Is the latest iPhone Plus better than a three-year-old flagship? Here’s how the 15 Plus and 12 Pro Max compare to each other.
Featuring an updated processor, build, screen, and cameras, it’s hard to not recommend the iPhone 15 Plus, especially when it’s up against a dated flagship.
Although the iPhone 12 Pro Max is still a good phone today and isn’t a dinosaur by any means, it might be time to retire it if you want something a little faster with a better display and excellent photo-taking abilities.
The iPhone 15 is here, including the iPhone 15 Plus, which is in the middle of the iPhone pack. This means it's been about three years since the iPhone 12 launched, so the flagship iPhone 12 Pro Max is getting a little old. But is it so old that even the more midrange iPhone 15 Plus is just as good or even better? Here's how the latest midrange iPhone compares to a venerable flagship, and whether you should upgrade to the 15 Plus.
You can now preorder an iPhone 15 Plus through Apple, Best Buy, and major cellular carriers. Once it launches fully on Sept. 22, you'll even be able to purchase it from other outlets like Amazon. The base model of the iPhone 15 Plus comes with 128GB of storage and costs $900, and the 256GB and 512GB models cost an extra $100 and $300, respectively. You'll also be able to pick up a brand-new case for the 15 Plus before it even launches.
Having launched in 2020, the iPhone 12 Pro Max has disappeared from Apple's website as a product you can buy new, though refurbished models are still available. It's possible, though difficult, to find the 12 Pro Max in new condition, so you may have to settle for a refurbished model, and you should expect to pay at least $650 either way for the base 128GB model, and potentially as much as $900 if stock continues to dry up.
The iPhone 15 Plus and iPhone 12 Pro Max are pretty similar when it comes to shape, sharing nearly identical dimensions, though the 12 Pro Max is a little thinner. However, the 15 Plus is significantly lighter, at 7.09 ounces (or 201g) compared to the 8.04 ounces (or 228g) that the 12 Pro Max weighs.
Although these two iPhones are three generations apart and in different classes, they're really not that different. They come in different colors, and the 12 Pro Max has a clearly different camera with three lenses instead of the two on the 15 Plus, but otherwise, they stick to the same design principles that Apple has been employing for a few years. They do, however, differ in what materials they use. The 15 Plus uses aluminum instead of the stainless steel found in the 12 Pro Max, which is also one of the reasons why it's significantly lighter.
One new thing the iPhone 15 Plus brings to the table is an updated Super Retina XDR display, which can hit up to 2,000 nits peak brightness. The iPhone 12 Pro Max also has a Super Retina XDR display, but it only goes up to 1,200 nits. Both are pretty bright, but that extra brightness on the 15 Plus will help in direct sunlight, and it should make everything (particularly HDR content) more accurate.
Although these two iPhones are three generations apart and in different classes, they're really not that different.
There are a couple of other minor differences between the displays. The 15 Plus has a slimmer bezel than the 12 Pro Max, and it has a Dynamic Island instead of a notch. While this still means there's a hole at the top of the display, it's a feature that can display information rather than merely a thing that exists to get the screen-to-body ratio higher. Otherwise, the displays on both models are pretty similar, even down to the pixel density, which is roughly 460 pixels per inch on both the 15 Plus and 12 Pro Max.
Additionally, the iPhone 15 Plus is one of the first iPhones to use USB Type-C. While this new port doesn't bring better charging or faster data transfers, it's generally considered an upgrade over Lightning since Type-C is more ubiquitous. No more inconvenient moments where you're in need of a Lightning cable, but all your friends use Android and only have USB.
Overall, the iPhone 15 Plus has three advantages compared to the iPhone 12 Pro Max. It's 10% lighter, has a significantly brighter screen, and features USB Type-C. Individually, these benefits aren't that big, but together, they're a decent improvement over the 2020 iPhone flagship.
While you can obviously expect the iPhone 15 Plus to use a newer and better processor than the iPhone 12 Pro Max, it's not a three-generation difference like the names would imply. The 15 Plus uses the older A16 Bionic that featured in the iPhone 14 flagships, while the iPhone 12 Pro Max uses the A14 Bionic, which was the latest chip at the time, so we're looking at a two-generation gap here.
