iPhone 15 Pro Max

iPhone 15 Pro Max Tutorial & User's Guide


iPhone 15 Pro Max in Taupe FineWoven case. bigger.	iPhone 15 Pro Max in Taupe FineWoven case. bigger.

iPhone 15 Pro Max (sapphire protective lens covers and integral Ceramic Shield screen protection standard, 7.8 oz./221g) in Apple FineWoven case (1.0 oz./39g; 8.8 oz./250g total).

You can get iPhone 15 Pro Max at eBay (How to Win at eBay).

This all-content, junk-free website's biggest source of support is when you use those or any of these links to approved sources when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. Thanks for helping me help you! Ken.

March 2024 Better Pictures Apple Canon Sony Nikon Fuji LEICA Zeiss HASSELBLAD All Reviews

iPhone 15 Pro Max in natural titanium. bigger.

Sample Images top

I'm an artist. Most of these received significant creative input after I shot them, often editing them in my iPhone itself with the free Snapseed app.

You can see more of my work at my Gallery, and more iPhone 15 Pro Max samples at California's Easter Sierra, October 2023 and Route 66, February 2024.

Starlight

The Milky Way, Bridgeport, California, 8:30 P.M., Saturday, 14 October 2023. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 1× (6.89mm actual or 24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 for 10 seconds at Auto ISO 3,200 (LV -6⅔ — that's minus 6⅔!!!), Skylum Luminar Neo. More tech details. bigger or fit-to-screen.

I put my iPhone on a tripod and invoked the Night (time exposure) mode by making sure the flash was off (tap the flash button on the top left until it shows off). With the flash off you can simply point-and-shoot the Milky Way, but by using a tripod it will let me expose for 30 seconds rather than the default 3 seconds hand-held. Time exposures are shown with a yellow icon at the top left, if it's not yellow and showing something like "3s" then tap it to turn it on. Once it's on, tap the triangle in the top center to get to more settings (shown at the bottom). Tap the yellow moon (night mode) icon to see the exposure time slider, and slide it to its maximum.

The iPhone is super-smart and its accelerometers let it know if you're on a tripod or not, and offers different exposure time options: up to 10s handheld or 30s on a tripod, if it's dark enough.

For this shot I had it set to 30s, and that's how long it took to expose. The EXIF reports 10s, which I'll assume is how much actual exposure happened (night mode is numerous shorter exposures which are aligned and then added together).

As-shot it's a very dark image, which is how the Milky Way appears to our eyes. It's pitch black out there. iPhone does a fantastic job of making things look natural in any light, however I want this image to look bright as it does above, so again Skylum Luminar Neo made it easy to erase airplane tracks and embolden the image. I used both the Enhance slider as well as Curves inside Neo.

More at How to Photograph the Milky Way.

Harsh Light

I've always loved how iPhone magically captures light and life as it happens, intuitively dealing with insane dynamic range and difficult white balances and just gets the shot we want on the first try. This was an unusually glorious sunrise:

Our Group at Conway Summit, California, 7:07 A.M., Friday, 13 October 2023. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 1.5× (6.89mm actual, cropped to 35mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 at 1/562 at Auto ISO 50 (LV 11.1), Perfectly Clear (now sold as Radiant Photo). More tech details. bigger or fit-to-screen.

Moonlight

Moonrise, California, 6:10 PM, Tuesday, 23 January 2024. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, 1× 6.9mm (24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 hand held at 1/5 second (automatic Night Mode) at Auto ISO 1,600 (LV -0.1), free Snapseed app in-phone. bigger.

Moonrise over Barstow, Route 247, Barstow, California, 6:34 PM, Friday, 26 January 2024. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, 1× 6.9mm (24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 hand held at 1/2 second in Night Mode at Auto ISO 6,400 (LV -3.1, that's minus 3.1!), Skylum Luminar Neo software. bigger.

This is the first time in my life that I've seen a moonrise in color. Unlike the sunrise, the moon usually isn't full so it's darker, and even when full, its still usually so dark that our eyes don't see color. This was unusual!

Expansive Ultra-Ultrawide Landscapes

Huge Clouds in the Sky, Bridgeport, California, 5:30 P.M., Friday, 13 October 2023. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 0.5× (2.2mm actual or 13mm eq.) camera at f/2.2 at 1/414 at Auto ISO 40 (LV 12.3), Skylum Luminar Neo. More tech details. bigger or fit-to-screen.

Who says you can't shoot portraits with the 0.5× ultra-ultrawide camera? I love that I can shoot iPhone from any crazy position. Its big, brilliant screen making it easy to shoot held down at my waist:

Andrea and Traveling Minstrels, Bagdad Cafe, Route 66, Newberry Springs, California, 12:46 PM, Saturday, 10 February 2024. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, 0.5× 2.2mm (13mm eq.) camera at f/2.2 at 1/1,395 at Auto ISO 50 (LV 13.7), Snapseed app in phone to lighten faces and the Bagdad Cafe sign and rotate it so the sign was level. bigger.

Long Lenses in Your Pocket

The Newly Repainted Roy's Sign, Route 66, Amboy, California, 2:37 PM, Saturday, 27 January 2024. 55mm B+W Polarizing filter held over the lens of my Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, 5 × 15.7mm (120mm eq.) camera at f/2.8 at 1/736 at Auto ISO 50 (LV 13.5, ignoring filter factor), free Snapseed app in-phone and Skylum Luminar Neo software in my Mac. bigger.

Ryan's second taking the car for a ride with dad on his learners' permit, Ramona Airport, 6:55 PM, 22 March 2024. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 5× (15.7mm actual, 120mm equivalent) camera at f/2.8 at 1/122 at Auto ISO 80 (LV 10.2), Photoshop CC 2021, Skylum Luminar Neo and Radiant Photo plugins. bigger.

As shown below in the introduction, the 120mm equivalent camera gives a much better perspective rendition of this car.

Close Focussing, no accessories required!

Western Spotted Orbweaver (Neoscona oaxacensis), California, 10:01 AM, Friday, 20 October, 2023. iPhone 15 Pro Max, 0.5× 2.2mm (cropped to 1×/24mm eq. and then cropped vertically from a horizontal shot) camera at f/2.2 at 1/541 at Auto ISO 40 (LV 12.7), Radiant Photo software on Mac. bigger.

Of course I had no idea this was a Western Spotted Orbweaver; my iPhone told me when I hit the "ⓘ " icon in the photo playback mode and got to this screen:

ⓘ Photo information screen.

I had no idea the Latin name is Neoscona oaxacensis until I hit "Look up" and the next screen gave me all sorts of data on it.

Low Shot along Route 120, Lee Vining, California, 9:16 A.M., Friday, 13 October 2023. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 0.5× (2.2mm actual or 13mm eq.) camera at f/2.2 at 1/1,927 at Auto ISO 50 (LV 14.2), free Snapseed app in-phone and Skylum Luminar Neo. More tech details. bigger or fit-to-screen.

This was shot with my iPhone upside-down to stick its tiny lenses just about in the tarmac. I can't do this with a camera with big lenses, and likewise only the iPhone has enough depth of field to get this all reasonably in focus from a half inch (1 cm) to infinity.

I cropped this to a square, roughly equivalent to a ZEISS BIOGON 38mm f/4.5 T✻ on the HASSELBLAD 903 SWC in 6×6 format.

COLOR!

Sunset, Fletcher Cove, California, 4:37 PM, Monday, 18 December 2023. iPhone 15 Pro Max, 1× 6.9mm (24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 at 1/1,767 at Auto ISO 80 (LV 12.8), free Snapseed app in-phone and Radiant Photo software on Mac. bigger.

