Review: Apple iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus

If you’ve found your way to this review, you’ve probably already decided you don’t want to spend more than $1,000 on an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max. You don’t find metallurgical advances alluring, you don’t care about an extra Action Button, and you don’t fancy yourself a budding filmmaker—pardon me, content creator—who at any moment might go viral. You’re a normie, and you own it.

You don’t want to fall in love with your phone. You just want an iPhone, preferably one with a battery that raves late into the night and a camera that snaps better photos in that dying light.

So, sure, the iPhone 15: Why not?

Photograph: Apple

The iPhone 15 ($799) is a very good phone. Apple always does a fine job differentiating just enough between old phones and new phones to make you want to upgrade. Is the iPhone 15 more advanced than last year’s iPhone 14 ($699)? Yes. Are the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, which start at $999 and feature Apple’s newest chip system, more advanced than the iPhone 15? Yes. But the gap between last year’s iPhone 14 Pro ($899) and the new iPhone 15 is a slim one. In some aspects the iPhone 14 Pro is even a better phone, so if you’re long overdue for an upgrade and don’t care about the addition of USB-C in the new phone, you might want to seek out the 14 Pro.

There are some Apple-y things that make the iPhone 15 stand out from the iPhone 14 not-Pro: The 15 has a “color-infused glass back” and an improved “Photonic Engine.” It has a “Dynamic Island,” an animated widget bar at the top of the display. If you were to ask Apple, “Who is the iPhone 15 for, exactly?” the folks in the marketing department there might respond with something like, “We think people are going to love this phone!” It’s my job to tell you, though, you don’t need to love your phone. You just need it to do a good job.

Photograph: Apple

Let’s first address the Serial Bus in the room: The new iPhone 15 (and 15 Plus and 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max) support USB-C instead of Lightning. This is mostly great. A round of applause for the European Union for forcing Apple’s hand on this.

USB-C is great when you’re charging lots of other USB-C gadgets as part of your daily routine, like if you work on a newer MacBook laptop or iPad. Over the past five days, whenever the iPhone 15 loaner I’ve been testing hit its low battery mark, I was able to unplug the USB-C charger from my MacBook Pro and just pop it into the phone. Brilliant! Except when I was using navigation on the iPhone 15 during a long car ride, and with just 4 percent battery left, realized that the USB-A to Lightning cable I keep in my car was absolutely useless. (I found my way home, and made a note to order yet another cable.)

You should also know that not all USB-C cables and adapters are the same. The iPhone 15 ships with a short USB-C to USB-C cable, but no charging block. The iPhone 15 also supports USB-2, which means transfer speeds are limited to 480 megabits per second, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max support USB-3, and therefore data transfer speeds up to 10 gigabits per second.

There's a new ultra-wideband chip in the phone that improves its location-sensing abilities.

Photograph: Apple

So, for fast charging and the best possible data transfer speeds on an iPhone 15, you’ll want at least a 20-watt USB charging adapter, which Apple sells for $19. Using a 20-W adapter, your phone’s battery will charge up to 50 percent in around 30 minutes. But again, I found it much more convenient to plug my phone into the same cable and 67-W power adapter I use to charge my MacBook, which took my iPhone 15 from 10 percent to 50 percent in just under 20 minutes.

Speaking of battery: The iPhone 15 gave less “range anxiety” than what I normally experience using the iPhone 13 Pro, and it just about matches the iPhone 14 in terms of its battery life claim. During at least one charge cycle, the iPhone 15 lasted from my 10 am meeting until around 8 am the following day, and that was with a heavy dose of Spotify, maps, phone calls, texting, and some social media browsing. The larger model, the iPhone 15 Plus, will get about 30 percent more battery than the base model, though that's just what Apple claims and I wasn't able to test that model. Apple also claims the iPhone 14 Pro has a longer battery life than the iPhone 15, but again, Apple would rather you forget that phone exists.

There are also new SOS calling features for emergencies, including roadside assistance for US iPhone owners. I didn't review these because my Jeep miraculously did not break down while I was testing the phone.

