iFixit specialists disassembled the new iPhone 15 Pro Max, showing how its tetraprism works and more.

You can see that the tetraprism is quite compact and is a single piece, probably made of glass. Technically, this solution is simpler than the periscope modules common on a number of other smartphones.

You can also see that the main camera sensor appears to be identical in size to the sensor in the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

On the motherboard you can see not only the three-nanometer A17 Pro chip, unique for the market, but also the Qualcomm Snapdragon X70 5G modem.

The teardown also reveals that the rear glass is now fairly easy to remove, prompting Apple to more than halve the replacement price for that same glass.

The maintainability of the new Apple flagship was rated by source specialists as only 4 points out of 10 possible. But this is not because of the technical part, but because Apple has again complicated the repair process for third-party specialists, requiring calibration of all major components after replacement.

Apple has launched the first consumer SoC based on the 3 nm process technology. However, it seems that even this platform in the new iPhones is overheating. Tests show that the GPU in the A17 Pro may be inferior to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC even in the Galaxy S23 Ultra, where Qualcomm’s flagship platform is not implemented in the best way.

In the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme test, the Samsung flagship both initially shows a higher result and behaves much better over time: performance decreases gradually, while for the iPhone 15 Pro Max it drops sharply, but then remains almost unchanged.

More specifically, the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s GPU performance dropped by 28% after 20 runs of the test, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s GPU performance dropped by 22% after just one run.

It is hardly worth drawing conclusions from one test, but still one is very indicative.

It seems that thanks to the fact that Apple installed its tetraprism-based camera with five times magnification in the iPhone 15 Pro Max, at least one new model with a periscope “telephoto” will appear on the market. Realme, apparently, is preparing just such a thing.

Apple’s influence here is not taken out of thin air. As you can see, Realme clearly refers to the new product of the Cupertino giant, stating that not only Max can zoom.

At the same time, there has long been a real leader in zoom on the market in the form of the Samsung flagship, and this leader has been replaced several times, and no one can compete with it, but Realme is talking specifically about the iPhone and is preparing its new product precisely after the release of the iPhone. Be that as it may, it is not yet clear what kind of smartphone it will be and when to expect it.

Interestingly, Realme has already released a smartphone with a periscope telephoto camera. This was the Realme X3 SuperZoom model, which was released back in 2020, but for some reason after that the company did not experiment with such a solution anymore.