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Phones · Apple iPhone

Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max

40owners with an opinion
63%of verdicts positive
22/13positive/negative since 2024
1.5 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and ease of use; criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 2.5 years
The new Siri on my iPhone 15 Pro Max is not good. I can still not have a back and forth conversation with it as I can and have had using chatGPT on my same phone for the past many years. I.E. Asking it a follow up question leads to it spinning/waiting and 95% of the time hearing the same old Siri trick, "Can you try that again something went wrong." The amount of times I hear chatGPT say that is 5% out of 100% and again on this same old Pro Max phone since Sept 2023. I have been running each beta now on the 3rd (maybe the next will fix this?). If not Apple should sue Open AI to oblivion to just then buy it. Their voice conversation tech is unparallel as Gemini (subscriber to both) tries but no way matches theirs.
Likes itOwned 0.83 years
Interesting. I’ve always understood that partly charging was supposed to be better for battery health with lithium batteries. I’ve capped my 15 Pro Max at 80% from the start and I avoid going below 20% and it’s still at 100% battery health after more than 10 months and 159 cycles. I occasionally charge from ~20% to a random higher number during the day, but other than that I just let it charge during the night. My iPhone 12 Pro Max dropped to 90% battery health in no time without the 80% cap and a similar charging schedule with optimized charging enabled.
Neutral
Syncable passkeys are a thing which the OP addressed. Apple, Bitwarden, and other password managers all implement syncable passkeys. In fact, I just did an upgrade of my iPhone 15 Pro Max to an 18 Pro Max and all of my passkeys came along with the upgrade.
Neutral
JPEG-XL is not particularly patent-laden and its license is correct for the use-case. Other than the complexity of its implementation, there is very-little-to-no business nor technical reason not to use it or include it. It has every right to be "the" image format for the next 20-odd years. Excellent compression, excellent lossless mode, transparency, etc. etc. And probably my favorite feature- progressive rendering, which means you never have to make thumbnails ever again, you just truncate the output stream at the right proportion of pixel data (!) iOS also now supports it natively for the photos it takes... but only if you have a newer iPhone than mine (a 15 Pro Max).
Likes it
Hey that's not fair, there has been one actually useful "innovation" -- switching to USB-C like the rest of the world has been using for 10 years. Literally nothing has made me feel the slightest craving for a new iPhone since getting my 15 Pro Max.
Doesn’t like it
> The new Siri isnt that exciting at least on my iPhone 15 Pro Max On my Pro 16 it has its ups and downs - I still can't get it to "play my running playlist on shuffle" whilst running (this is the only thing I used Siri for before the beta and it would improve my life immeasurably if it worked). But it responds to things like "how long will it take to drive to the AirBnb booking in my inbox", and "when is X playing a concert in Y - add a calendar entry with details" perfectly. This is a beta and I have hopes, but I can imagine it will run better on a 17 and later
Likes it
I'm glad I've been sitting on my iPhone 15 Pro Max... I'll upgrade someday, if/when I need to and the software updates are compelling, but I'll see how things run on my M5 Macbook. But the 15 Pro Max isn't subpar in any other way.
Likes it
And if every iPhone was also a Mac when attached to a monitor and keyboard, monitors and keyboards would become entirely common - as with the hotel example. My iPhone 15 Pro Max is more capable than a MacBook Neo; it’d be nice if it could be one.
Doesn’t like it
I don’t understand how this could be measured fairly though. What kind of cycles? What temperatures was it exposed to? Charged fast or slow? This is an incomplete set of criteria, which seems designed specifically to be meaningless / gameable. To me this seems like saying you can sell a car with a sealed gas tank as long as it “gets 40 miles per gallon.” And GM gets to decide the test course for measuring MPG, which will be a 2-mile slightly downhill coast with no stopping. Surprise! All our cars get 40-60MPG! The unspoken implication here is that if your phone still retains 80% after 1000 cycles, then it’s probably so old and obsolete by then that battery replacement would be a silly waste of time, so why burden people with these “onerous rules” in that case. But in reality, nothing about that metric, even if it’s true, means that customers don’t need to replace their batteries. My iPhone 15 Pro Max is in dire need of a battery replacement, at 82% after only 714 cycles. Aside from the battery, I have literally zero motivation to replace this phone. The phone manufacturers hate the idea that the battery might get replaced, because in this day and age it’s pretty much the only reason a 2 to 3-year-old phone (especially a flagship) isn’t extremely adequate for 99% of the population.
Likes it
I was in the small phone camp. I’m in a fortunate position where due to my work I have a work phone that has regularly refreshed hardware that I have some input on, so I made the conscious decision to switch to a max-sized handset (iPhone 15 pro max). I gave up being able to ‘one-hand’ the phone, but let’s be honest - all modern mainstream phones can’t really be used with one hand easily, that ship has sailed. I really liked it. The larger screen is more productive, and the improved cameras on the larger phones are worth it for me. I take more and better photos of my kids. Sometimes it’s worth trying the thing you don’t think you want - you might be surprised.