These chips are similar in many ways. They're built on the same process node and come with the same amount of CPU cores. However, the A16 has some significant advantages, like having nearly double the total cache, a GPU with five cores instead of four, and a significantly higher CPU clock speed. The A16 is roughly 25% faster and more power efficient than the A14, which isn't a huge improvement, but it's not bad either.
While the iPhone 12 Pro Max is getting a bit old, it's not so old that it'll miss out on iOS 17, the latest version and the one that the iPhone 15 Plus will ship with. iOS 17 will feature lots of improvements to the communication aspect of the iPhone experience, introducing FaceTime voicemail, Contact Posters for customizing the details of your contacts, and Name Drop, which is essentially a way to give other iPhone users a virtual business card. The 12 Pro Max can also be expected to run iOS 17 about as well as the 15 Plus, given that the A14 isn't that far behind the A16 even in the most intensive workloads.
Again, because the new USB Type-C port doesn't actually change anything on a technical level, both the iPhone 15 Plus and iPhone 12 Pro Max have the same charging capabilities: 20W wired, 15W via MagSafe, and 7.5W through Qi wireless charging. We don't have official specifications for the battery size of the 15 Plus at this time, but considering the 14 Plus had a nearly 4,400mAh battery, we can expect the 15 Plus to match that, and that would be a significant improvement over the 12 Pro Max's 3,687mAh battery.
While the 15 Plus lacks the telephoto lens of the iPhone 12 Pro Max, its main camera offers what is perhaps the most stark difference so far. It uses the same 48MP main camera as the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max, which have some of the best phone cameras today. The 12 Pro Max's main camera is just 12MP, and it also has a much larger pixel size, which means photos on the 15 Plus will just generally look better, crisper, and less blurry or fuzzy. However, the 12 Pro Max does retain an advantage in quality when zoomed in since it has a telephoto lens.
The selfie camera on the 15 Plus is also slightly improved, with a tighter aperture for better lighting, phase detection autofocus (or PDAF), and TrueDepth, which isn't so much about photography as it is about all the automatic and dynamic stuff your iPhone can do just by looking around. Overall image quality will be pretty similar for both phones when it comes to selfies, since these improvements are relatively minor compared to what's going on with the main camera on the 15 Plus. Still, the 15 Plus's better autofocus will definitely make photo taking a more convenient experience.
While you can find good deals on the iPhone 12 Pro Max today, it's hard to not recommend the iPhone 15 Plus given that it's in much better supply and has a set of improvements that are altogether pretty substantial. The 15 Plus is faster, has more battery life, a brighter display, USB Type-C, and better cameras. At most, you're probably spending about $270 more for the 15 Plus, and that price gap will only decline as the 12 Pro Max slowly becomes less and less available.
If you're considering upgrading from your iPhone 12 Pro Max, you're not getting a ton of improvements with the iPhone 15 Plus overall. Still, if you primarily care about battery life, screen quality, and photography prowess, then you might benefit quite a bit from what the 15 Plus offers.
Featuring an updated processor, build, screen, and cameras, it’s hard to not recommend the iPhone 15 Plus, especially when it’s up against a dated flagship.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 12 Pro Max can make sense if you can find it for just below $700, and although it still looks pretty modern, it does have some disadvantages, particularly its battery size and main camera. The 12 Pro Max is by no means toast, but it's getting up in years, and its dwindling supply means it will get more expensive and harder to find brand new. If you want the 12 Pro Max, get it while it's cheap; otherwise, get the 15 Plus or something in the iPhone 13 or 14 lineup.
Although the iPhone 12 Pro Max is still a good phone today and isn’t a dinosaur by any means, it might be time to retire it if you want something a little faster with a better display and excellent photo-taking abilities.
Matthew is a PC Hardware Writer at XDA, having previously written for Digital Trends, Tom’s Hardware, and other publications since 2018. He’s mainly interested in the three way fight between AMD, Intel, and Nvidia in PCs and servers. He also has a degree in history and linguistics.