California Dawn, 7:06 AM, Friday, 05 January 2024. iPhone 15 Pro Max, 1× 6.9mm (24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 at 1/419 at Auto ISO 80 (LV 10.7), free Snapseed app in-phone. bigger.

Unique to iPhone is how its automatic HDR magically ensures that neon tubes retain their colors, as they do in real life, and don't simply wash-out to white as they do with regular cameras. These shots are just grab shots like everything else I shoot on iPhone:

Night Window at the Route 66 Motel, Route 66, Barstow, California, 8:30 PM, Friday, 26 January 2024. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, 1.5× 6.9mm (35mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 hand held at 1/60 at Auto ISO 640 (LV 4.9), Skylum Luminar Neo software. bigger.

Route 66 Motel Sign, Route 66, Barstow, California, 8:34 PM, Friday, 26 January 2024. Square crop from Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, 1× 6.9mm (24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 hand held at 1/40 at Auto ISO 640 (LV 4.3), levels adjustment layer in Photoshop CC 2021. bigger.

Introduction top

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com The front "selfie" and 5× cameras have much less distortion than the selfie and 3× cameras had in the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

B&H Photo - Video - Pro Audio

The two biggest reasons to get the newest iPhone 15 Pro Max are that its screen is brilliantly bright outdoors in sunlight for reasonably long periods of time (older phones were bright for a short time, but quickly dimmed so they wouldn't overheat), and the 15 Pro Max has a new 5× (15.7mm actual or 120mm equivalent) camera that's unique to the 15 Pro Max. I've been asking for longer lenses for years; longer lenses are critical for many kinds of photography.

Also significant is that for regular JPG shooting (the only kind I ever do), the images at any setting from 1× to 1.5× are saved at a real 24 MP, up from 12 MP in earlier cameras.

The brighter screen is a huge help not just for everything, but especially for composing and shooting in daylight. It's always bright and visible, far better than older iPhones that became dim pretty fast after shooting a while.

If you're an avid photographer (and who isn't), of course the iPhone 15 Pro Max is worth it not just for its improved cameras over the old iPhone 14 Pro Max, but also because it's something we use all day long, every day. See also Is It Worth It.

The new 5× camera is important not just for trying to catch things far away, it's crucial because longer lenses let us stand farther away to get much more natural perspective rendering for everything three dimensional from people to cars to pets and portraits.

Here's a series of shots from different distances (but at the same height), keeping the car about the same size. While of course the 0.5× and 1× cameras give comical results, most importantly, look at how much more long and natural the car looks at 5× from father away compared to the shot with the common 2× camera (click any to enlarge):

BMW 850i Convertible. Click any to enlarge.

Unless you're at least about 15 feet (4.5 meters) away or more, people's and car's noses get too big. Standing further away with the 5× (120mm eq.) camera lets us show things in much better perspective without the unnaturally large noses.

The 15 and 15 Plus have only two lenses on the back, the 0.5× (13mm) and 1×/2× (24/48mm) cameras. Neither has the third telephoto camera, which everyone here needs.

The 15 Pro (not Max) has a third 3× (77mm) telephoto camera, while only the 15 Pro Max has a third 5× (120mm) telephoto camera. This is a big deal; the 120mm camera is 57% longer than 77mm, the same difference between a 50mm and 80mm lens.

As my article Is It Worth It says, it comes down to how much money you have, how much you'll use the new features, and how much will you use them. In the case of our phones, we all use them all day long; so even minor improvements are important since we all shoot and use our iPhones all day, every day.

Better than any other camera, every photo is sharp, in focus, well exposed and has great color. You have to work really hard to take a bad picture with an iPhone. It's astonishing how it just gets sharp pictures regardless of the difficulty of the situation, and is remarkable in how naturally it renders all light and shadow, regardless of how difficult or harsh is the lighting. No other camera makes this so simple. What more could you need to know?

Better than any of my exotic Nikons, Canons, Sonys, Fujis or even any of my immortal LEICAs is that my iPhone is always in my pocket 24/7/365 and can be drawn and fired faster than any other camera, so I never miss a shot. My iPhone camera has much better color rendition than any of my Sonys, Fujis or LEICAs and I much prefer its photos.

Honestly, if you look at my recent galleries, probably half or more of my favorite photos come from my iPhone rather than my fancy cameras.

Think about it, and it becomes obvious that the iPhone 15 Pro Max is the most advanced consumer product ever created. I'm serious, think of anything technical ever created, be it a consumer, commercial or military product or home-built contraption. Nothing has more kinds of advanced technology and replaces more other products in a smaller package that works so well, is so beautiful that it looks as if it was stolen from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and is affordable by such a large portion of the world's population.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max has four visible light cameras. All use 12 MP sensors, except the 1× ~ 2× cameras which use the same lens and 48 MP sensor, cropping it as needed to and saved at 24 MP.

The 15 Pro Max camera is significantly improved over my old 14 Pro Max as it has higher resolution when shot at zoom settings between 1× and 1.5× where the 15 Pro Max stores JPG and HEIC (HEIF) images at 24 MP rather than 12 MP, and at zoom settings at or longer than 5× where the 15 Pro Max' native 5× camera beats the mere 3× tele camera of the old 14 Pro Max. While the raw files from the 1× camera have 48 MP from either camera, only the newer 15 Pro Max by default saves normal HEIC or JPG images at 24 MP rather than just 12 MP as in the 14 Pro Max.

The 48 MP sensor uses a modified Bayer array where each group of four detectors senses the same color. This reduces the chroma resolution compared to most other 48 MP Bayer sensors, and helps low-light and overall performance. Apple knows what they're doing better than anyone, so don't read too much into this. The system works great in every light and gives a lot more sharpness from 1× to wherever the tele camera kicks in compared to the iPhone 13 Pro Max and iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Most people in the developed world seem to own an iPhone. iPhones take more pictures every day than any other kind of camera and we all know how well everything from Apple works, and just as important is how great is the support from Apple Care ((800) APL-CARE in the USA) if we get stuck.

Especially when I'm shooting any assignment with my big camera, I almost always instinctively draw my iPhone instead for any shot which requires an unusual or difficult point of view, casual macro, any kind of video, or if I need to grab something happening and unfolding fast right in front of me. My iPhone is always ready for anything and its huge screen, bigger, brighter and more accurate than any other camera, makes it trivially easy to see what I'm shooting from any position or any angle, forwards or backwards.

There are many things for which a big camera is better, like telephoto shots longer than 120mm without digital zoom, field sports, birds and aircraft in flight, wildlife, anything I'd do on a tripod, studio portraits and product photos, formal interiors, anything I'm going to exhibit at extreme magnifications, anything that needs daytime fill-flash or studio strobes (which means all my studio work and and serious macro shots), anything in dimmer light where I want to shoot at the lowest possible ISO, anything that needs exposures longer than 30 seconds and anything about which I'm investing a lot of planning and attention. iPhone excels at grab shots, capturing life as it's lit, video and seeing things from different points of view, which is most things.

While the 15 Pro Max really does have 48 MP for its 1× camera (more than anything from Canon or Nikon mirrorless), it still only has 12 MP at its 0.5×, 2× and 5× settings.

Large cameras have technical advantages when looking at their images at extreme magnifications, like on my desktop 4K 55" monitor two feet (80 cm) away or printed 8 feet tall. iPhone images may not look as great as images from larger cameras at very large magnifications, but at the normal sizes almost everyone uses for most pictures, this doesn't matter.

