Apple - iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB - Apple Intelligence - White Titanium (Verizon)

I upgraded from my old iPhone 8 Plus after it suddenly died on me. That was something I had been avoiding for several years due to the Face ID. I was used to Touch ID and had serious doubts about the reliability of Face ID. I needn’t have worried. Once I set up my new iPhone 15 Pro Max with my previous apps and settings, a long process because I had forgotten to perform a more current backup than 3 months ago and I could no long access my old dead iPhone. In any event, once I had all apps and settings as I had before I proceeded to set up Face ID. It took less time than it did to set up my Touch ID. I shut the iPhone to try it out. No sooner than I picked up my iPhone and it was unlocked… no pause what so ever! WAY faster than Touch ID! I tried with and without glasses with readers. Never once did it hesitate even though I had the “Require Attention” enabled. Now I do NOT miss Touch ID. Well, not completely, the Apple Pay is more of a pain! Before I could use Touch ID at the gas pump or register before I was at the reader and it was instantly accepted. Now I have to double tap the side button to proceed. My sites that accept online Touch ID work the same with Face ID. The camera is nothing short of amazing! Overall color fidelity and detail is light years ahead of my previous iPhone. Photos taken in the dark are exactly as they appear with no colors casts I’ve seen before. My use is primarily for quality photos of images or documents for layout work. I’ve tried out the 25X zoom and it shows things I can barely see with my eyes alone. Portrait and Panorama are light years ahead of my previous iPhone. Vides are something I rarely do but in testing, these were very clear, with no motion issues. PHOTOS: - A remote house on top of a cliff, hundreds of yards across a river. - Same photo only zoomed in from within Photos app. - A girl on the beach on my side of the river. (With the naked eye she was just a spec of a person.) - Same photo only zoomed in from within Photos app. I purchased the Zagg screen protector and an Insignia clear case. Both are fantastic and work well with m new iPhone. The squared edges of the iPhone 15 Pro Max and case make for very easy handling. Bottom Line…. BEST purchase I’ve made!

Of course, it's about time Apple added USB C to the iPhone since my MacBook and iPad have already had it for years. No reason I should need a different charger for all my devices from the same manufacturer. Thank you EU. Besides that, this phone is WAY lighter than the brick that was the iPhone 14 Pro Max. That thing could have easily busted the window on a Cybertruck. 5x zoom is a plus as well. No, Android fanboys, nobody cares about 100x zoom or your ability to take a picture of the moon and nothing else. Nothing else really to say about it other than it's an iPhone and it does iPhone things, but faster than the other iPhones.

I ordered 2 Pro Max 15s with Verizon a little after launch. Verifying phone numbers took a few tries because Verizon’s system was slow to verify but I was able to get both the White (hardest) and Blue (easy) preordered successfully for launch day. The White is one of the most popular colors so I had to choose to have it delivered but the Blue was easy to get and I was able to choose in-store pickup at my local BB. I was a little worried they would have them on Day1 since these sold out so fast on the Apple site so I was checking constantly to see if it shipped or was ready for pickup. The day before I saw both processing so all was good!!! Bestbuy even overnighted the White one and I had both phones in hand on launch day. Great job BB! Verizon activation was an adventure though. I did an ICloud Restore which worked great but my 12pro had a physical SIM and the new ones since the 13 only have eSIM, meaning you can’t just transfer using the phone restore process. Long story short I ended up having to call and use chat as they kept messing up the activation and IMEI for each phone. They were pretty responsive and answered their calls in 10 mins or less but this could’ve been avoided if they set it up right from the start. Hopefully this is easier in the future with eSIM to eSIM activation. Make sure to have your phone backed up and your old phone handy to do all the Apple verifications! As for the phone itself, the 15 Pro Max is a huge upgrade for me coming from the 12 Pro: - USB-C finally! And with the Pro models you get the faster 10Mbps speeds which is great for larger pictures, RAW files and video or recording directly to an external SSD drive. - 120Hz screen with 2000nits. iPhone has always been smooth but the 120Hz is next level of smoothness and the brighter OLED is even better for HDR content. - WIFI 6E is great if you have a router or mesh system capable of the newer standard. My speeds increases about 30% to the max of my gigabit plan. - The new 5x optical “periscope” zoom is fantastic for further objects and the new “portrait” anytime mode is great as you can modify pictures later to change focus even if you didn’t shoot in Portrait mode. - Dynamic island isn’t new but it’s new to me and really adds nice interactive functionality while looking a lot nicer than the old notch. - 256GB minimum storage is excellent even though I use ICloud 2TB storage as my old 128GB was almost always full so less shuffling pictures and video to iCloud. - Titanium body is less fingerprint prone and it also makes the phone feel a lot lighter, almost the same as my 12 Pro. - The new A17 Pro chip is slightly faster overall and a good bit faster for graphics. I don’t really game on phone so not as big a deal for me. The increase in RAM from 6GB to 8GB is also nice for multitasking so I don’t need to close out apps as much. Overall I do notice the phone is more responsive with apps and even shutting down and booting up is a lot faster, which I had to do a lot during activation. The only negatives is the battery life isn’t as good as I thought it would be. Maybe because I had the phone open so much trying to troubleshoot, restore and activate but it seems to drain pretty fast. I’ve read the A17 pro chip isn’t as efficient as you’d expect on a new process mfg node, and the chip also seems to throttle more when using intensive processes, but that is more of an issue with TSMC 3nm process that all the phone chips are going to deal with. The titanium shell also seems prone to discoloration but I use a case (because kids) so not a huge deal to me. Still overall this is a pretty massive upgrade for me from the 12pro and BestBuy did a great job coming through. I also get AppleCare+ on both phones with my BestBuy Total membership, which more than pays for itself with AppleCare+ in 2 phones. Very happy!