A new Action Button gives users more customization than ever

Fact checked by Jerri Ledford

Apple's latest flagship brings major upgrades without a price hike.

Apple just announced the iPhone 15 Pro at its 'Wonderlust' event in California, and it features a host of upgrades.

A new grade-five titanium design makes the iPhone 15 Pro the lightest iPhone to date. Apple claims it's also its most durable phone yet, thanks to a special PVD coating. As before, Apple will offer Pro in a 6.1-inch model and a 6.7-inch 'Max' variant. The company has also redesigned the internal design of the iPhone Pro to make it more repairable and make more use of recycled materials. A new 'Action Button' replaces the iPhone 14 Pro's old ringer switch. Users can program the button to complete custom tasks. For instance, you can configure the button to begin recording a voice memo. It can also turn on the phone's flashlight, open the camera app, and more. Apple is also introducing a new Standby display mode that activates when the phone is placed in a landscape orientation on a wireless charger.

Internally, the iPhone 15 Pro features Apple's new 3-nanometer A17 Pro chipset. According to the company, the new chip's two high-performance cores are 10 percent faster than its previous generation chip. Additionally, the built-in neural engine is up to two times faster. As for the A17 Pro's GPU, it's not only faster, but it also supports hardware-based ray tracing, a feature that will allow game studios to add more realistic lighting to their releases.

Like the iPhone 15, the iPhone 15 Pro features USB-C connectivity, but the A17 Pro features a dedicated USB controller that enables 10Gbps data transfers. Of course, Apple has also gone all out updating the iPhone 15 Pro's camera array. It includes an updated 48-megapixel main camera that Apple claims is better at capturing low-light photos and is less susceptible to lens flare (sorry, J.J. Abrams). Additionally, the camera allows users to change focal lengths. You can snap photos at 24mm, 28mm and 35mm focal lengths. The included telephoto camera also offers up to 5x optical zoom and a 120mm focal length.

The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are available to pre-order starting September 15. The former starts at $999 for the 128GB model, with the latter starting at $1,119. Shipping starts on September 22.

Separately, Apple announced that iOS 17, the next iteration of its mobile operating system, will arrive as a free update on Monday, September 18. The company has been publicly testing the new software since this past June when it first previewed iOS 17 at its annual WWDC conference. The update will bring a host of new features, including a redesigned call screen that users can customize to their liking and a Check-In, a feature that alerts trusted contacts when you’ve arrived at a destination safely.

Update 09/12/2023: Added information about the release of iOS 17 in paragraph 6.

Read the original article on Lifewire.