Apple is in the strange position of having to slowly improve a product while also trying to reinvent it.
Some say their success requires them making small, evolutionary steps seem revolutionary. I don’t quite agree with that.
As iPhones become better and better over the years, small steps eventually bring tip-over points, when technology starts to enable things that we couldn’t imagine years before. These developments enable not mere steps, but leaps forward: the iPhone X’s all-screen form factor and Face ID; iPhone 7’s Portrait mode; last year’s Dynamic Island and 48 megapixel main camera.
So here’s iPhone 15 Pro Max. This year brings a leap in materials and silicon, but marks an evolutionary photography step. Or does it?
I have to get this out of the way: I find physical camera design important. It seems superficial, but camera design has been a playground and muse for artists and designers through the history of photography. There’s nothing more magical to design than a box that traps light and converts it to creativity.
Few companies appreciate this, but Apple certainly did this year. The new Pro line depart from jewel-like appearance of last year. Gone are the reflective, shiny polished stainless steel rails, replaced with an almost imperceptible brushed finish titanium frame that feels fantastic and grippy thanks to its soft finish. The rounded edges make it comfortable in the hand and contoured to your fingers. It might be an illusion, but even the clearance and contour of the buttons make the entire thing feel more tactile.
For the first time, I actually shot the new iPhone on the old one. This product shot was captured with the iPhone 14 Pro.
I chose the iPhone 15 Pro Max this year, as its optical zoom lens extends to 5× the default camera, or a 120mm focal length equivalent . Its smaller, non-Max sibling maintains its excellent 3× lens.
My previous Large iPhone Experiences— especially iPhone 12 Pro Max— were enough to make me prefer the smaller screen sizes for every subsequent release. Even my standard-sized iPhone 14 Pro felt borderline too large and heavy.
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I went into the 15 Pro Max expecting a little discomfort with a giant slab of glass and metal in my hand, but to my surprise, it felt manageable. That titanium frame and rounder edges really make a difference. If next year’s standard size models offer same telephoto lens, I’m not sure if I’ll downsize. It’s that comfortable.
Tactile feedback improves camera usability, and there’s a reason that dedicated cameras still have physical buttons: it’s hard to make tapping glass feel satisfying. This year we gained a button, which we’ll dive into later.
Ultra Wide
We’ll kick off this review looking at the lens that has come standard on every iPhone for the last four years: the ultra wide. Its sensor and lens are unchanged, according to Apple — with the notable exception of the coatings on the lenses, which means fewer flares and reflections when shooting into light sources. Additionally, the ultra wide camera benefits from better processing.
Its field of view remains so incredibly wide that if you don’t watch yourself, your body can accidentally end up in your frame. This is a solid, sharp lens that’s always fun, because there’s almost no framing involved.
I noted very clear improvements in its handling of very bright light: while the occasional ghost can glint around the viewfinder, it happens a lot less often. In the dark it does fine, but in daylight, it does great. Shots are incredibly detailed and sharp, and the macro mode is astonishingly close focusing.
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One thing that I’d love in a future iPhone: an extra ‘lens’ in between this hyper-ultra wide and the regular camera, offering me a 16/18mm equivalent field of view. It would help keep subjects framed with a bit less distortion near the edges and fewer accidental finger photos. Hopefully this can be achieved similar to 2× mode, using a higher-resolution sensor that creates a virtual lens.
Main
Last year, I waxed poetic about the main (or ‘wide’) camera on iPhone 14 Pro — taking it through Bhutan by motorcycle and Tokyo by foot. Without hyperbole, it was easily the most dramatic shift for my personal photographic process. Not only did the iPhone suddenly take 48 megapixel photos — the camera itself began to render in a way that I could only ineffectively describe as ‘real-camera-like’: I really got shots that were great. Not ‘great for a phone’ — genuinely great photos.
This year’s main sensor and lens combo feels just like one on the iPhone 14 Pro. Zero complaints. It’s a great camera.
Apple’s touting some serious improvements on this camera as a result of an improved imaging pipeline. While not mentioned explicitly during the event, the iPhone camera now combines a 48 megapixel high-resolution frame with a 12 megapixel frame to create a highly detailed, high-resolution-but-manageable 24 MP shot by default.