The iPhone has much cleaner images than you'd expect for having a smaller sensor than full-frame cameras. It does this by using very low optimum ISOs in good light, ranging from ISO 20 to ISO 50 depending on which camera is in use. Sadly most big cameras never go below ISO 100 by default in good light, while by starting at ISO 25 to ISO 50 with its fast lenses iPhone gives wonderfully clean and detailed images in good light AND shoots at high shutter speeds to banish motion blur. Also amazing is how great iPhone looks at higher ISOs as you saw in my Sample Images. Apple works a lot of magic.

While I love my Canons, Nikons, LEICAs and HASSELBLADs, I always carry my iPhone because it does some things better than any of them. An iPhone should be in every photographer's pocket. iPhone doesn't replace a big camera for serious shooters, but it certainly adds a lot to any assignment, especially for candid, casual and record shots of just about anything, and all my iPhone shots are always flawlessly flagged for time and location, no fiddling needed. Even if I didn't love my iPhone shots on their own, nothing else works as well for documenting a shoot with time, location and what's going on, or what was my setup and lighting.

You can get iPhone 15 Pro Max at eBay (How to Win at eBay).

New since iPhone 14 Pro Max intro top

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com 5× telephoto camera is now a 120mm equivalent, up from a 3× 77mm equivalent.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com 5× telephoto lens now uses an optical path folded by a prism, a first for any iPhone.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com 5× makes a huge difference not just for distant shots, but makes a huge difference for much more natural perspective rendering compared to just the 2× or 3× cameras of other models.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com New artificial-horizon-style electronic level goes from white to yellow when you're level. It fades away after you're level for a moment, bravo!

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com 1× "24mm," 1.2× "28mm," and 1.5× "35mm" cameras now save 24 MP images by default, up from 12 MP images.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com Level display artificial horizon line turns yellow when you're level, and then disappears to get out of your way.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com We can select and adjust the Portrait Mode after we've shot an image.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com Apple claims new lens coatings, and while The Ghost is still in the 1× camera, even with its prisms the 5× camera is remarkable free from flare and ghosts.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com The live screen image while shooting video is much more stabilized than it was in the iPhone 14 Pro Max. iPhone's video stabilization has been so good since the iPhone 6 of 2014 that gimbals are completely unnecessary, but few people have realized this because the live screen image has always bounced around as you shoot — even though the played-back footage is rock-solid. As I said ten years ago about iPhone 6, "Video stabilization is so good you really can shoot while walking and have the video come out perfectly stable!" The live video screen in iPhone 15 Pro Max still bounces around a little, especially zoomed to the limit at 15× (360mm eq.), while the final video is completely smooth and solid.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com "Action Button" replaces the ringer switch. Hold it a moment to swap between silent and ring. There's an obvious tactile feedback so it's easy to know discreetly if you've turned the ringer on or off as you enter a meeting. Also you now can program this button to your choice of Focus, Camera, Flashlight, Voice Memo, Translate, Magnifier, Shortcut, or Accessibility; I leave it at Ringer.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com USB-C connector with USB-3 (10 gb/s) data rates, up from a lightning connector with USB-2 (480 mb/s) data rates. Importing video files into iMovie is much faster.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com Brightest screen ever in a phone or camera, and it looks fantastic.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com Not only is the screen specified as having higher peak brightnesses, in practical use I'm impressed that it can stay at these high brightnesses much longer before having to dim due to heat. The old 14 Pro Max would dim quickly due to heat at full brightness outdoors, while this new 15 Pro Max seems pretty happy cranked all the way up outdoors.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com Grade 5 Titanium frame elements lead to 21g (¾ oz.) less weight.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com "StandBy" screen displays when left charging horizontally works like bit like a desk or nightstand clock:

iPhone 15 Pro Max StandBy Display. bigger.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com No more leather cases from Apple; but there are plenty everywhere else.

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com 3 nm chip architecture leads to some parts of the circuitry being only twelve silicon atoms wide!

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com 19 billion transistors!

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com It supports most of the world's languages, and I'm impressed to see that its keyboard includes support for Apache, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Hawaiian, Maltese and Navajo as well as about a hundred others from outside the USA.(While the keyboard supports these for typing, the OS doesn't work in these languages.)

blue ball icon © KenRockwell.com No more 128 GB option.

Good intro top

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Great photos: always sharp, well-exposed, in-focus and with great color balance in any lighting condition. Bravo!

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Time exposures work miracles with motion. I can shoot out of a moving car at night and somehow it always pulls off sharp images!

Just for grins on the ride up to California's Conway Summit in the blackness before sunrise, I pointed my iPhone 15 Pro Max out the tinted window of our car at 65 MPH to see what would happen. It was so dark I couldn't see anything, but wanted to see what my iPhone saw:

Jupiter the Morning Star, Bridgeport, California, 6:29 A.M., Friday, 13 October 2023. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 1× (6.89mm actual or 24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 at 1/5 of a second (actually the time exposure Night mode) at Auto ISO 1,600 (LV -0.1), Skylum Luminar Neo. More tech details. bigger or fit-to-screen.

The iPhone image was amazing at the time, since it saw more details than my eyes, and this was shot out of a moving car!

The bottom of the image is soft because we were blasting along at 65 MPH and so of course it's motion blurred! We were bouncing around, and the iPhone is so smart it aligned all the frames it captured in Night Mode to keep Jupiter and distant hills sharp. Amazing!

I worked it in Neo to bring out all these colors. Remember it was totally dark at the time, yet the camera sees colors the eye can't regardless of light level. Here's how it looked as-shot, which was still much more vivid than the inky blackness I saw through the tinted window:

As shot. bigger.

Stars in the sky at night? No problem! The iPhone 15 Pro Max has no problem seeing all this dynamic range, and JPGs likewise easily capture it all in this grab shot coming back from dinner.

Starry Night, Bridgeport, California, 8:54 P.M., Thursday, 12 October 2023. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 1× (6.89mm actual or 24mm eq.) camera at f/1.8 handheld at 1/2 second at Auto ISO 4,000 (LV -2.4 — minus 2.4!), Perfectly Clear (now sold as Radiant Photo), and HDR Merge in Skylum Luminar Neo from one JPG image. More tech details. bigger or fit-to-screen.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com 4:3 "Ideal Format" aspect ratio.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Spectacular real-world video. While I have big cameras that can give better still pictures under some conditions, unless you're a Hollywood DP and spend a day lighting your set just right, the magic inside the iPhone tames real-world lighting for better video than I've ever seen from any other video camera. Pro, studio video and digital cinema cameras demand that you light your sets well, while iPhone magically applies HDR and lots of other magic to regular video to prevent blown-out foreheads and lost shadows. iPhone does the same for video as it does for stills: tames and makes real-world lighting look wonderful.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com No gimbals needed for video; the iPhone's incredible stabilization makes things shot while walking, running or riding look like they were shot on a dolly on rails. I'm serious: while your screen image while rolling will bounce all over, the video you save locks-down as if it was shot with a fluid head. Even zoomed in to 15× telephoto where my subject is a random distant aircraft for which I can't hold my phone steady or even keep it in the frame, it plays-back as if I was some sort of human fluid head. Try it; what it records is so much better than what you see on the screen live.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Super fast charging. Mine charges at a maximum measured rate of 27W, which charges at about 2% per minute and will mostly charge a mostly dead battery in half an hour.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Almost eternal battery life. We all use our phones differently, and I almost always have more than half my charge left at the end of each day. Of course this varies with how much you use it and how close you are to a cellular tower or Wi-Fi. Mine easily ran for over 7 real-world hours out in the booners using Google Maps driving to Yosemite with charge left when I arrived. Three hours of playing music into my low-impedance Audeze LCD-X headphones with my USB-C to 3.5mm Headphone Adapter drew only 7% of my charge, which calculates to 43 hours of real-world enjoyment.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com The ultra bright screen doesn't seem to harm the battery life outdoors, but if you're away from cell towers there will be a big drain with any phone. (Use the Low Power mode and no worries.)