Likes it
Well, with this last one they finally made the telephoto 48MP. Also, vapor chamber is nice. I don't know if the 18 will have enough for me to upgrade, and it might even have a reason for me not to upgrade (removing gestures from Camera Control). But so far it's been every year, because I've only been using iPhone for a couple years, and my first was a refurbished 15 Pro Max. The 17 Pro (non-Max) only comes with up to 1TB of storage, but that's still more than my 15 of before.
Likes it
I recently upgraded (downgraded?) from an iPhone 15PM to a smaller iPhone 17P, and I have found myself wondering if I got a glitchy piece of hardware or if it's just iOS 26 bugs. I hardly had any problems with the previous phone, but on the 17 it's pretty routine that I have to close apps (including native Apple ones) which have become non-responsive. Frustrating, for sure.
Doesn’t like it
1) My Bluetooth audio on my recent-model iPhone (15 Pro Max) is still flaky AF, across all Bluetooth speaker devices or my car. Even my 4 year old kid noticed and commented on it! It's been like this since the iOS beta, for months. And I can tell that it's one of those hideous, nondeterministic bugs, too. Apple, hire me as a contractor to help fix it, if you want! I love hard problems. 2) There is still no solution for this annoying-as-hell UI problem that I documented years ago on Medium: https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... 3) I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product, but works a little janky due to how iOS handles keyboard extensions) because Siri's voice dictation is so abysmally worse than literally every other option right now, and has been for years. WTF, Apple? Hey Tim, I love the Vision Pro too (I own one) but maybe get your head out of that for a bit and polish up the engineering on the rest of your lines!
Doesn’t like it
Or they needed some kind of glossy faux-development to headline the marketing year when Apple AI tanked, and this was the best they could cobble together at relatively short notice. Meanwhile I get regular connection issues on Facetime on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though bandwidth isn't a problem here.
Likes it
Downloaded Apple intelligence and realised I was probably never going to use it. Fully disabled. Siri has been disabled since day 1 (moved over from Android to the iPhone 15 pro max) I would much rather see small individual uses of AI using the quite powerful hardware than another chatbot. Photo editing for example - the new AI feature to remove an object (like a random person behind you in a selfie) works great. Give us more upgrades like that with real world uses ! I don't care about some giant all encompassing Siri. I don't even like talking to my phone in general.
Doesn’t like it
> 4) Advanced voice mode stuttering because it hears its own voice and thinks it’s me interrupting I experience the same issue on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and have to mute the mic whenever I'm listening to a response. I wish they added an option to disable voice interruptions so that it could be interrupted only by touch.
Likes it
>it's an expensive power-hungry extra radio that doesn't work Yes, it requires more power. You have to consider power and the time the radio needs to be on to accomplish the task. If using mmWave you can transfer data at 2,000Mbps and using midband you achieve 500Mbps the baseband will be on for 4x the time with midband, and it will need to use less than 1/4th the power of mmWave to break even. Midband does not require 1/4th the power of mmWave. Closer to 1/2th. On 11/27/22 at 5:13pm I was in the St. Louis airport and ran a speed test on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I was probably one of the first non-diagnostic users of their mmWave infrastructure and I must have been the only user at the time because I achieved a damn-near-practical-maximum of 3938Mbps down. The only reason I ran the speed test at all was that a notoriously sluggish web application I was using was performing spectacularly. Since then I have been running speed tests at concerts, sporting events, traffic jams, airports, shopping centers, and the Rennaissance Faire. All locations where, prior to 5G, cellular coverage was useless. On 10/13/24 at 1:14pm I was in a crowded terminal at Chicago O'Hare and ran a speed test on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Connected via mmWave I achieved 1869Mbps down.
Likes it
Anecdotally speaking, the 80% limit seems to be key to better battery aging long term.Anecdotally speaking, the 80% limit seems to be key to better battery aging long-term. My launch-day iPhone 15 Pro Max is at 95% battery health. That phone has had the 80% limit enabled since day one, and I very rarely have had to increase it for specific busy days. My previous iPhone 12 Pro Max very quickly descended to 88% battery health after a year. My charging habits remain the same: fast and furious Magsafe/Qi/Qi2 charging every time there is a charger nearby (remote worker, so that’s almost all the time). I do have unpleasant thoughts about the 80% battery charge limit not being available on anything older than the 15, since it turns out it can be sideloaded via Nugget and MobileGestalt manipulation. Not enough to push me away from the walled garden (these phones are aging better than my previous flagships from other ecosystems), but a reminder of the rough edges in it.