This is going to be a huge jump for most users, which have previously shot 12 MP shots (even on iPhone 14 Pro, which always shot 12 MP images unless set to ProRAW 48) and it makes absolutely perfect sense.
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48 megapixels are far too much for most images, take up a ton of space and are slower to capture. I think I can state without exaggeration that it’ll be a huge upgrade—potentially one of the biggest ever— for the average iPhone user, on par with the introduction of Night mode.
Speaking of Night mode: in some modes, the camera app will output lower resolution images where needed. Night mode, for instance, combines pixels for higher light sensitivity on-sensor and only gets you 12 MP, no matter the capture format. I found it a solid tradeoff in my usage.
Unfortunately, I can’t personally shoot in 24MP, because it isn’t available when shooting ProRAW. Your choices are only 12MP or 48MP. It’s a real bummer because 48MP ProRAW files get absolutely massive.
Even if you’re fine shooting HEICs, native 24MP capture is sadly not available to third-party apps like Halide. Some apps now take 48MP photos and then downscale to 24MP, for the slowest possible experience with none of the processing benefits. We’re here just hoping Apple will roll out genuine 24MP support in an update.
As for the files as they are today, I noticed colors are ever so slightly more pleasant. Maybe it’s software—we’ll dig into that later—but it’s always possible this is due to lens coating changes this year.
Last year’s iPhone pro added an ‘optical’ 50mm (2×) lens, and this year adds 28mm and 35mm equivalents. You can disable or enable any of these, even making, say, the 35mm (1.5×) ‘lens’ your only main camera, comfortably sitting between the extremes of 12 (0.5×) and 120mm (5×).
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Last year’s virtual lens was, more or less, a straightforward crop of the higher resolution sensor. Apple says that these new modes use a special capture pipeline to get more detail out of the sensor.
I have to say, I love this approach. It’s a great way to add depth and control to the camera. For most users, it’s not more than a stop along their zoom wheel, but for those that care it is a discrete lens. I can’t help but escape the feeling that it’s still kind of a digital zoom. The quality is certainly there, but there’s more freedom in shooting at 24mm and cropping afterwards.
Maybe they were on to something with this being the field of view of the main camera after all.
Revisiting the Virtual Telephoto
I suppose I should really be reviewing both the main camera’s ‘optical’ 2× lens here, and the new telephoto.
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For everyday use, the 2× shines, but there are times where you’ll find that it is indeed an extra-crispy, zoomed version of the main camera. Sometimes the depth of field isn’t quite as sharp as you’d expect from a dedicated lens. But as a device with only 3 real lenses, the virtual 2× ‘lens’ holds up surprisingly well:
I am not sure if the 15 Pro is any better, but one year later, it’s clear that the 48 megapixel sensor has enough resolution headroom to make these kind of virtual lenses work quite well. I was a skeptic in last year’s review, and this year I’m a cautious believer.
And now for the main attraction…
The 5× Telephoto
I will not quit until I have shown you an inordinate amount of comparisons between the main camera and its new, long 5× telephoto counterpart. Not because it’s just fun to see how much it zooms, but also to show you how differently you have to look at the world around you.
A crop of the 5× image above. Even when cropped, the lens retains lots of detail and sharpness in decent light.
Previously, you could see a shot that you wanted to capture because it was part of what you were seeing. Now, you have to look for a detail and then capture it. It’s a very different way of composing shots, and kind of tricky.
If it helps, I have overlaid our ‘director’s viewfinder’ framelines on a regular image here so you can see just how much tighter of a shot you are lining up.
The frame of a 5× zoom can take some getting used to…
… but the sharpness is easy to warm up to. A purely ‘digital’ zoom on the right is still retaining impressive detail at 48MP in the dark, but the sharpness of the shot left showcases just how much more reach this lens brings to iPhone.
This has a funny psychological effect: once I shoot at 5× for a while, the Main lens feels… wider somehow. I’ve had to double-check a few times if I am not accidentally shooting at 0.5×. I suspect that this is what led to Apple adding the 28- and 35mm ‘lenses’ to the camera — once you are going between such extreme ranges, the change is just a bit jarring.
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Is it a great lens?
It is, hands down, the sharpest telephoto lens Apple has ever shipped. “Of course!”, you could argue. “Why wouldn’t it be? It’s 2023 and technology gets better. Why wouldn’t it be sharper than the last one?”