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Precise construction quality better than a LEICA. Crafted of solid stainless steel and hardened glass — not plastic.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Easy to use in total darkness. Unlike big cameras, the four side buttons are easily found by feel and every other control is clearly illuminated on-screen — no more holding flashlights in our teeth to set our cameras in the dark!

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com Displays and playback rotate with the camera.

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com High-quality technical support at (800) APL-CARE.

Bad intro top

red ball icon © KenRockwell.com Icons for zooming (0.5×, 1×, 2× and 5×) cover the image, making it clumsy to compose out to the edge when we can't see what's going on behind these:

Camera Screenshot, iPhone 15 Pro Max. bigger or fit-to-screen.

red ball icon © KenRockwell.com Video can lose focus when zoomed all the way to 15× shooting birds, aircraft, astronomical objects or other small things against a blank sky. There's no problem when things fill much of the frame; the problem is that focus can wander in and out when most of the frame is blank trying to catch the moon, planes and helicopters for DTS. Weird.

red ball icon © KenRockwell.com It still takes too many swipes and taps to answer the phone and select the speaker. iPhone still refuses to use its proximity sensor (which shuts off the screen as we hold it to our heads) to select the speaker or not. Therefore I have to select "Speaker" manually if it's not held to my head, and if the Speaker is active and I hold it to my head during silence and then the other person starts talking, it blows my ear out with loud audio that should have reduced its level automatically.

Missing intro top

gray ball icon © KenRockwell.com No lenses longer than 120mm equivalent, although digital zoom takes us out to 686mm equivalent!

gray ball icon © KenRockwell.com Can't really shoot full-resolution macro with its longer settings. Instead, really close macro shots usually crop from the 0.5× or 1× camera. For serious macro I still need my big camera, while for casual shots iPhone is awesome.

gray ball icon © KenRockwell.com No built-in flash, just a bright continuous-light LED. It's not bright enough to use as fill flash outdoors — but Apple's magic in taming difficult light makes the iPhone camera work just about as well without fill flash.

gray ball icon © KenRockwell.com Can't readily be used with external flash or studio strobes - so? Doesn't work with wall-mounted rotary telephones, either.

gray ball icon © KenRockwell.com "Always On" display isn't. Mine turns off after a while on my wireless charger overnight, or if I walk away. It always wakes right up when I get close, but it still needs a clock app to work as a nightstand clock. More from Apple about the Always On screen.

gray ball icon © KenRockwell.com No exposures longer than 30 seconds.

gray ball icon © KenRockwell.com No Automatic Leveling mode.

Specifications top

Woven USB-C to USB-C cord.

You can get iPhone 15 Pro Max at eBay (How to Win at eBay).

Cameras, Lenses & Sensor Sizes specifications top

Every iPhone has about as many cameras as a spacecraft.

In addition to an infra-red LASER RADAR (LiDAR) 3D sensor array on the back and an infra-red emitter and camera system on the front for Face ID, the iPhone 15 Pro Max has four separate visible-light color cameras: one on the front for selfies, and three on the back:

iPhone 15 Pro Max Rear Camera Array (held vertically). bigger.

	Front Camera	0.5×	1×, 1.2×, 1.5× & 2×	5×
Also called	Selfie or Screen	Ultra-Wide	Main & Digital Zoom	Telephoto
Diagonal Angle of View	86º (or 71º crop)	120º	83º 75º 1.2× crop 63º 1.5× crop 48º 2× crop	31º
Full-Frame Equivalent	23mm (or 30mm crop)	13mm	24mm 28mm 1.2× crop 35mm 1.5× crop 48mm 2× crop	120mm
Actual Lens	2.69mm f/1.9 6 elements	2.22mm f/2.2 6 elements	6.86mm f/1.78 7 elements	15.7mm f/2.8 6 elements + tetraprism
Crop Factor	8.55× or 11.15×	5.856×	3.5406× 4.25× 1.2× crop 5.3× 1.5× crop 7.08× 2× crop	8.56×
Close Focus	about 2.2 inches (55mm) from the screen	about 0.5 inches (12mm) from the lens cover	6.5 inches (165 mm)¹	3⅓ feet (102 cm)¹
Lens Diaphragm	None, always shoots at f/1.9	None, always shoots at f/2.2	None, always shoots at f/1.8	None, always shoots at f/2.8
Still Image Stabilization	"Auto image stabilization"	none	"second generation sensor shift optical image stabilization"	"3D sensor shift optical image stabilization"
Video Stabilization	"Auto image stabilization"	electronic	sensor-shift & electronic	"3D sensor shift optical image stabilization"
Electronic Lens Distortion Correction Available?	No	Yes	No	No
Resolution	12 MP or 7 MP (crop)	12 MP	24 MP³ (JPG & HEIC) 48 MP³ (ProRAW) 35 MP³ (1.2× crop ProRAW) 24 MP³ (1.5× crop ProRAW) 12 MP 2× crop	12 MP
Image Size (pixels)	4,032 × 3,024 or 3,088 × 2,316 (crop)	4,032 × 3,024	5,712 × 4,284 (JPG & HEIC) 8,064 × 6,048 (ProRAW) 6,720 × 5,040 (1.2× crop ProRAW) 5,376 × 4,032 (1.5× crop ProRAW) 4,032 × 3,024 2× crop	4,032 × 3,024
Actual Sensor Size	4 × 3mm or 3.1 × 2.3mm (crop)	5.6 × 4.2mm	9.8 × 7.3mm 8.2 × 6.1mm 1.2× crop 6.5× 4.7mm 1.5× crop 4.9 × 3.65mm 2× crop	4.5 × 3.4 mm
Marketing Sensor Size	1/3.5" or 1/4.7"	1/2.55"	1/1.28" 1/1.54" 1.2× crop 1/1.92" 1.5× crop 1/2.56" 2× crop	1/3.5"
Sensor Diagonal	5mm or 3.83mm (crop)	7.00mm	12.22 mm 10.18 mm 1.2× crop 8.17 mm 1.5× crop 6.11 mm 2× crop	5.6 mm
Pixel Pitch	1.0 µm	1.4 µm	1.22 µm @ 48 MP (1×) 1.73 µm @ 24 MP (1×) 2.44 µm @ 12 MP (1×) 1.22 µm @ 12 MP (2×)	1.12 µm
ISO Range² (observed)	20-10,000	40-12,500	50-12,500 (on tripod²) 50-25,000 (hand-held with motion²)	50-3,200

1.) Macro mode magically digitally zooms-in from from the next shorter camera if you're too close at the selected zoom setting.

2.) It's super-smart, adapting its ISO and shutter speeds in low light based on how steadily you're holding the camera.

3.) Only 12 MP (4,032 × 3,024) in Night Mode.

Still Image Formats specifications top

HEIC, JPEG, and DNG (ProRAW).

Video specifications top

Frame Sizes and Rates

4K (3,840 × 2,160) at 24, 25, 30 or 60 FPS.

4K ProRes up to 4K at 60 FPS with external recording.

1,920 × 1,080 at 25, 30 or 60 FPS, also 120 or 240 FPS for slo-mo.

1,280 × 720 at 30 FPS.

"Cinematic" faux selective focus mode up to 4K HDR at 30 FPS.

"Action" mode up to 2.8K at 60 FPS.

Dolby Vision HDR up to 4K at 60 FPS.

File Formats

HEVC, H.264 and ProRes.

Features

HDR.

Dolby Vision.

