Apple puts USB-C on the iPhone 15 Pro, the 15 Pro Max adds a periscope zoom

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags The iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max are the biggest upgrades to the lineup since arguably the first Pro Max in 2019. The rebranding has been years in the making — but the iPhone finally has USB-C. Goodbye, Lightning, and hello to universal cables across platforms! The pros have USB 3.0 with speeds of up to 10 Gbps. You will be able to use the charger and cable from your iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, or Galaxy to charge the new iPhones. However, Apple hasn’t mentioned anything about faster charging. Apple has brought several upgrades to the design of the iPhone 15 Pro series. The new pros have contoured edges and the thinnest bezels ever seen on an iPhone. Apple managed to shrink the overall dimensions of the phones while keeping the same screen sizes as last year. Stainless steel has been replaced by titanium for the frames, resulting in what Apple claims to be the lightest Pro models they have ever released. The difference with the 11 Pro duo is only 1g, but compared to last year’s 14 Pros, the new ones are 19g lighter. The specific alloy used is grade 5 titanium, which the company says is also used on the Mars rover. Apple encased aluminum in the titanium substructure using a new thermomechanical process. The sheathed aluminum helps with thermal dissipation. The frames of the phone have a brushed texture, which went through a 14-hour process that includes machining, sanding, brushing, and finally applying the phone’s titanium exterior. The iPhone 15 Pro comes in four finishes – black and white, blue, and natural titanium. The mute switch is now an action button. By pressing and holding, the phone will go back into silent mode by default. However, you can assign one of a set of actions to a press or double-tap – this means you can finally open the camera quickly with a button on an iPhone. The front of the new iPhone 15 Pros features Ceramic Shield glass, just like the 14 Pro models. The screen size has not changed – the iPhone 15 Pro has a 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR OLED with an adjustable 120Hz (ProMotion) refresh rate, HDR10, Dolby Vision, and a peak brightness of 2,000 nits. The iPhone 15 Pro Max has a size of 6.7 inches. The always-on display now includes Standby, a landscape always-on mode for when you’re charging. The camera system on the new iPhone 15 Pro is completely revamped. It all starts with the 48MP main camera, which has a larger sensor with 1.22µm pixels and second-generation sensor-shift stabilization. The lens is a 24mm f/1.78. The main camera opens up new imaging possibilities for the iPhone 15 Pros. You can now record 48MP HEIF images along with 48MP ProRAW. The new larger sensor also allows for 28mm, 35mm, and 48mm digital zoom modes, and the iPhone will let you choose one of these focal lengths as your default setting. The iPhone 15 Pro Max introduces the first periscope camera on an iPhone. Thanks to the folded optical design, the Pro Max finally zooms past 3x and up to 5x, or 120mm in 35mm equivalent terms. The optical design is unique. Apple calls it a tetraprism and it reflects light four times from the pupil opening of the lens to the folded sensor. The lens itself is nf/2.8, the brightest on a 120mm camera on a phone, which is a pretty specific feature. There’s also optical stabilization, which Apple says makes 10,000 micro-adjustments per second to neutralize blur. The iPhone 15 Pro comes with a pedestrian 77mm 3x zoom camera with 1µm pixels and an f/2.8 lens, similar to last year’s phone. Both models feature a new 13mm f/2.2 1.4µm ultrawide with 100% focus pixels and macro focus capability. The A17 Pro chip powers the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. It is the first industry chip built on a 3nm process. Inside is a 6-core processor with 2 performance cores, which according to Apple, is 10% faster than in the A16 Bionic, and 4 efficiency cores. The GPU is a 6-core unit, which Apple says is 20% faster than its predecessor during peak performance. The GPU enables hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing, which is believed to be 4 times faster than the software-based Ray Tracing on last year’s chip. Apple has shown console games like Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage running on the new iPhone 15 Pros. The neural engine is a 16-core unit that Apple says is twice as fast as last year’s chip for machine learning models. The A17 Pro SoC features a Display Engine with a dedicated AV1 codec and a ProRes codec. The chip allows the new iPhone 15 Pro models to capture 4k 60fps in ProRes RAW, along with support for the industry-standard ACES color profile. The iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max can be pre-ordered this Friday. The 15 Pro starts at $999 for a 128GB base model, while the 15 Pro Max starts at $1,199. However, the base model now has 256GB of onboard storage. Prices in Europe are €1,199 for the Pro and €1,449 for the Pro Max – these are the same prices as last year. Both models will begin shipping next Friday, September 22nd.