Well, it’s a long lens. It is truly remarkable how nicely this new lens captures detail despite that length.
The challenge here is serious: the longer the lens, the harder it is to keep it steady from your shaky, pathetically unstable human hands. Most people do not take photos the way a tripod does — which means the iPhone camera has to do several things:
Take a stream of photos from the telephoto lens and stabilize them in space to offer a less shaky viewfinder;
Take said stream of photos and manage to capture enough photos from them for their multi-frame Smart HDR process despite the large amount of shake potentially misaligning them;
Take photos preferably with a higher shutter speed than 1/focal length, which is 1/120th of a second without too much noise despite using a significantly smaller sensor than the main camera.
It does all that splendidly.
It’s very fun to play with the first point. Simply open the camera app and move around at telephoto zoom range to see how there is some ‘inertia’ to the movement. The heavier, slower movement of the viewfinder is a result of keeping that image somewhat stable instead of a trembling mess that is your minuscule (or large) amount of hand shake magnified by ten.
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The more fun experiment, however, is taking a photo. For someone who has always loved taking photos at night, it was kind of mind blowing:
Getting a handheld shot, at night, without a tripod, or really too much effort on my part on a 120mm-equivalent lens is magic. There’s no other word for that, because there’s such complicated technology involved on a hardware and software level that it makes my head spin.
This is a cool thing, because whether or not you’re a photography nerd or an absolutely average iPhone user, the lens will impress. It’s just really neat.
That random shot out of an airplane window? You can count trees on a mountain now.
Out near a popular bridge? Take a closer look and count the rivets.
All in, it leaves one difficult photography problem that you have to solve that the stack of machine learning and three-axis optical image stabilizer cannot: framing.
Whether it’s an iPhone or DSLR, it’s tricky to take great photos at this focal length. You’re left with details, closeups and portraits — even the latter perhaps a bit too long. It’s worth returning to iPhone portraiture in another post, but suffice to say, this is a challenging focal length to get fantastic shots, despite its excellent execution.
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This is perhaps personal, but I’ll go back to what I said about the ultra wide camera: you essentially don’t have to think about framing with a field of view that wide. With the old, shorter telephoto lenses on iPhone, I enjoyed the creative challenge. I had to think a lot more: one has to be very intentional with what you frame, and how you capture it.
A 5× lens requires a lot more planning and thought. It feels at least twice as challenging.
While uncomfortable at first, it isn’t bad. If you stick through it, you can get much more original and interesting perspectives— ones we’ve never seen taken on iPhones.
Does It Really Have 7 Lenses?
It seems that a lot of people in the photography world are a bit hung up on the idea of claiming that this phone packs 7 lenses. For what it’s worth, if you rewatch the Apple Event, it seems nobody says that exactly. It’s phrased as being like having seven lenses.
Is it like having seven lenses? For me, I wouldn’t say so. I would not mind seven actual lenses, but I suspect most people would find that cumbersome and borderline insane. For most people, the iPhone 15 Pro feels like it has a bunch of extra lenses. It even managed to make me a pretty happy user of a virtual 2× lens.
For most intents and purposes, what Apple really succeeds in with this major camera update is to bring much-needed depth to the photographic experience for average users — not just pros.
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I found it pleasantly surprising that Apple chose to maintain real photographic verbiage and iconography throughout all this, too. Field of view is expressed as a focal length — 24mm, 28mm, 35mm and so on. F-stops are used for Portrait mode’s depth of field, even down to the icon of an ƒ.
This matters, because it helps expose and teach average users to photography’s essentials. It’d be easy to toss in a slider that goes from 1 to 100 for portrait blur.
Anyone can design an interface that just dumbs things down. Great interface design, on the other hand is easy to use — while helping you learn. Great interfaces make users smarter.
Becca Farsace of the Verge has an excellent video review of the iPhone camera in which she said it best when talking about the new virtual lenses: it’s accessible.
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Where Are You Coming From?