Slo-Mo.

Time Lapse.

Night Mode Time Lapse.

Extreme stabilization makes gimbals obsolete.

Too many more to list.

Audio specifications top

S - t - e - r - e - O microphones built in.

"Flash" specifications top

"True-Tone" continuous-light LED which adapts its color to match the ambient light.

The OLED screen can light, and adapts its color, for use as a light source when the front camera is used.

Neither of these is really a flash; they work OK at close distances indoors, but lack the power for outdoor fill.

CPU specifications top

Hex-core A17 Pro.

3 nanometer geometry.

19 billion transistors.

OLED Monitor specifications top

"Super Retina HDR."

Rated 6.69" (170 mm) diagonal, if you measure out to where square corners would be if they weren't rounded.

I measure 6.48" (164.5mm) diagonal out to the rounded corners of the active image area.

2,796 × 1,290 pixels at 460 PPI, which calculates to 6.08 × 2.80 inches (154.4 × 71.2 mm).

39 : 18 aspect ratio.

About 10,000,000 dots.

HDR.

Updates at rates from 1 to 120 Hz.

P3 color gamut.

2,000,000 : 1 contrast ratio.

1,000 nits maximum brightness, typical.

1,600 nits peak HDR brightness.

2,000 nits peak brightness outdoors. It can stay this bright for long enough to accomplish quite a lot before it has to dim due to heat buildup, which is much better than was the iPhone 14 Pro Max. This is one of the main reasons to get this new 15 Pro Max rather than the old 14 Pro Max; the ability to use it in daylight without the screen dimming.

Connector specifications top

USB-C, new from the Lightning connector of the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Storage specifications top

256 GB, 512 GB or 1 TB.

Battery & Charging specifications top

Battery

17.32 watt-hours, lithium-ion.

4,422 mAh.

3.9 V.

63 grams.

Rated up to 25 hours streamed video or 95 hours of audio.

Charging

Via included woven USB-C to USB-C cord (27 W maximum charging rate, measured) or wirelessly.

MagSafe rated to 15W.

Qi2 wireless rated to 15 W.

Qi wireless rated to 7.5 W.

Size specifications top

3.02 × 6.29 × 0.32 inches HWD.

76.7 × 159.9 × 8.25 millimeters HWD.

Weights, Actual Measured specifications top

iPhone alone: 7.795 oz. (221.0 g; rated 7.81 oz./221g).

Case: 1.035 oz. (29.4 g).

Total, iPhone & Case: 8.830 oz. (250.4 g).

This is 0.740 oz. (21 g) less than the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Environment specifications top

Water resistance rated IP68 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes) per IEC 60529.

Altitude up to at least 10,000' (3,000 m).

5% to 95% RH, non-condensing.

Operating

0º ～ 35º C (32º ～ 95º F).

Storage

-20 ～ 45º C (-4 ～ 113º F).

Included specifications top

iPhone.

Announced specifications top

12 September 2023.

Ships specifications top

22 September 2023.

Optional Accessories top

Petino Samba Pad Pro 3-Way Wireless Charging Station.

You can get iPhone 15 Pro Max at eBay (How to Win at eBay).

Charging Stations

While my new iPhone 15 Pro Max works great with the same wireless chargers I've had ever since the first iPhone had wireless charging and I have loads of USB-C chargers, I really love my Petino Samba Pad Pro 3-Way Wireless Charging Station:

USB-C Adapters

NEW: USB-C to Lightning Adapter.

This new adapter has a female Lightning receptacle and a male USB-C connector, effectively turning your new iPhone 15 Pro Max back into a Lightning device for charging and audio with older devices.

While this adapter works great with Lightning headphones and earpods and mics, it refuses to work with any docks or Apple's 30-pin to Lightning adapters. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future, as a $30 adapter doesn't serve much purpose just to prevent us from having to replace a $20 lightning charge cord.

This adapter works great with my Sennheiser AMBEO 3D binaural recording microphone system for recording and playback.

USB-C to 3.5mm Headphone Adapter.

I've been using these ever since my iPad went to USB-C, and I just ordered some more at a whopping $9 each for my new iPhone 15 Pro Max. I use them to drive my corded Audeze planar magnetic headphones for serious listening.

Hint: Instead of buying new USB-C corded earpods (if anyone still uses these), you can use this USB-C to 3.5mm Headphone Adapter to let you use your 3.5mm earbuds from ancient times with your new iPhone 15 Pro Max. If you need corded earpods, I'd get the newest USB-C corded earpods rather than adapt old 3.5mm ones from under your couch, however in my case since I have adapters and old earpods I rarely use, I'm good.

Cases

Cases are a very personal choice.

I use Apple's Taupe FineWoven case. I've dropped mine on concrete a few times and it's fine. Better than silicon rubber cases, it slips easily in and out of my jeans' pockets, and its textured surface sticks in my hands well.

Oddy my FineWoven case started to show wear in its corners after a month living in my jeans pocket, but after six months it's still going strong and looks fine with the wear. With all the use an iPhone gets, every case shows wear.

The metal buttons of the FineWoven case feel fantastic; tight and precise just like the buttons on the phone itself.

I pass on screen protectors. I've dropped this and many earlier models on concrete, stone and pavement from a few feet, and never broken a screen — but I have seen plenty of people less lucky who dropped it on a rough surface where something hit the screen first, and even with screen protectors it cracked. I've seen cracked screen protectors over undamaged iPhone screens - but once the protector breaks, how do you get it off? I suspect the native Ceramic Shield glass is stronger than any protector you might get.

I saw a guy at the gym drop a huge 70-pound (32 kg) dumbbell on his iPhone. It was bent like a potato chip, and it still worked! His plastic stick-on screen protector kept the glass together well enough so it worked, even though it was in a thousand little pieces.

My son had his earlier model iPhone 12 Pro Max in a huge Otterbox case, but he dropped it on a pointy rock that hit the screen, and his screen still shattered. Good luck to all of us.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max is rated IP68 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes) per IEC 60529. While rated to be water resistant, and people have shot even earlier iPhones underwater without a problem, as far as I know Apple doesn't warrant this, so if you flood your phone or get it underwater, don't expect them to cover any problems. I haven't dropped mine in the toilet — yet.

I'd skip lens protectors. The iPhone's lens covers are sapphire, and I've never seen one scratched or damaged (but am sure some have been). Anything you put over the lenses will affect pictures and especially ghosting when shot into the light, and if the protectors are plastic, they'll quickly scratch and dull the image. If you must, be sure protectors are glass and have antireflection multicoating rather than being just plain glass.

Tripod Adapters

I use the all-metal Oben SPA-1000 iPhone adapter:

Oben SPA-1000 iPhone Tripod Adapter. bigger.

The SPA-1000 is spring loaded with thick rubber pads to hold your phone. It has an Arca Swiss foot, as well as a 1/4-20 tripod socket on the bottom.

I also have a bulletproof Robus SPCS-001, but it scares me as instead of spring tension as in the SPA-1000, it uses vicelike screw tension to clamp down on your phone. I'm afraid I'll crunch my phone!

I have an older plastic XUMA MTA-300B, but I'd skip it unless weight is incredibly important to you.

For $18 as of 2024 the extremely well-made SPA-1000 is a clear winner.

Apple Watch

The native Camera Control app is a remote control and a self-timer for when you're in the picture.

You can see the image on your Apple Watch screen to compose while you're in the shot!

Performance top

Overall Image Quality Fast Draw Autofocus

Auto White Balance Bokeh Distortion Ergonomics

Exposure Functionality Macro Precision & Quality

Security Shutter Display Image Search

Visual Look-Up Satellite Rescue 911 GPS

Music & Audio Power & Battery Clock Accuracy

You can get iPhone 15 Pro Max at eBay (How to Win at eBay).

