Gsmarena just wrote a "do not buy" recommendation. The pro they like. The plain 15 they feel is underpowered and overpriced and has usb2 speeds behind the usb-c where the pro goes 10gigabits.
I actually think that’s a terrible take. Maybe they are just salty about the USB speeds, a feature that is irrelevant for the vast majority of people. The A17 in the Pro is an extremely marginal improvement over the A16 of about 10%.
The iPhone 15 vs 14 has the better main camera with 4x the resolution, usb-c charging, dynamic island, upgraded processor, and twice the peak brightness. Seems like a totally solid upgrade for MSRP 100 bucks!
It can have USB0 speeds and it would make no difference. Since iCloud and Airdrop over a decade ago, I haven't synched a photo or file from or to my iPhone since.
But many people care more about spec comparisons than real life impact.
There are probably plenty of reasons to skip the 15, but this is about as niche as it comes. Survey nearly any user and ask about the transfer speed between lightning, usb2 and usb3 and the most common answer will be "no idea and who cares?" I'm a techy and I haven't plugged in my phone for data transfer in years. Complain that Apple pinched pennies here, but it matters to almost no end users. And those few who do care, would likely get the Pro anyway.
I haven't plugged my 13 into anything, ever. Magnetic charging, iCloud, and AirDrop do the trick. It's not a bad place to cheap out on the entry-level devices.
To me it’s interesting that a phone with that much battery life, CPU, memory, fast Wi-Fi, hi-res OLED display, and a pretty great camera is considered entry-level. It comes with an office suite and great music and video production apps.
The chip inside the iPhone 15 doesn’t have the redesigned I/O block from the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s also the same chip that was designed and used in the iPhone 14 Pro, which had Lightning and USB 2.0.
So they are possibly, more or less, using a chip that was designed for USB 2.0 over Lightning, with an integrated Lightning to USB-C adapter.
The alternative is a full chip redesign, which is not cheap, especially when the iPhone 16s will inherit the redesign next year.
USB3 isn't just a free upgrade though. It costs in terms of routing (extra wires/pins), it costs in terms of power (USB3 uses way more power during transfers), and it costs more in terms of silicon area, obviously. If the USB3 controller is as large as portrayed in the die shots for the new chip, that's actually a considerable cost in die area alone.
It's disingenuous to say "it was released 14 years ago, what took so long?". Plenty of old technology is used when it is appropriate. If there's no valuable reason to adopt newer standards, it's a waste of money and engineering effort. The only reason, as far as I can tell, that other vendors all have USB3 is because Qualcomm put it in their chipset and forces vendors to buy it.
Also, to nitpick, they're supporting 10gbit speeds for the pro, which was a spec released 6 years ago. Relatively recent as far as spec adoption goes.
Also, to nitpick, I have Transcend JetFlash 780 thumb drive from 2014 which allows me to copy files faster than 25MB/s. It wasn't released 6 years ago.
Well, it's fairly obvious if you are reading the tea leaves that they never intended to move on from Lightning, but the EU forced their hand. There's no rational logic otherwise for delaying the move so long.
Also, it takes 1-3 years to design a chip. Apple's probably finished with the A18 design at this moment and working on A19. They might, honestly, even be nearly finished with A19 and talking about A20. When the A16 was designed, the idea of being forced to move to USB-C was probably not a consideration, and they were probably still hoping that the wireless accessories / MagSafe system would take off even though it clearly hasn't by now. Which is stupid on their part but as an investor, I wouldn't want them to waste a billion or so for the sake of undoing the past to give USB 3 on iPhone 15s.
unless they mysteriously want to backup 128gb of stuff. then it more than matters. the speed difference is absurd.
normal people cant care less what majority thinks, because they (normal people) know that in 2023 this is spit in the face for extreme amount of money. none of fanboy excuses can change that.
I can understand some very niche use cases, so it totally makes sense on the Pro. Like if you are using an iPhone for professional video work (sounds suspicious, but let’s go with that) then you can shoot in 4k raw directly onto a SSD. Or if you are doing some video editing on iPhone and want to hook up a 4k display.
People get so weird about this stuff though. I never once heard a complaint that iPhone was limited to USB2 speeds till the Pro finally upgraded to Usb3.
While "do not buy" is too strong, I would agree that the Pro seems like a better deal than in other years. This is probably on purpose, a way to nudge people to buy the Pro, which I'm sure has bigger margins. (I still wouldn't buy it.)
Blanket recommendations almost useless. There are a lot of different situations someone might be in (e.g. someone might have a five year old iPhone and their carrier is offering an incentive).
120Hz is useless without a stack that can run it. My 14 is supposed to have 60Hz, but scrolling through a lyrics page in an Apple Music would have you believe it’s 6Hz.
I’d much rather they go through and fix all the jank that already exists scattered across the floor than raise the ceiling some more.
