The iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max pack three upgrades that will turn these iPhones into the best handheld gaming consoles out there.
The contraption in the image above isn’t ChatGPT responding to a prompt asking it to imagine a portable PS5. It’s the $199 PlayStation Portal that Sony wants you to buy so you can play PS5 games on the go. But the device only streams games from your console over your home Wi-Fi. It’s not a Switch or Steam Deck alternative that you can take with you when you leave home.
The iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max that Apple just launched could give the PS5 a run for its money. While the iPhone 15 Pro costs more than the PS5 and PlayStation Portal combined, it does have a few exciting upgrades that can turn the device into a full-fledged portable console. It also has one glaring problem that Apple has to fix.
The A17 Pro’s impressive power
I’ve talked extensively about the A17 Pro chip that powers the iPhone 15 Pros because this piece of hardware is genuinely exciting. The iPhone 15 Pro doesn’t just blow Android out of the water in benchmark tests. It also outscores M2 MacBook Air and Pro models, proving Apple’s still-uncontested superiority in the chip-making business.
The most impressive moment from Apple’s A17 Pro segment during the iPhone 15 event concerned gaming. The A17 Pro chip features a redesigned GPU that offers support for ray tracing on iPhone. Therefore, this is the most important iPhone 15 Pro component for turning the iPhone into a PS5 rival.
I also pointed out that the upcoming M3 MacBooks will feature similar GPU upgrades. But the M3 will pack an even bigger punch when it comes to gaming because it can support even more GPU cores than the iPhone 15 Pro.
