Apple announces iPhone 15 with a big camera upgrade, the Dynamic Island, and more

Apple has just announced the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, and the big upgrade is the Dynamic Island from the iPhone 14 Pro. If you were hoping for a totally new iPhone 15 design, well, that’s not happening this year. This year’s iPhone looks largely the same as the iPhone 14 before it, with the iPhone 15 continuing to use a 6.1-inch display. The iPhone 15 will ship in pink, yellow, green, blue, black variants.

All models of the iPhone 15 will come with the Dynamic Island. That’s the pill-shaped cutout that first debuted on the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, providing a new way to see certain notifications and interact with apps. The iPhone 15 also has an OLED Super Retina display, which supports Dolby Vision content with 1,600 nits of brightness. The peak brightness of this display is 2,000 nits in sunlight, double that of the iPhone 14.

The biggest noticeable upgrade to the iPhone 15 outside of the Dynamic Island change is an improved camera system. The main camera sensor is moving to a 48-megapixel one, up from the 12-megapixel one found on the previous iPhone 14.

Last year’s iPhone 14 preserved much of the iPhone 13’s design, too. There was no Mini option last year, and one of the bigger iPhone 14 additions was Emergency SOS, an emergency messaging system that works via communication satellites when you’re out of range of a cell signal.

Apple is launching its latest iPhone 15 models alongside a new Apple Watch Series 9, which includes an upgraded chip with improved GPU performance, a second-generation ultra wideband chip, a “double-tap” feature, and more.