Is Apple falling behind Samsung? Well, I’m going to answer that because I have the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. I’ll compare everything, including the designs, displays, cameras, performance, and much more. So let’s dive deep into the iPhone 15 Pro Max vs the Samsung S23 Ultra.

TABLE OF CONTENT
Design Differences
Display Comparison
Action Button
USB-C Transfer Speeds
Speaker Comparison
Geekbench 6 CPU
Web Browsing Speed
Geekbench 6 GPU
3DMark Wildlife Gaming
Overheating and Thermal Test
Camera Comparison
Which One Should You Buy?

iPhone 15 Pro Max vs Samsung S23 Ultra: Design Differences

Getting straight into the designs: The iPhone 15 Pro Max has generally the same design as we’ve had since the 11 Pro. But this is the new blue titanium model. It is dark, almost like a navy blue. I actually kind of like it.

The only issue is the fingerprints on the sides. I thought the titanium would get rid of that. But it almost looks like it has worse fingerprints than the stainless steel on the S23 Ultra.

Now, both of them have a curved design, especially on the Samsung, but I love the new curved edges on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. It makes it feel a lot more comfortable in your hands. Honestly, it makes it feel thinner than the previous 14 Pro Max. Even though it’s slightly thicker now compared to the S23 Ultra.

They’re basically the same regarding thickness. But I don’t like this square design where it kind of digs right into your palm. It kind of gets annoying. This is just such a massive phone compared to the nice, soft-curved edges on the 15 Pro Max. So, I’ve got to say, in terms of comfort, the iPhone is the winner.

Now, comparing the camera bumps, they both look good. I like how Samsung has this flush glass design with the lenses right on the back, and I love Apple’s as well. It looks clean with this kind of glass step-out.

The interesting thing is this little glass square. It doesn’t look like the camera bump is massive. But in reality, it is huge when you look from the side. So much thicker than the one on the Samsung.

Even though the Samsung has a 10X telephoto lens compared to the new 5X, which Apple achieved. There’s some interesting stuff, which I’m going to get into in a minute. A 200-megapixel main camera on the Samsung compared to 48. So, I mean, Samsung, good job on not having a massive camera bump.

One interesting change that I’m noticing this year is that the iPhone is lighter than the Samsung. Only because of the titanium, making it about 10 percent lighter. So, this is nice because the Samsung’s heavier and larger, like it takes up so much more room in your pocket.

Samsung S23 Ultra vs iPhone 15 Pro Max: Display Comparison

The iPhone 15 Pro Max has the same 6.7-inch display as we had last year. There have been no changes to the features. Meanwhile, the Samsung S23 Ultra has a 6.9-inch display, so it has a larger display.

They both have 120-hertz displays with their adaptive refresh rate, or ProMotion. But I do like how the S23 Ultra has that little single-hole punch right there at the top. Compared to the dynamic island, which I will admit is very impressive and useful. It shows up with little notifications, accompanied by very nice animations. But the hole punch is smoother now.

One thing I do like about the iPhone is the super-slim bezels. How slim they are compared to the Samsung, especially the top and the bottom. They just stick out like a sore thumb. So, good job, Apple, with the super-thin bezels.

They both get super bright when you adjust them to maximum. Right now, the iPhone looks like it’s a little bit brighter than the Samsung. In terms of peak brightness, the iPhone will go up to 2,000 nits, compared to around 1,750 on the Samsung.

And yes, I went outside. I confirmed that the iPhone display is brighter. It’s brighter with full white screens like the Google homepage. Also with ones like The Verge, where there are a lot of darks and very bright whites.

The iPhone is still brighter in both scenarios. But when we get into HDR videos on YouTube. For some reason, the Samsung is quite a lot brighter for all these HDR scenes. The colors are actually popping more because of that.

So, it’s doing a better job. I don’t know if it’s the tuning or what with the software, but no doubt, S23 Ultra is winning here. Now with the displays out of the way, let’s jump into the speaker quality test.

S23 Ultra iPhone 15 Pro Max: Action Button

Now, this year, the iPhone 15 Action Button: Pro Max has two big things going for it on the exterior. One of them is the brand new action button, which is actually very unique.

Now, the Samsung did used to have the Bixby button. But everybody hated it because all it did was turn on Bixby, so they got rid of it. Now you only have the power button and volume buttons, but this action button is very, very cool.