Just a quick check here: not many people should really be upgrading their phone every year. iPhones get excellent, long term software update support and can easily last you a few years. I tested the iPhone 15 Pro against my iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 14 Pro, and for each you’ve got a pretty nice set of upgrades:
Coming from iPhone 11 Pro:
Higher Resolution: The iPhone 15 Pro Max packs a 48-megapixel main camera which is a significant upgrade in resolution compared to the iPhone 11 Pro’s 12-megapixels.
Sensor-Shift Image Stabilization on the Telephoto lens: This feature, which stabilizes the sensor instead of the lens, helps in capturing sharper images and smoother videos, especially in low-light conditions.
Enhanced Zoom Capabilities: 3× or 5× optical zoom options vs 2×.
Photography Modes: Features such as Action mode, Macro mode, Cinematic mode, ProRAW photos, ProRes video, Night mode portraits, Photographic Styles and a whole lot more has been added.
Upgraded Front Camera with Autofocus: Improves the clarity and focus of selfies and video calls — a big one.
Much better Low-light performance: Night mode and sensor-shift stabilization are one thing, but with larger sensors and faster lenses the iPhone 15 Pro Max performs better in low-light conditions on all of its cameras.
Ultra Wide Upgrades: Very significant upgrades to the ultra wide camera in recent years enable it to shoot much sharper shots.
Next Generation Portrait Mode: Portrait mode is now automatic and does not require switching into a discrete mode anymore, with the Camera app capturing depth data when it detects a person, cat, or dog.
Coming from iPhone 12 mini:
Higher Resolution: The iPhone 15 Pro Max packs a 48-megapixel main camera which is a significant upgrade in resolution compared to the iPhone 12’s 12-megapixels.
Telephoto: Having a telephoto lens is one thing, but you’ll be upgrading to a 3× or 5× optical zoom. That’s a lot of reach.
Advanced Photography Modes: Including Action mode, Macro mode, Cinematic mode for video, ProRAW for photos, and ProRes video, among others.
Upgraded Front Camera with Autofocus: Improves the clarity and focus of selfies and video calls — a big one.
Much better Low-light performance: With larger sensors and better processing, plus faster lenses the iPhone 15 Pro Max performs better in low-light conditions on all of its cameras than the mini.
Next Generation Portrait Mode: Portrait mode is now automatic and does not require switching into a discrete mode anymore, with the Camera app capturing depth data when it detects a person, cat, or dog.
Coming from iPhone 14 Pro:
120mm 5x Telephoto Lens: The iPhone 15 Pro Max features a 5x 120mm telephoto lens, providing more reach and creative photography options.
Improved Night Mode: The Night mode feature has been enhanced for better low-light photography.
Next Generation Portrait Mode: Portrait mode is now automatic and does not require switching into a discrete mode anymore, with the Camera app capturing depth data when it detects a person, cat, or dog.
Lens Coatings: Updated lens coatings result in fewer lens flares when shooting into light sources.
Pro Video: Recording to external media and ProRes Log capture.
Action Button
You can’t write about iPhone 15 Pro hardware without diving into its other signature feature — and I am not talking about a new element on the periodic table.
The Action button is an interesting addition with some clear photography applications. Apple showcases opening the Camera app to snap a photo in its keynote, and I was excited about a potential new physical control for the camera. This could have a huge impact on the usability of the iPhone as a proper photo-taking device.
In practical use, the devil’s in the details. I didn’t find using the button to open the Camera — or Halide — particularly useful. Yes, it’s quick, but the button on the iPhone 15 Pro Max sits quite high up, making it less ergonomically feasible to quickly hold.
In the Camera app, the Action button also takes a photo. This is great, as a dedicated shutter button is wonderful to have, but it doesn’t do more than the volume buttons. There’s no half-press for focus before the shot and you cannot hold the button down for a burst of shots.
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I ended up really missing the regular old ringer switch behavior (this was not helped with iOS 17 having wonderful, non-disruptive new ringtones and sounds). As a result, I kept it on the default ‘Silent Mode’ setting for a while, until I discovered thanks to Steven Robles that the button can also show a list of options through the use of a Shortcut.
I grabbed his version and put together a personal Shortcut that shows a list when triggered:
This was getting somewhere. This small, personal Control Center let me toggle the most useful things very quickly.
I still think there’s a lot more potential for a dedicated button on an iPhone. Shortcuts unlock a lot of potential: some people have orientation-sensitive triggers, so your Action button can do different things depending on which way you hold your phone. There’s some limited ways you can add a single- and double-click functionality.
