Finally upgrading to a new phone - 3 years seems to be my cut-off if I’m buying my own devices. This year I’m going with the iPhone 15 Plus. Top 3 reasons for upgrading from my iPhone 12 below:
USB-C - Finally. Goodbye Lightning, I won’t miss you. The one pain point of switching over to an iPhone has been Lightning, and now that’s gone.
Improved main camera on the base line iPhone 15 models. Finally a jump to a higher res sensor. Photonic engine, a 2x optical quality “zoom”, and a whole bevvy of other camera upgrades should make this feel like a newer device.
Larger device means much better battery and larger screen. Not only are we cutting down a cable, we’re cutting out a battery pack and getting rid of the iPad Mini! Goodbye to battery anxiety, and hello to a lighter carry.
Why the Plus and not the Pro models?
Price point is considerably higher on the Pro models.
Extra features like the telephoto, ProRAW, ProRES recording to external storage, USB3 speeds, hardware ray tracing, etc don’t feel like they’re something I would use regularly enough to justify the purchase.
Long lead times for shipping - I’m a sucker for getting my device sooner, it’s why I went with the regular 12 instead of the 12 Mini at the time!
Along with the new phone I grabbed the 2nd Generation AirPods Pro with the USB-C case, those should be arriving today. This is both an effort to eliminate Lightning, but also the battery in my first gen Pros is getting a bit short after 3 years. I’m looking forward to hearing the improvements in sound quality and testing out adaptive transparency and the speech detection features.
Overall the phone upgrade has become a bit pedestrian at this point. We’re really at the point of small incremental upgrades like cars see year over year, and the desire to jump to something new is not at all as strong. I’m happy the chase is finally over.