes care of it. On iOS, the app needs to support the said gesture otherwise there is no easy way to navigate. Many developers just forget this part and think adding a back button at the top is how you implement the back navigation gesture in the app. This results in a poor experience for the user as the back swipe gesture they are used to does not work and they have to stretch their thumb every time to hit the back button on the top.
It’s not uncommon to come across comments from users complaining about how navigation on iOS is worse than on Android because the button is hard to reach. In reality, that button is merely a backup solution and any good app following Apple’s HIG should have a back swipe gesture built-in. But so many apps these days don’t because their developers are clueless or only used to building for Android and the end result is frustration for the user and animosity towards the platform as a whole. Apple needs to do better here by either educating developers used to building for Android or simply having the OS itself detect a back swipe and emulate a back gesture.
Another perplexing thing about iOS is just how many interactions and gestures are completely obscure. You could be using the phone a certain way for years only to find out through a TikTok video that there was an easier way to do it through a gesture that no one knows. Text editing alone has a dozen different gestures you could be using to make your life easier but for some reason, Apple rarely ever talks about them.
We could go on with the complaints and trust us, there is a lot to work with here. iOS has become a quagmire of poor design decisions that have piled on over the years and will likely stay that way as the company cannot afford to give a whiplash to its users with a completely revamped design; we all saw how that went down when iOS 7 was released.
The side effect of this is that anyone moving over from Android often has an immediately worse user experience because so many things just feel counterintuitive. The old adage of iOS being easier to use just doesn’t hold true anymore. If you are a long-time user then navigating these quirks and inconveniences may have become second nature but a user completely new to smartphones will likely find stock Android much easier to grasp than iOS with all its idiosyncrasies, not to mention a lot more customizable if something doesn’t sit right with them.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some things iOS does better than its competition and many of them are quite aspirational. The focus on security and privacy has been a rallying cry for the company for years and as far as we can tell Apple has always put its money where its mouth is. Never mind the bigger picture things, simply being able to hit ‘Ask App Not to Track’ every time the pop-up appears is incredibly gratifying knowing full well the app no longer has any idea what’s going on the rest of your device. You are unlikely to see that on Android any time soon as it would be pretty hypocritical of Google to stop other apps from tracking your usage when Google itself does it all the time.
Then there is the software update policy. Other companies have now started promising even longer software support but as of now they are simply castles in the air. Apple never put a figure on its support duration but the company’s track record speaks for itself and if there’s one thing you are guaranteed with an iPhone it’s long-term software support.
Then there’s the App Store. While it may not please Tim Sweeney and the EU very much, the App Store is home to some of the best apps you can find on any platform. But what truly sets it apart is the quality of games that you can get. While this has always been true, the recent release of top-shelf AAA titles such as Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding puts iOS in a completely different league compared to Android even though the latter has innumerable gaming-focused devices. And if you want more, Apple Arcade offers access to a wide range of excellent titles without any ads or in-app purchases, some of which are developed specifically for the platform.
So yes, there are still many valid reasons to move to or stick with iOS. Some may even say the presence of iMessage alone justifies that decision, although we aren’t American enough to agree. Also, with the EU breathing down Apple’s neck, the company may be forced into making several other changes that should bring iOS closer in line with Android. While the company does seem to be fighting this in the end we think it will be good for the consumers and the platform as a whole.