Photograph: Apple

Just as a note, I’m testing the pink iPhone 15. This was not my choice. The color-infused camera module on the back looks nice, but if I owned this thing I’d soon be slapping a case on it anyway. This phone is also not titanium; you’ll have to splurge for a Pro model to get that upgrade.

That camera module on the back of the iPhone 15 includes just two lenses; the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max have Apple’s triple-lens Pro camera system. Even more crucial to the camera’s performance than the outward-facing lenses is the phone’s chipset: The iPhone 15 is powered by Apple’s A16 Bionic chip (same as the iPhone 14 Pro, again!), while the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max phones have the most up-to-date chipset, the A17 Bionic.

There is no doubt that the Pro models of the iPhone 15 capture better photos and videos. The chip is that much more powerful, the image sensor that much larger, and you can read Julian Chokkattu’s review for a sense of how much nicer your photos will be if you buy the iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max. Also, how much more storage space your photos and videos will take up.

My photo comparisons were primarily between the iPhone 13 Pro, the iPhone 14, the iPhone 14 Pro, the iPhone 15, and an occasional Google Pixel 6 Pro photo for good measure. The pics I took on the iPhone 15 looked dramatically better than the ones captured on the iPhone 13 Pro — the 15 captured more detail and truer colors, had better exposure control, and didn’t lag at all when shooting in lower-light settings.

Depending on the scene, it was difficult to tell the difference between images captured on the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro models (especially the iPhone 14 Pro) and the iPhone 15 camera. An iPhone 15 photo of a plate of wagyu beef at a dimly lit hot pot restaurant showed greater dynamic range and more detail than the same pic taken on the iPhone 14. During a sunset photo shoot at my go-to beach, which featured a scarf of fog—San Francisco’s favorite accessory—I noticed that the iPhone 14 image looked slightly more blown out than the sunset captured on the iPhone 15. But my friend’s iPhone 14 Pro photos? Looked the same, if not better, than my iPhone 15 #sunset pics.

The entire camera system on the iPhone 15 does offer more granular control over your photos than the iPhone 14 does, even if some of the resulting images aren’t stunningly better than the prior generation’s. The biggest update is that the iPhone 15 has the ability to capture both 24-megapixel and 48-megapixel images, which can be preset under “Resolution Control” in your phone’s camera settings. But this feature is optimized for shooting at 1X in decent light, whereas if you shoot at .5X or ultrawide, the camera will default back to 12-megapixel captures.

The iPhone 15 now has an additional 2X optical zoom option; the iPhone 14 only offered .5 and 1X zooms. Portrait mode on the iPhone 15 can be activated automatically when the camera detects a portrait-worthy image, though in my experience, the iPhone 15 has yet to deem any of my subjects worthy of portraiture. Also, in Portrait mode, you can now control the depth of the image and zoom out to capture even more data from the scene. This is admittedly a nice feature add.

Still, real photography nerds are going to want to go bigger.

All new iPhones are going to ship running iOS 17, and—good news—your old iPhone can now run it too. We’ve assembled a round-up of our top features, including my new favorite, transcribed voice notes in messages, and improved autocorrect, which allowed me to write “f*cking A!” to my editor in Slack and did not change it to “ducking.”

StandBy mode also turns your iPhone into a smart tablet of sorts when you turn it on its side, lock it, and prop it up on a compatible charging dock.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Dynamic Island, which is as much of a hardware feature as it is a software feature, because of the way Apple reengineers the front-facing camera module to make Dynamic Island work. This was previously available on iPhone 14 Pro phones, and now it’s on the 15. It is basically a widget. But a live, clickable one. It uses that real estate at the top of the phone to show you what song is playing on Spotify, your timer countdowns, the status of your Uber ride. My experience with Dynamic Island was limited before using the iPhone 15, and I’m surprised to say I sort of love it.

OK, love is a strong word. No one should really love a phone. I like the iPhone 15. Let’s leave it at that.

Update, September 19 at noon EDT: The story was updated to correct some price and model number information for older iPhones that was incorrect.