Life among the flagships gets you Apple’s fanciest features, some of which are familiar at this point. For instance, the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s 6.7-inch OLED screen runs at the same resolution as last year’s model, though it goes brighter and has slightly slimmer bezels. It features the same Dynamic Island, too, hiding the TrueDepth front camera in an animated notifications and status bubble.
It still supports IP68 dust and water resistance, 5G (in sub-6 and mmWave flavors), and Bluetooth 5.3. New for 2023 is a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip that boasts more range and brings AirTags-style directional pinpointing to Find My Friends (just as long as said friends have also bought an iPhone 15 series phone). An embedded Thread radio will, once it’s activated later on, allow the iPhone 15 Pro max to connect directly to a Thread smart home router.
Apple’s satellite system — which allows the iPhone 15 Pro Max to communicate, sluggishly but potentially life-savingly, via satellites when out of carrier range and assuming a clear line of sight to the sky – is also present, with two years of Emergency SOS service out of the box. For 2023, there’s also Roadside Assistance via satellite, summoning AAA to your broken-down vehicle. It’ll be covered by AAA membership, while non-members will get a rundown of the costs involved before help is dispatched.
iPhone ownership has never been cheap, but the iPhone 15 Pro Max nudges Apple’s smartphone into even more expensive territory. For 2023, it kicks off at $1,199 — $100 more than the starting price of last year’s iPhone 14 Pro Max — though that’s in part because Apple has done away with the 128GB configuration. Now, you get 256GB of storage as a minimum, or up to 1TB for a heady $1,599.
