iPhone 15 Pro: Apple reveals premium phone with brand new material and features

Apple has unveiled the new iPhone 15 Pro, with an entirely new material.

The new device will be made out of titanium, and rely on a host of new manufacturing processes. Its new material and design allows it to be the lightest Pro phone Apple has made, and includes the thinnest edges around the display.

As well as the titanium, the new phone has the toughest glass-based material in the industry and an aluminium structure inside the phone, with the two materials joined in a new way that should make the phone extra strong, Apple said. The glass is now much easier to replace, Apple said.

The iPhone 15 Pro comes at the same price as the previous pro model, at $999. The iPhone 15 Pro Max will be slightly more, starting at $1,199, though Apple stressed the price increase comes with more storage.

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It comes in two sizes, 6.1-inches and 6.7-inches. And it comes in four new colours: black, white, blue and a natural titanium.

(Apple)

The titanium itself is a “grade five” alloy, Apple said, the same material used on the Mars rover. The new material also brings a new look, with a brushed texture on the side of the phone.

As well as the new material, the iPhone 15 Pro brings a new customisable “action button” on the side of the phone, and an improved “A17 Pro” chip inside it.

The action button replaces the mute switch on the side of the phone, and does the same job by default. But it can be changed to start voice memos, open the camera – or to start complex processes, by using Apple’s Shortcuts app.

The new chip has “next-level performance”, Apple said, with improvements including dramatically improved graphics performance. Apple claimed the device is a “new chapter in iPhone performance”, and it focused particularly on the gaming performance that the new chip will allow.

The iPhone 15 Pro has “the equivalent of seven camera lenses”, Apple said, even though it retains the three visible lenses on the back of the phone. That is partly because the iPhone 15 Pro Max has a 5x optical zoom, by using the extra space in the bigger device as well as a “tetra prism” design that bounces light around in the phone.

The new camera also has a new coating to reduce lens flare, and better performance in low light. Like the normal iPhone 15, it has a 48 megapixel camera but offers the option to merge that down into a 24 megapixel image, which Apple said should allow for better quality and high resolution images.

The iPhone 15 Pro is also able to stitch together images from two of the lenses to capture spatial video, which can later be viewed in the Vision Pro headset. At the time of the release of that headset, some had expressed concern that people would be forced to put those headsets on to take the new kinds of videos.

Like its cheaper iPhone 15 sibling, the 15 Pro will also be the first phone to switch to a USB-C charging port to charge. In the Pro model, that allows for USB 3 speeds, Apple said.