The iPhone 15 will be announced in September 2023 and it will be one of the biggest events in the tech calendar. It could also be hugely significant for Apple’s biggest iPhone Pro. The beleaguered iPhone Pro Max has stumbled through the past four years, struggling to really find its identity. That could all change next month with a change of direction.
Rumours suggest that with the iPhone 15, Apple is going to widen the gap between its top-tier iPhones, taking the iPhone 15 Pro Max and renaming it to iPhone 15 Ultra – and what a name that would be. The Pro Max name has never sat well with me, it sounded compromised, as though it’s the iPhone that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. But Ultra is a name, it’s the best of the best – it gives Apple’s top phone the distinction it deserves.
But the only difference between these top two devices in the past has been the size of the display and the battery capacity. Since its inception in 2018 as the iPhone XS Max, there has been no other difference between Apple’s flagship models since the iPhone 7 Plus which introduced a dual camera arrangement to better the regular iPhone 7. Now Apple might be about to shake things up and make the Ultra truely worthy of the name.
What will be different in the iPhone 15 Ultra?
Before we look at the actual differences, let’s talk about the name. Cynics might say that Apple is just copying Samsung. Yes, Samsung pulled exactly the same trick in 2020, taking the Galaxy S20 and introducing the Galaxy S20 Ultra as a new flagship tier. But Apple has already set the precedent for making this move – and it did it without anyone noticing.
In 2022, Apple announced the Apple Watch Ultra. It wasn’t the Apple Watch Pro, or the Apple Watch Plus, or the Apple Watch Pro Max – it was the Apple Watch Ultra. It’s a wonderful name for a device that’s been wonderfully received – and it also put the Ultra name into Apple nomenclature. This move to Ultra naming was suggested in 2022 just after the launch of the iPhone 14 and it makes perfect sense now.
But just like Samsung’s Ultra, there needs to be an actual difference in the hardware and functionality to deserve the name – and it looks like Apple is going to use the camera, just as Samsung did. Rumours suggest that Apple will introduce a periscope telephoto lens on the iPhone 15 Ultra – and this will allow much greater zoom than previous iPhone models. There are even reports surfacing that the iPhone 15 Ultra will be slightly delayed while Sony supplies the hardware, so anticipation will build while fans wait to buy the phone.
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The exact details of this new camera have not been revealed, but the advantage that the iPhone 15 Ultra has is size: there’s more space to accommodate the hardware needed for this sort of lens than there is in more compact iPhone models. Taking an educated guess, I’d predict that Apple would want 5x optical zoom from it – that would make to properly competitive.
I’m sure there will be talk about how the Photonic Engine will analyse and refine the images, along with other hardware and software aimed at boosting the performance and quality, but ultimately, the advantage for the iPhone 15 Ultra user will be that you can zoom in further than ever before for even better photos.
Surely, that’s got to be worth the Ultra name?
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