Weekly Poll: Which Apple iPhone 15 Are You Buying?

You’ve already heard our thoughts on the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 15 Pro Max, now we want to hear what you think of Apple’s latest (and arguably best) smartphones.

The big change this year is that Apple has adopted the industry standard USB-C for its iPhone 15 series (and the updated AirPods Pro 2). It did so under duress from the EU, but Tim Cook and the company put a positive spin on it. From a previous poll, we already know that the majority approves of this move. But is that enough to make you upgrade?

Hold your horses, there are so many upgrades we need to talk about. The iPhone 15 now has a 48MP main camera (finally!), which can take 2x “optical quality” telephoto shots – true telephoto lenses are still the exclusive domain of the pros. In addition, the chipset has been updated to that of the iPhone 14 Pros, the Apple A16 Bionic, so you get improved performance. And we can’t call the tectonic shift that is the Dynamic Island, not that it takes up less space than the notch it replaces. And, uhm, there’s UWB 2, but that’s about it.

The iPhone 15 Plus is in the same boat. If it wasn’t clear, it’s a $900/€1,100/£900/₹90,000 phone with a 60Hz display and a USB 2.0 port (now with a Type C connector, but still).

Now is a good time to talk about pricing – the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus cost the same as in the US and India but are a bit cheaper in Europe. Or rather would have been cheaper if Apple had not dropped the prices of the 14 and 14 Plus to $700/€850/£700/₹70,000 and $800/€950/£800/₹80,000 respectively.

Here are the global prices of the iPhone 15 models:

Moving on to the iPhone 15 Pro. Both pros feature the latest 3nm Apple A17 Pro chipset with a record-setting 3.77GHz maximum clock speed on the large CPU cores. There is also more RAM on board, 8 GB (up from 6 GB). The frame is now made of titanium rather than stainless steel, so it’s 19g lighter. And, unlike the vanilla models, the USB-C port is capable of 10 Gbps data transfer speeds (versus 480 Mbps). But even the USB 2.0 ports on the vanilla phone support DisplayPort (i.e., video out).

While the Pro cameras are essentially the same as last year, the iPhone 15 Pro Max has a tangible upgrade – Apple’s first periscope camera comes with a 120mm lens and a 12MP sensor with 1.12µm pixels. With 5x zoom, the Apple camera can finally take the fight to Androids, although it also leaves a big gap between the main camera (which supports native 2x zoom) and the tele – that’s a long way for digital zoom to cover, but Apple didn’t want to add a fourth camera.