Overall

While it doesn't replace big cameras at what big cameras do best for serious shooters, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is the World's Best Camera for casual shooting for many very important reasons:

World's Best Image Quality performance top

If we define picture quality as pictures which most accurately reproduce the scene as it looked to our eye, no camera on earth does a more accurate job of capturing what's right in front of us on the very first shot than the iPhone. When getting it right on the first shot matters (and it always does), nothing beats iPhone.

From staring up into the sun to daylight to brilliant sunsets to mixed artificial light to huge dynamic range to indoors to city streets at night to moonlight to starlight, no camera does a better job than the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and it shoots all this handheld, even under starlight!

I kid you not, ever since iPhone 11 Pro Max I've been able to grab my iPhone while I'm asleep to grab a shot of moonlight streaming into my room, even while I'm still mostly asleep. No big camera can shoot in light this low handheld, even if you had the time to set it for moonlight. iPhone just does it.

iPhone always wins over big cameras in this ultimate image fidelity test. iPhone is exceptional in its ability to handle difficult highlight and shadow contrasts with no fiddling or manual HDR required. Difficult lighting that we never could capture on film, and which throws big cameras for a loop, always seems to come out looking exactly as it did to my eye from shadow to highlight and everywhere in between.

It's unfair to compare an iPhone to a big camera if you allow time to make the manual settings big cameras usually require as conditions and subjects change. That's like letting one kid in a class have an extra few hours and an open book to complete a closed-book test. It doesn't count if you have to change ISO or exposure compensation or anything to get your shot; for many things if you have to stop and set, you just lost your photo. That's why most of my photos of my kids were shot on an iOS device even fifteen years ago: it shoots faster and always gets the shot.

Sure, we all can spend a few minutes trying to set our Canons, Nikons, LEICAs, HASSELBLADs, Sonys and Fujis to get an image that sort of looks like what's in front of us as conditions change or get crazy, but life waits for no one. I can draw and fire my iPhone in a second and always get a sharp, color-accurate and well-exposed shot under any conditions from daylight to shooting hand-held from moving cars at night to moonlight to starlight, while the big cameras almost always require futzing with settings as conditions change — and the photo opportunity vanishes and I lose my shot.

For at least ten years people have asked me how to set their big cameras to just get the picture right the first time as our iPhones always do, but iPhones are simply smarter and more advanced than any other camera. There is no single set of settings that allow our big cameras to just get it right under every kind of condition. iPhone has an astonishing amount of secret sauce and technology inside that, like every other virtuoso, makes the impossible always seem easy. Apple has far more smart people and development budget than any other camera company, and all this development smarts and budget goes into the magic inside that lets iPhone do things the big cameras can't even imagine.

Not only does it capture extreme dynamic range (iPhone is always capturing images continuously at many different exposure levels and then magically and automatically saves them into just one flawless image as we press the shutter), the iPhone 15 Pro Max also has an incredibly bright OLED HDR display that plays-back with much of the original extreme dynamic range.

World's Fastest Draw performance top

No other camera wakes up, focuses, sets, and shoots as quickly as an iPhone.

I usually have my shot on my iPhone in less time that it takes some cameras to turn on, much less focus.

LASER-Guided Autofocus performance top

iPhone 15 Pro Max Rear Camera Array (held vertically). bigger.

Even if the smaller sensors and shorter lenses of the iPhone didn't have the laws of physics on its side for fast autofocus (which they do), the iPhone 15 Pro Max has an additional active infra-red LASER RADAR (LiDAR) autofocus system. Even in absolute pitch black or in the complete vacuum of space, the LiDAR system scans the subject(s) with invisible infra-red LASERs to measure distances and create a 3D subject model to get rough autofocus almost instantly, after which the optical phase-detection systems get it perfect.

No big camera has anything close to a LASER RADAR system; the closest similar thing was the ultrasonic SONAR AF system of some Polaroid cameras in the 1970s.

I always get perfect focus instantly, and if one out of of 10,000 shots on one of my older iPhones was off, I sent it to Apple as it was so remarkable to get an out-of-focus image that they gave it a pretty serious look. After six months with my iPhone 15 Pro Max I still can't recall any out-of-focus photos. Yes, I can get blurry photos from gross subject or camera motion or other obvious mistakes, but I can't recall any shots that my iPhone simply didn't focus properly.

Bravo!

World's Best Auto White Balance performance top

Almost all mirrorless cameras are pretty good today (thank goodness), and my iPhone continues to amaze me in how it gets it right essentially all the time. Even shooting a warm-toned object in shade, it magically knows what it is and sets a nice warm shade white balance, exactly as it looks to my eye and not too blue as is much more likely to happen with a big camera.

In years past the thing most likely to confuse iPhone (or other cameras) was someone lying on grass, where it would think it was fluorescent light and be too magenta, or if I wore a pale yellow shirt and it would come out too blue, making the shirt neutral. Thank goodness I haven't seen iPhone Auto White Balance get fooled for a couple of years now.

Bravo!

Bokeh performance top

Bokeh, the feel, character or quality of out-of-focus areas as opposed to how far out of focus they are, is superb, and completely adjustable after you shoot the images!

Even better than older iPhones, often you have the option to use the Portrait mode even after you've shot an image without it!

Rockwell Gets a Haircut, 12:20 P.M., Tuesday, 12 March 2024. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 5× (15.7mm actual or 120mm eq.) camera at f/2.8 at 1/120 at Auto ISO 250 (LV 8.6), free Snapseed app in-phone. bigger or fit-to-screen.

I shot this as I walked out of Supercuts, no extra lighting needed. This is at the default setting of f/4.5 in Portrait mode; I can set that value retroactively to change the amount of defocus to my heart's content. The bokeh looks awesome!

Distortion performance top

green ball icon © KenRockwell.com The front "selfie" and 5× cameras have much less distortion than the selfie and 3× cameras did in the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Lens distortion isn't a problem. It's usually invisible, except some pincushion distortion with the front and 2× cameras, and some just about invisible barrel distortion with the 0.5× camera. The front camera has stronger distortion seemingly optimized to keep faces from looking too funny at selfie distance.

Lens distortion correction is optional for the front and 0.5× cameras, but oddly I see no difference with it either ON or OFF in Airdropped JPG images from HEICs. I see no change in distortion with the correction ON or OFF at SETTINGS > CAMERA > LENS CORRECTION. I leave this ON.

For more scientific use, use these corrections in Photoshop's lens correction filter to JPG or HEIF images.

These aren't facts or specifications, they are the results of my research that requires hours of photography and calculations on the resulting data.

At 30' (10m)	Correction factor, Correction ON¹	Correction factor, Correction OFF¹
front camera	-1.70^{2, 4}	-1.70^{2, 4}
front camera (cropped)	-0.50	-0.50
0.5×	+1.00	+1.10
1×	±0.00³	±0.00³
1.2×	±0.00³	±0.00³
1.5×	-0.50³	-0.60³
2×	-2.00³	-2.00³
5×	-0.50³	-0.50³

1.) I don't see any difference with Correction ON or OFF.

2.) Weird distortion optimized for selfies which slightly pinches (pincushions) the center to help faces look more natural, with some barrel distortion at the corners.

3.) There is no correction available for this lens.

4.) Some waviness remains after this correction.

World's Best Ergonomics performance top

It's trivially easy to hold and shoot an iPhone in any position, at any angle. Heck, it has cameras on its front and back, so no matter in what direction you want to shoot you can see its huge screen without having to move or adjust any screens.