Now, you can choose a bunch of different things, like silent mode. You have a focused camera. You could actually open up the camera and have it go straight to a photo or even a selfie. A video, a portrait selfie, very customizable: flashlight, voice memos. Basically, anything you want to do. This is a really cool and unique feature, and it’s going to be a lot of fun for people who upgrade.

iPhone 15 Pro Max vs S23 Ultra: USB-C Transfer Speeds

The second big thing is that Apple finally adopted the USB-C port. Now, I know a lot of you Android guys are going to say, “Yeah, we’ve had that for years,” but guess what?

The iPhone actually has a faster USB-C port. It supports 10 gigabit per second transfer speeds. While the Samsung S23 Ultra is more expensive, it only uses 5 gigabits per second. So, Apple actually came out and beat them, going from only USB 2 speeds at 480 megabits per second to 10 GB per second.

The cool thing for iPhone users this year is that you could charge a bunch of things with a USB C port. For example, I plugged in the AirPods Pro USBC-to-Lightning cable, which was really cool. Plug in a phone cooler. It works using MagSafe to get rid of the overheating issues that people are complaining about on the 15 Pro. By the way, this thing gets freezing cold. And you can even charge the S23 Ultra from the iPhone.

Now, of course, this thing can do all those things, but it’s cool for iPhone users. Even better, you might not know this, but you could actually plug in a USB-C hub. It’s powering it on. Basically, you can plug in a ton of different things. This is awesome. All of that makes me very excited. Everybody thought that Apple would limit the USB-C port. But they’re letting it go free with full support, like you have on a Samsung or other Android device.

Speaker Comparison

All right, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is actually louder, and it sounds better than the S23 Ultra. This is interesting because last year, the S23 Ultra actually destroyed the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

So, the iPhone 15 matched the 14 and then exceeded it with a lot more volume and bass, everything sounds very good. The iPhone 15 Pro Max is definitely the winner in speaker comparison.

Geekbench 6 CPU

Starting with the Geekbench 6 CPU. We have the A17 Pro chip on the iPhone, clocking at 3.77 gigahertz with 8 GB of RAM. On the S23 Ultra, we have 3.36 gigahertz, so this should theoretically have a lower single-core score. But with that said, I ran the CPU test.

I have our scores. Wow, it looks like the A17 Pro is still way ahead in the CPU department. In single-core, it’s 45% faster, and in multi-core, it’s 36% faster. So, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is definitely way ahead.

Web Browsing Speed

Let’s test Speedometer 2.0, the web browser benchmark, to see the web browsing performance.

There’s our score, and wow! Over twice as fast for general web browsing speed. That might be because the S23 Ultra is using Chrome. The iPhone’s using Safari, which is extremely optimized. It’s made by Apple, so it fully supports all the features. The iPhone 15 Pro Max is definitely the winner here.

Geekbench 6 GPU

Going back to Geekbench, I ran the GPU Benchmark Metal on the iPhone and on the S23. Whoa, this doesn’t make sense right here because we have 27,329 for the iPhone and only 9,398 for the Samsung.

So, it seems like, for some reason, Geekbench 6 is not really doing well in terms of cross-platform ability.

3DMark Wildlife Gaming

So, I did another test. We have a 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Unlimited test for both of them. It’s very good at utilizing the GPU for gaming performance. I ran for both of them.

I got the results, and take a look at that! Samsung is beating the iPhone in the first test in the GPU, ever so slightly, at 21 fps compared to 20.8 fps on the iPhone.

The Apple A17 Pro GPU is actually falling behind because Samsung’s about to have the New SD 8 Gen 3 coming out very soon.

Overheating and Thermal Test

I want to take a step further with the 20-minute Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. It’s going to show us a chart of the actual average FPS going down. This will help us see which one’s overheating more. There are reports of the A17 Pro overheating quite badly. They’ve really pushed a lot of wattage into the chip and the GPU in particular. I got my little thermal seek camera to see the difference in temps.

The iPhone’s actually hitting about 30 FPS, no problem, while the S23 Ultra hits about 22 to 25. So definitely smoother FPS on the iPhone so far. The FPS is dramatically lower than that of the S23 Ultra. This is weird. Is it overheating already?

