Apple iPhone 15 Pro review

Design, build quality, handling

iPhone. Forged in titanium. This year, Apple is replacing the stainless steel that pretty much no one else used as a structural material in their phones with titanium - an even less common material in the industry. That should mean lighter, tougher and more corrosion-resistant frames, though there are nuances to those properties.

What's beyond debate, however, is that the 2023 Pro iPhones are lighter - the 15 Pro, in particular, is 19g lighter than the 14 Pro, and it's a change that you can easily feel. This opens up the small Pro to a crowd that, up until now, wouldn't have considered it simply because of its pocket heft.

While the 15 Pro Max is lighter than the 14 Pro Max by about as much, you always expect the Max to be big and heavy. Not quite so with the 14 Pro - its weight did use to come as a bit of a surprise for its size, and that disconnect is no longer there with the 15 Pro. In that sense, the new build is more fundamental to how the 15 Pro is perceived in the hand than it is to the Max.

There's more to this titanium situation than meets the eye, however. While the material has been used on the outside, on the inside, it's aluminum that's replacing what used to be stainless steel. Doubtless, that's where part of the weight savings have come from, but the flip side of that substitution is that maybe the new Pros are less sturdy than the old Pros.

While early YouTube 'testing' painted a grim picture of the longevity of the new Pro iPhones, we can't really speak to it ourselves. What we do know is that the iPhone 15 Pro is once again IP68-rated, exceeding the standard's requirements (1.5m for 30 min) - Apple's handsets are tested to survive for as long as 30 minutes down to 6m deep underwater. The Ceramic Sheild, the toughest smartphone glass, is here to stay as well.

The back panel has no changes - it is as matte as before, made by Corning, and still not a Ceramic Shield one. You'll see the iPhone 15 Pro on this page in Black Titanium and White Titanium, and Blue Titanium and Natural Titanium are also available. Those appear to be quite dull colors, obviously an effect Apple wanted as those are all metallic inspired, but still likable.

For what it's worth, the Black model we tried seemed to collect fingerprints and smudges much more readily than the white one.

iPhone 15 Pro in Black Titanium and White Titanium

The titanium frame has been treated to a matte finish instead of the previous generation's glossy stainless steel, which is a two-fold development. On the one hand, it makes the 15 Pros feel more like the non-Pros in terms of poshness - the finish was an easy differentiator up until now, and now both lineups are simple matte upon a passing glance.

One of the more subtle changes this year, still related to the frame, is the roundover that it has where it meets the front and back panels. The older design had more pointy edges, and the 2023 frame feels more natural and thinner in the hand than the previous one. The matte finish improves the grip, too.

Along those same lines is the slimming down of the bezels - you may not spot it at first, but the new iPhone 15 Pro is shorter and narrower by 0.9mm. With the displays being the same size, that means the new model has lost 0.45mm of border around the display. About as hard to notice at first, but still there, is the ever so slight rounding of the front glass edges towards the periphery - it's no Galaxy Note Edge, but it's not flat-flat either.

Not much has changed, in principle, when it comes to what's where on the iPhone 15 Pro. The pill-shaped cutout for the selfie camera and the FaceID bits is unavoidable (at least until Apple discovers the fingerprint reader). Up above it is the earpiece, which also doubles as a second speaker. One of the ambient light sensors is behind the display, while the other is around the cameras on the back.

The 'primary' speaker is on the bottom, as is the primary mic, both flanking what's one of the biggest hardware changes this year - the USB-C port.

Bottom with USB-C port • Nothing up top

The long Side key is alone on the right - it is used for Lock/Wake up, power on, Apple Pay, and also participates in taking screenshots and powering off, restarting or emergency menu activation.

Finally, the left side of the iPhone 15 Pro houses the SIM tray (unless you're in the US, where iPhones are e-SIM-only), the two volume keys and the new Action key, which is like a 50% smaller version of one of these buttons. This new Action key replaces the old Mute switch.

Power button on the right • SIM slot, volume and Action keys on the right

The Action key triggers on/off when you long press it. There are a few predefined actions - silencer, torch, magnifier, camera shortcut, Focus, Voice Memo, Shortcut, and No Action. The Shortcut option allows you to assign any configuration you've set up within the shortcut app and opens thousands of possibilities.

The Action key is supposed to be used more than a Mute switch, and for that we are not sure if its unchanged position is the best one. We guess only time will tell and getting used to it might help, it just doesn't come naturally to reach all the way there frequently.

The back of the iPhone 15 Pro is made of matte anti-reflective glass, but the Apple logo in the middle is mirror-like. Also reflective is the glass plaque that's the base of the camera assembly. It contains three metal rings - one for each camera, plus the LED flash, LiDAR scanner, ambient light sensor, and a mic.

Naturally, with a camera bump this big, the iPhone 15 Pro does wobble if placed on a table with no case on. It's not quite as pronounced as on the Max, though, so there's that.

The Apple iPhone 15 Pro measures 146.6x70.6x8.3mm, which means it's 0.4mm thicker than last year's model, but ever so slightly smaller in footprint, as established. More important to the pocketability, however, is the reduction in weight from 206g to 187g. That makes the 15 Pro a much more enticing proposition for someone looking for a premium handset that's both compact and anything close to lightweight - the 14 Pro could only pass for compact.