Everyone instinctively knows how to use an iPhone, and it's trivially easy to shoot, to set everything and figure out the menus.

iPhone is the only camera with a SEARCH function in its menu system to find things.

It's trivially easy to use in total darkness. Unlike big cameras, the side buttons are easily found by feel and every other control is clearly illuminated on-screen — no more holding flashlights in our teeth to set our cameras in the dark!

Its displays and playback images rotate with the camera.

It's easy to shoot at 10 FPS: just swipe the shutter button towards the last-shot photo icon and hold, and it's easy to view, select the best and delete the rest from these bursts!

World's Best Light Meter performance top

I get perfect exposure more often with iPhone than with any other camera, regardless of lighting conditions.

Not only does it miraculously expose well in all sorts of difficult conditions, mine accurately meters down to starlight (LV -7, that's minus 7), and possibly darker!

What's crazy is that while under harsh lighting conditions where there is no one correct exposure because the dynamic range is so great that no single exposure will capture it all on a big camera, iPhone breaks the rules and just makes the picture look as the scene looked to our eyes with magic, automatic and clairvoyant HDR in one snap whenever it needs it. Bravo!

World's Most Functional Camera performance top

While other digital cameras have offered basic abilities to trim and resize images, even those basic edits are incredibly difficult to do on a large camera with its tiny screen and limited controls.

Meanwhile, we all know that we can run the free Snapseed app as well as numerous other apps to edit our images on our iPhones.

As of iOS 16 we can extract subjects from backgrounds.

Once our images are ready for the world, iPhone is already connected directly to the internet to share or publish these. I can get speeds of over 500 Mb/s if the signal is right, six times as fast as I get at home!

The best a big camera can do is try to connect to your phone with a clumsy app, and then good luck hoping it works if you want to transfer anything. I've never found any camera-maker's app to work reliably, often requiring long manual configurations each time I try to use it or usually just not working at all after I get it to to work the first time — while when you shoot it on the iPhone, you're already done and can share your images.

Macro Performance performance top

iPhone focuses up to about 0.5 inches (12mm) from the lens covers. It focuses so close that it's hard trying to keep light on our subject.

It focuses so close that it's nearly impossible to show anything recognizable for comparison; it gets so close that almost anything I show at its close focus distance becomes too abstract to recognize.

As I shown above, when set to 1× as close as I shot the spider, it magically swaps to the 0.5× camera (which focuses much more closely than the 1× camera) and crops accordingly. It also does this often at other zoom settings: shooting with the 0.5× camera and cropping (digital zooming) accordingly.

I list the close-focus distance for each camera at Specifications.

StandBy and Always On Displays performance top

The "StandBy" screen appears when charging horizontally. It works like bit like a desk or nightstand clock:

iPhone 15 Pro Max StandBy Display. bigger.

Good news is that the StandBy display is very legible and useful, and you can program what it shows.

Bad news is that oddly it still doesn't stay on all the time as a nightstand clock should. Instead it turns off when it can to save energy, watching for any motion in the dark, at which it lights back up. Thus one often has to wave an arm and can't just open one eye to see it in the middle of the night.

You can opt for it to stay on all the time at SETTINGS > StandBy > Display > TURN DISPLAY OFF > Never, however if you select this it also forces the iPhone into a relatively illegible dim red "night mode." This Night Mode is for astronomers to protect their night vision; it's not particularly legible when you're mostly asleep.

The regular Always On display still sneaks and turns off when it can, so likewise it also goes black when you're sleeping. Leave your phone vertically on a charger and you'll see your Lock Screen, which usually shows a big clock, when it's on.

Thus you may or may not want to keep using your favorite night stand clock app. Fliqlo is my favorite, and we all have our own. Fliqlo stays on continuously, but if you're paranoid, it does this by keeping your phone unlocked as you sleep.

World's Most Precisely & Best-Made Camera performance top

Back in 1954 the new LEICA M3 was precision incarnate, made of nothing but glass and metal. The M3 and its shutter button are so precisely made, with nothing but a fine film of air between them, that the shutter button glides straight down with no perceptible left-right play, the finest trigger pull of any camera.

LEICAs today have lateral play in their shutter buttons, smaller finders and sloppier rangefinder systems. LEICA's instruction manuals today usually start off explaining how to dispose of them as hazardous waste, while the M3's manual started off explaining how it was an instrument designed to give at least a lifetime of flawless photographic pleasure.

Every other camera today, even a "pro" model, is mostly made of disposable plastic. Eeew!

The iPhone ist ein meisterstück (is a masterpiece). Everything about it is at least as precisely made as the old LEICA M3. iPhone is entirely titanium (probably lots of stainless steel and aluminum, too) and hardened glass, with sapphire covers for its lenses. There is no visible plastic and even its back is textured glass — not plastic.

Not only do iPhone's few switches work without play, they're also all metal.

Don't even get me started about internal precision. The iPhone's A17 processor is built with a 3 nanometer process, which is the size (not just precision) of the features. How big is 3 nanometers? 3 nanometers is half of one one-hundredth the size of a wavelength of light, or about the size of 12 atoms or the diameter (not length) of a strand of DNA. A speck of COVID virus is 40 times larger and one bacterium is a thousand times longer than 3 nm.

The A17 processor is but one of many, many chips in the iPhone, and the A17 processor alone has 19 billion transistors — every one of which need to be in the right place. That's precise!

World's Most Secure Camera performance top

Mine backs itself up to iCloud every night while it's charging. Everything I've shot is up there in case of catastrophe, assuming you have a decent connection wherever you're sleeping.

Of course others use iCloud Photos so their snaps are already in the cloud as they shoot them.

While I still have to back up what I shoot each day on my big cameras manually, my iPhone tends to itself, so long as I'm not staying someplace without a signal.

If I lose my iPhone, Find My iPhone finds it on a map or makes it beep. Try that with your Nikon, for which you can use Apple AirTags.

World's Fastest Shutter Speeds performance top

You really have to push it to make it do this, but pointing iPhone into something extremely bright (like up at the sun or into the reflection of the sun in brushed stainless steel ), I've seen shutter speeds as short as 1/71,429 with the f/1.8 lens at LV +19 (16 times brighter than direct sunlight).

You're not going to see speeds this fast in normal shooting, but speeds from 1/10,000 to 1/28,000 come up pretty easily with the f/1.8 lens in daylight.

iPhone uses automatic exposure, so it picks the speeds based on lighting and, in dim light, on how steadily the iPhone is held.

World's Best Display performance top

Every big camera is still using crummy little last-generation 3" LCDs, and just about none of them save for the Canon 5DS/R have automatic brightness control like the iPhone so you can see them properly in any light. Big cameras use tiny LCDs, typically with a couple of million dots and unspecified brightness.

The iPhone has a huge, ultrabright, ultra-accurate, ultra-high resolution OLED screen that automatically adjusts its brightness and color balance for perfection for any light. The iPhone's huge screen has about ten million dots.

Better than any big camera, the iPhone measures the colors of the ambient environment and adjusts its display for the most accurate color reproduction! Apple calls this the True-Tone display, which you can activate at Settings > Display & Brightness > True Tone > ON.

The only OLEDs on most larger cameras are tiny monochrome screens for seeing settings, like on the Nikon Z7 II.

I haven't compared to offbrand phones that might (or might not) have bigger screens or brighter ratings. What's critical with iPhone is that the screen is supremely color accurate, and never flickers as it dims. Too often I see offbrand phones that emphasize reds to impress the innocent, or use lower frequencies for pulse-width modulation to dim their screens that lead to brain-hurting flicker as you move your eyes across their screens.

