iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro: How the two lines stand against each other

Apple brings big upgrades to the iPhone 15 lineup with USB-C and better camera, and a new processor on the 15 Pro models

In a customary move, Apple announced four new iPhones at the ‘Wonderlust’ event on September 12. The baseline iPhone 15 along with its bigger sized iPhone 15 Plus model are the affordable new options compared to the high-end iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. With improved camera systems on all four devices and Dynamic Island now standard across the lineup, Apple has narrowed the gap between the baseline and Pro models. But, there still are differences. Take a  look:

Display

With Dynamic Island made available to the entire lineup, both the Pro models and the baseline iPhone 15 models get the same 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch display size option. All four models also get ceramic shield protection. The iPhone 15 Pro models and iPhone 15 models also get the same peak brightness of 2000 nits.

 

Similarities aside, the Pro models get a ProMotion display for adaptive and higher refresh rate of 120Hz. Despite having the same screen size as the iPhone 15 line, the 15 Pro models have slimmer bezels for a more edge-to-edge appearance.

Dynamic Island on the iPhone 15

 

Design

The 15 Pro Series is heavier and thicker than the baseline iPhone 15 despite featuring a new aerospace-grade titanium frame. The iPhone 15 continues with an aluminium frame, but gets colour infused back glass. It essentially means the back cover on the iPhone 15 models will no longer be glossy but textured in matte finish.

Another key design change among the two lines is the mute switch. While the vanilla iPhone 15 models come with the standard mute switch, the iPhone 15 Pro line gets a new customisable Action button. Apple said the new action button will offer more options to the user than just switching between silent and ringing mode.

Connectivity

The USB-C connector is standard across iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro line. However, the 15 Pro models get the USB 3.0 version with transfer speeds of up to 10GBps.

Performance

Apple has decided to give the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max a big performance boost with a new A17 Pro processor, while the baseline iPhone 15 get the A16 Bionic chip from the last year Pro models.

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Apple says that the new A17 Pro processor has 19 billion transistors on a 3nm architecture, compared to 16 billion transistors on the A16 Bionic (based on 4nm fabrication). Additional transistors on a small package improves performance and power efficiency. The A17 Pro chip also has an additional GPU (graphic processing unit) cores than the A16 Bionic chip, totalling up to 6 cores for improved gaming performance on the Pro models. The A17 Pro supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing and MetalFX upscaling, which are said to improve graphics experience on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.

Camera

The iPhone 15 Pro models get a triple-camera setup on the rear, featuring a 48-megapixel main camera with sensor-shift optical image stabilisation. The big change, however, comes with the 12MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom (77mm lens equivalent) on the Pro and 5x (120mm lens equivalent) on the bigger Pro Max. The Pros will also have a 12MP ultra-wide-angle sensor.

The Pro variants will also get spatial video capturing capabilities in coming months. Apple said the phone would use the multi-camera setup to take videos with depth. The spatial videos captured with the iPhone Pros will support the Apple Vision Pro headset, which Apple said will launch next year.

Triple Camera setup on the iPhone 15 Pro

The iPhone 15 line comes with a dual-camera setup. It gets a 48MP main camera sensor with 2X in-sensor zoom. As for the camera features, Apple has enabled support for Auto-portrait in Photo mode with an option to adjust depth. The main camera in the baseline models are capable of shooting High-Res photos at a 24MP resolution.
 

Battery

Although there are no official details available around the battery sizes and capacity, Apple said that the iPhone 15 Pro has up to 23 hours of video playback capacity, up to 20 hours of video streaming and about 75 hours of audio playback capacity.

The iPhone 15, on the other hand, is said to have up to 20 hours of video playback, up to 16 hours of video streaming, and about 80 hours of audio playback capacity.

iPhone 15 Pro features

iPhone 15 features