Here are the hard facts after doing some research:
Long story short, from a hardware camera / photography point of view, the only real reason to get a 15 model is if you know you‘ll use the 120 mm tele lens from the Pro Max a lot.
Edit: If you want to call this a „hardware improvement“, there is apparently a new nanoscale coating on the wide-angle lens to reduce lens flare. Better than nothing, I guess.
- The main 1x camera on both new Pro models is exactly the same as on the 14 Pro / Pro Max. No new sensor, no new glass.
- The ultra wide 0,5x camera on both new Pro models is also exactly the same as on the 14 Pro / Pro Max. No new sensor, no new glass.
- The 3x tele camera on the 15 Pro is exactly the same as on the 14 Pro / Pro Max, which was already exactly the same as on the 13 Pro / Pro Max. Again, no new sensor, no new glass.
- The 5x tele camera on the 15 Pro Max is indeed brand new. Sadly, it replaces the 3x camera instead of being added. So on the Pro Max, you now have native optical focal lengths of 13 mm, 24 mm and 120 mm. For my personal use cases, this is actually worse than the native optical focal lengths trio of the regular Pro at 13 mm, 24 mm and 77 mm. The gap between 24 and 120 is huge and for me 77 is a more frequently usable focal length than 120.
Long story short, from a hardware camera / photography point of view, the only real reason to get a 15 model is if you know you‘ll use the 120 mm tele lens from the Pro Max a lot.
Edit: If you want to call this a „hardware improvement“, there is apparently a new nanoscale coating on the wide-angle lens to reduce lens flare. Better than nothing, I guess.
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