I was impressed when I saw a new folding screen in a store, but I realized a day later that folding screens are obviously plastic, which means that as you actually use it that its shiny surface will eventually become dull. iPhone uses hardened ceramic-coated glass: it's not going to get dull.

World's Best Image Viewer & Search performance top

Not only does iPhone have the world's best screen, its native Photos app makes it trivially easy to find anything you've shot purely by location or date, or just tap the 🔍 icon and ask to search by your friend's names or "dog" or "pen" and iPhone just finds it.

Cooler, mine is always poking around and making photo movies of the best shots from past trips or vacations or other fun - and they're good!

I have photos from at least 25 years of shooting film and digital in my iPhone, and it looks inside those photos, knows what's in them, and finds them for me. Yes, iPhone even sees and searches what's inside my saved film scans!

I'll say that again: iPhone has human-like intelligence to look inside the actual visual content of images from just about any digital photo, scanned film or screen shot, and search and find things based solely on their appearances, not needing keywords, metadata, captions or written text descriptions! Of course it easily finds signs or text inside an image as well, like STOP signs.

Mentioning captions, it's also easy to add, search and read text captions and notes to your iPhone photos' metadata (tap the ⓘ photo info icon), but none of this is needed for search.

With iPhone, I can find and use my photos more easily than anything, although if I used the Photos app on Mac it's probably equally as smart (I don't use Photos on my Mac). Brilliant!

Beyond Image Search: Visual Look Up performance top

You can search your images for anything you want, but even crazier, if you don't know what something is, your iPhone can tell you what it is! Apple calls this Visual Look Up.

If you see little sparkles on the ⓘ (photo info) icon as you look through Photos, iPhone wants to tell you all about what it is. It can identify kinds of fungus, dogs, plants, pets, animals, landmarks, statues, works of art, album covers and just about anything:


Sparkles on the ⓘ icon tells you iPhone knows who this is. bigger.	What it finds for this Great Pyrenees puppy. bigger.	It even gets the tough ones, identifying fungus! bigger.

The Only Camera That Can Rescue You from the Wilderness performance top

Rangers are loaded with sad stories of city folk who go hiking without preparation, thinking their phones will make up for forgetting enough water and maps and first aid and common sense — and then they have no signal because there are no cell towers out in the wilderness!

iPhone 15 Pro Max can communicate directly with satellites to summon help if you're stuck out in the boonies without a cellular signal. Even if you don't use the camera, you might be able to ditch your dedicated satellite phone for emergency use.

iPhone 15 Pro Max can summon help with very low-rate text data to specialized emergency centers. No, you can't just make phone calls to your friends via satellite — yet.

How to Use the Emergency Satellite 911 Text System.

World's Best GPS performance top

Every iPhone has great GPS that's always running, and tags all of my images to within feet — in three dimensions. iPhone also logs the magnetic compass for the direction in which the iPhone was pointed.

Integral GPS was only a passing fad about fifteen years ago in big cameras and mostly gone today. Most big cameras can connect to your phone to tag images via an app. These systems rarely worked or work well and most of my big camera images never got or get tagged. The problem with big cameras is that they can't always be awake and connected or tracking location all the time so they rarely know where you are. When you turn on a big camera and snap a shot it hasn't located itself yet.

iPhone's GPS is always active and knows where it is whenever you snap a shot.

World's Best Music Source performance top

iPhone easily streams over 100 million songs in Lossless quality, often in high resolution and/or discrete multichannel audio!

See my Apple Music review for the details.

See Apple Lighting Adapter Audio Performance for a great analog 3.5mm headphone output.

Power, Charging & Battery performance top

Fast Charging

I forgot to charge my iPhone 15 Pro Max one night. No worries; it had 40% charge when I woke up. I plugged it in to charge, and half an hour later when I was ready to go it was mostly charged. Use a 20W charger or better and it's super-fast. It will charge at a maximum rate of 27 W if your USB-C charger is rated that high or higher.

Battery Life

I usually have a half to two-thirds a charge left at the end of each day.

This all depends on how much you use your phone, how bright you set your screen, how close you are to a cell tower or WiFi, and what you're doing on it. Your battery life will vary.

For instance, if you don't use your phone and have a strong signal, even my old iPhone 13 Pro Max runs over a week in Low Power mode if I only use it only a little bit each day as a remote control for my Apple TV and don't have cellular service active, but if I spent all day and night texting, editing photos and checking Instagram I'd use close to a full charge each day. We're all very different, and if you don't have WiFi or a strong cell signal, battery life likewise will suffer.

A half hour will charge from mostly dead to mostly full with a USB-C PD charger, USB-C PD power bank or USB-C PD solar panel rated at least 30W or so. The standard Apple 20W USB-C PD charger will be about as fast since iPhone only draws over 20W below 60% charge.

See how I charge and use my battery for more.

Clock Accuracy performance top

iPhones always set themselves via GPS. While the clocks in my big cameras vary and have to be corrected now and then, and set manually for daylight versus standard time, iPhone is always dead-on.

This matters when you shoot multiple cameras and then sort all the images based on capture time to compare the similar views of each scene.

Compared top

You can get iPhone 15 Pro Max at eBay (How to Win at eBay).

Compared to Big Cameras

I've been covering this throughout this review. As we all know the iPhone is always with us, far handier to use and nails the first shot perfectly more often than any big camera, while there are many things, like long telephoto shots or things for which you'd use a tripod, which iPhone doesn't do as well.

Even at web sizes my big cameras can make sharper images, but that doesn't matter if I missed the shot or didn't find as strong a composition because I didn't want to crawl around in the muck with my big camera, rather than just reach down with my iPhone.

Of course iPhone photos look much better in the field because iPhone has the biggest, brightest screen on the planet — while back in the studio on my big monitors the big cameras win — if I get the shot!

Compared to other iPhone 15 Models

The iPhone 15 Pro (non-Max) only has a 3×, rather than 5×, telephoto.

The iPhone 15 (all non-pro versions) have smaller sensors and no telephoto (3× or 5×) cameras, just 2× digital zoom from a smaller sensor, with 26mm and 52mm equivalents.

If you're a serious enough photographer to be reading this, of course you want the 15 Pro Max, so long as it fits in your pocket. Personally I wish it were even larger, but that's just me. I love big screens.

Compared to Other Phones

Call me old fashioned, but I always prefer to stick with the company that invented something, like Apple for the iPhone or Mercedes who invented the car back in 1886. Apple's always innovating so others can copy, for instance, my iPhone 14 Pro Max already had satellite communication a generation ago, while the others just started talking about future plans after Apple announced it.

I prefer Apple because it's part of my much larger ecosystem. Even if another phone was as good, it wouldn't interface with the rest of my life. My iPhone seamlessly integrates with my Apple ecosystem; everything I do in CarPlay and on my iPads, Macs and Apple TVs and God knows what else just works together.

I can play movies or music pretty much from any source into anything, even before using Apple Music.

If I lose my Apple TV remote in my sofa (as I do more than I like to admit), no worries, it's duplicated in an app on iPhone: just swipe down from the top right and look for the REMOTE icon. If it's not there, be sure you added it to your Control Center on iPhone at Settings > Control Center, which is trivially easy to find with the Search box at Settings.

Also iPhones don't get slower or crummier with use. It's sad to hear friends whining about how their Samsung or whatever phones got all buggy after 18 months like a windows PC. With Apple, new versions of iOS have always added features to my older phones. While some people are never happy, all my old phones still work just swell, and usually with more features than when they were new.

User's Guide top

You can get iPhone 15 Pro Max at eBay (How to Win at eBay).

See my separate iPhone 15 Pro Max Tutorial & User's Guide.

Recommendations top