GSMArena Team, 19 April 2024

Apple iPhone 15 Pro long-term review

Conclusion

Seven months with the iPhone 15 Pro and it's easy to see why Apple enjoys its current position in the market. There's so much it gets right and most of it comes through steadfast founding principles rather than just trial and error, which makes it especially impressive.

Take the design for instance, which understands that 'big' shouldn't be the default size for a flagship smartphone while also lovingly crafting it out of exquisite materials with outstanding fit and finish. Or that when you buy a flagship phone you should get best-in-class software and after sales support for years to come. These are not decisions that happen to come about at random or through inspiration from others but rather from having decades of history behind them that lead up to this moment.

This extends to several other aspects, such as having some of the best and most well-calibrated displays on the market, possibly the most well-rounded camera system around, maintaining a catalog of some of the finest apps and games on any platform, commitment to user security and privacy, and having a greater cognizance of the environment than its peers.

Unfortunately, this steadfastness isn't always a good thing and there's no better example than the company's software. Apple wants iOS to be this simple, easy-to-use interface that anybody could use but under this veneer of simplicity is an operating system that has changed considerably since it debuted over a decade ago. The result is software that is harder to use because of how it obfuscates the features it does have to maintain this charade of simplicity, all the time still lagging behind the competition in both actual simplicity and having useful features.

The truth is that this design has run its course because it was never designed for the world we live in today and all the things we demand from our smartphones. But Apple's stubbornness in sticking to this design while also making it more feature-rich with every new update only results in an incongruous mess that affects usability.

At this point, we are ready to move on from iOS to something that is more in line with modern features and user expectations. It's the only remaining bugbear we have with modern iPhones and we are getting increasingly tired of seeing this incredible hardware being hamstrung by late-2000s era design sensibilities. Enough version updates, Apple, it's time for a real change.