99 Days With The iPhone 15 Pro: A Longer Term Review

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Since launch I’ve used an iPhone 15 Pro, everyday, one in my personal life, and one for work. And after 90 days I have mixed feelings about them. Let’s get started.
The iPhone 15 Pro now has a titanium frame, but still has a textured glass back. The frame is super easy to get fingerprints on, and make it look dirty, but that’s not a big deal because you can quickly wipe it away with a cloth. It has the A17 Pro chip, and you know how that goes every year. It's a faster, more better-er chip. You get the idea,This is the first year Apple introduced USB-C on the iphone, and despite being a charging port change, it lets the iphone do a lot more things that Android users have been enjoying for a long time now, like being able to use a usb-c dongle to plug into monitors, usb drives, and external SSDs.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
1:05 Personal Experience
4:30 Camera Features
5:40 USB-C Makes a HUGE Difference
6:46 Should You Upgrade?
8:10 Conclusion
The phone UI feels smooth in everyday usage, I haven’t experienced a ton of glitching or a ton of apps closing randomly. Images taken from the camera look great but let’s face it, most high-end smartphone cameras out today look good too. But the thing that stood out to me was the performance on the phone, not necessarily in a good or bad way. I primarily play Genshin Impact on my phone, you know, gotta grind those daily commissions for primogems. But the phone gets hot when you’re running intense games like this. The 15 pro runs hotter than my 14 pro did when running this game and when recording videos. It’s not burn your hand hot, but it is noticeably hotter, and uncomfortable to hold for long periods of time. This leads me to lowering the graphics settings in the game menus even when I know the phone can handle it, or utilizing a gamepad so I don’t have to touch the body of the phone.
The action button that replaced the mute switch is nice. You can change it, start a voice memo, switch focus modes, and use it as a mute button. To activate the action button you don’t press it like a normal button on your phone, you have to press and hold to activate actions so you don’t have accidental presses. But if you’re the type to take your phone out of your case often, you might find that you accidentally trigger the action button, just like how easy it was to trigger the mute switch on older iPhone models.
The iPhone 15 pro takes good photos, but video is the standout feature. If you’re a typical user, you most likely won’t use Pro-res for videos of your family’s birthday, or your dog running around, or really ever have it on. It’s for people who like to play with their video footage in color grading or video editing programs.This iphone is such a great video taking phone. Because with any kind of usb-c storage plugged in, from SD cards, flash drives, and external SSDs. The iPhone 15 Pro can record pro-res footage directly to external storage. But saving directly to the external storage only applies to Pro-Res video, so if you’re taking pictures, or regular non-pro-res footage. It saves it to the phone with no direct saves to the drive.
Okay, USB-C. It opens the door for new accessories to be used with the iphone, and makes it a lot easier to switch between an iphone and an android device, cause most of your cables will work. But it also allows everyone to finally use one cable to charge all of your different devices. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but it’s a lot nicer than buying accessories that only work for my iphone and nothing else.
Okay, so I guess at this point, it’s conclusion time. The iPhone 15 Pro does its job as a minor yearly update. Everything is a little better. But the inclusion of USB-C makes this phone much more versatile than last year’s iphone 14 Pro even if that means apple users will have to update some of their old lightning cables and accessories. There are some nice new Pro video features. But most people aren’t “pro” videographers or care about those features. But besides that? The photos are a little nicer. Should you upgrade to the iPhone 15 pro or any phone in the iphone 15 lineup? Well, honestly, phones as a whole are a mature product category now. I don’t think we should be thinking of “Is this the one to upgrade to” anymore. We should just upgrade when we think our devices don’t fit our needs anymore. Regardless of how old your phone is, I'd say to just keep your old phone until it is too slow, doesn’t fit your needs, or dies. Then upgrade. Your wallet will thank you.