Recording the backs, we have a hot spot on the Samsung of 41 degrees Celsius, which is pretty hot. Going over to the iPhone, it was also 41 degrees Celsius. So there are really no differences, but it does look like the heat is more spread out on the Samsung. That’s probably because of the cooling of the vapor chamber. For some reason, Apple is refusing to put it on their iPhone.

It looks like Apple’s actually throttling the A17 Pro chip more than the S23 Ultra is. The S23 Ultra is running at a higher frame rate, it’s clearly more smooth.

So, what I want to do is turn these over on the back so that we get a more accurate thermal reading. On the S23 Ultra, we have 45 degrees Celsius. Then, over on the iPhone, we have 45 degrees Celsius. So, it is still throttling a little bit.

Once again, the heat distribution on that S23 Ultra is spreading the heat. On the iPhone, there’s a hot spot, which tends to cause more throttling since all the heat is focused there. Of course, the S23 Ultra is a little bit bigger, so it can handle more heat with a bigger spread.

The first test is high for the iPhone: 3,996, compared to the best loop score of 3,755 for the Samsung. So a little bit better for the iPhone. But you get a bigger drop on the iPhone with only a stability of 62.5 percent. That’s basically the difference between the best score and the worst score. Whereas with the S23 Ultra, it’s able to keep the performance higher before throttling.

The iPhone definitely drops off lower because of thermal throttling. But in the end, it still has a higher lowest loop score of 2,498 compared to 2,407. So, it looks like the iPhone 15 Pro Max is still winning.

iPhone 15 Pro Max vs Samsung S23 Ultra: Camera Comparison

The cool new feature on the iPhone, starting with selfies, is the ‘F’ button. So, if I click it, it actually turns on portrait mode because the AI algorithms actually detected my face. The S23 Ultra has better quality because it has a 40-megapixel selfie camera compared to 12 on the iPhone. The quality is a lot better on the Samsung, so it definitely wins for selfies.

Moving on to the ultra-wide camera. First of all, the HDR is better on the iPhone because of Smart HDR 5. But the quality is actually better, as far as I can tell, on the Samsung for ultra-wides. But now let’s get into the new 5x camera on the 15 Pro Max.

Using the 10x camera on the S23 Ultra, which is a big advantage for it compared to the 5x, which I digitally zoomed up to 10. You could definitely see that we have higher quality on the S23 Ultra.

Then we have a far-range shot showing off the difference in terms of detail and text. You can see the 10x right; there’s definitely an insane amount of extra detail on the S23 Ultra’s 10x camera. And by the way, this is actually 25x set on both of them. And here we just went all out. This is a hundred X on the S23 Ultra and 25x, which is the maximum for the iPhone. So, if we zoom in and try to match up the framing of both, the iPhone looks terrible. It’s hard to tell it’s a building compared to the Samsung, which looks much better for far range.

Here I’m comparing the 50-megapixel camera on the Samsung compared to the 48, which is HEIF Max on the iPhone. So, once again, let’s do some pixel-peeping. And as it turns out, the iPhone’s 48-megapixel camera looks to be a little bit better than the 50 on the Samsung.

Then we’re actually testing the 200-megapixel camera mode on the S23 Ultra.

So, let’s zoom in really close. And surprisingly, the iPhone actually isn’t that far off. You see more smoothing and compression artifacts on the Samsung. There’s over-sharpening on the iPhone. But I do think the 200 is a little bit better.

Finally, in a 10x low-light shot, we had a lot of the lights off. It looks like the Samsung actually turns off the 10x camera and uses a crop from the main. The iPhone has more noise, but it’s definitely more detailed. The 5x lens has an f/2.8 aperture, so it can stay on and collect enough light in low-light situations. This is compared to the 10x, which operates around f/4.8 or 4.9. It doesn’t get enough light, so it shuts off and switches to the main.

Which One Should You Buy?

With all that said, let’s answer the original question: Is the iPhone 15 Prox Max falling behind the S23 Ultra? Honestly, I’m kind of liking it. I was expecting to get worse performance, and that stress test actually beat it out. We have the new action button, and we have USB-C, which is now twice as fast as on the S23 Ultra. I’d argue you have a better design language that fits more comfortably in your hand. You have the dynamic island, and the camera is better in multiple ways.

So, I’ve got to say I’m giving the win to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Now, of course, we’re getting the new S24 Ultra very soon, so I’ll have to see when that comes out and do this test again.