In Halide, we decided to really try to push it to its limit: with the use of Shortcuts, we can actually use the button for in-app triggers. Our latest update, which is out today, has an entire Action button menu:
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From there, we guide users to either set up our special ‘In App Trigger’ shortcut, which opens Halide and enables you to use the Action button while in the app to switch lenses, modes or more, or to set up the Action button the old fashioned way: with a single action or a custom menu as shown above.
This particular bit of clever engineering made me excited about the future of having a dedicated Action button on iPhone. Cameras are all about phyiscal controls. Delightfully tactile buttons and dials that live in fixed places, allowing you control in a way that can become reflexive — so the camera can become an extension of your own body.
We hope this update and further iterations on the Action button from Apple will start to bring that kind of flexibility and power to this newest tiny hardware addition. I’m excited that it’s only going to get better from here.
Processing and Process
One of the best things I have done to educate myself as a photography instructor and camera app developer is joining a Facebook group of novice iPhone photographers. In the last few years, I’ve watch many novices run into the same issue: distracting processing on the latest and greatest iPhones.
People in photos are blown out and seemingly over-processed, and telephoto shots reduced to a sloppy, smudgy mush. Some argue that Apple has gone too far in processing, to the extent that it makes images unrecognizable. Many Halide users reduce processing in Capture Settings, or just shoot native RAW to circumvent processing altogether.
But what’s really happening is that the iPhone has gotten better as rescuing photos. Back in the days of the iPhone 7, if I shot my subject backlit by the sun, the result would be unusable. At best, you’d see a silhouette. The iPhone can now take those once-unsalvageable and make them passable. Sometimes even good.
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A camera torture test: Coast redwood trees backlit on a sunny day. Deep shadows and sunlight highlights produce extreme dynamic range that only modern cameras can handle.
The tradeoff is that today’s novice photographers have lost the feedback loop we had back when we learned photography on big, dumb cameras. When a camera never fails, you can be fooled into thinking you’ve mastered photography.
Apple is in the position where they design a camera for everyone. I don’t mean all of us reading camera reviews on this blog. I don’t even mean all of us in this hemisphere, or country, or culture. I mean every person, of every age, on the planet. And if they get an unusable photo where other cameras give an overprocessed shot of a loved one, they will pick the camera that gives them something over nothing at all.
We’re photographers who make camera apps for other photographers. We want the freedom to take bad photos.
Regardless, this is the iPhone 15 Pro. Does the Pro in the name give us a bit more feedback? Will it let us make mistakes? Surprisingly, yes.
iPhone 15 Pro Max has significantly more feedback in its processing, in a form that I missed in the last iterations of Apple’s image processing pipeline. As I edited my photos, I was delighted to see… noise.
When it isn’t stylistic choice, noise indicates your camera lacked light. When noise gets stronger in an image, we understand that we were taking a literal shot in the dark.
On iPhone 15 Pro, ProRAW files contain a bit more noise. This is most pronounced on the telephoto lens, which tells you in no uncertain terms that it’s punching above its weight when light levels dip too low.³
This is a welcome change, as previously iPhone generations tried to hide this behind heavy noise reduction, resulting in that smudged, ‘watercolor’ effect. It seems odd to cheer on noise, but this is genuinely a huge improvement as fewer details are lost, and it might even help people take better photos.
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3 — I will have to admit that this is, at times, a difficult task to test. The new telephoto lens is engineered to collect a lot of light, and the larger sensor and optical image stabilization took sharp, handheld shots in conditions that seemed almost unbelievable to me. This takes a lot of work — from the image being stabilized for users in the camera to capturing a sharp image — and it was hardly mentioned in the event. Well done to the team that worked on that.
The Camera
Apple expends monumental efforts to make the iPhone camera feel natural. The vision is clear: “You should never know there are separate lenses, sensors and processing pipelines.” They strive for an uninterrupted whole, a utopian vision of a technology-enabled camera that just works.
Most of their work is invisible. At manufacturing, components are matched with microscopic measurements so their tolerances are aligned for better optical and color performance, ensuring fewer visual hiccups as the camera switches lenses transitioning through the zoom range. Once impossible feats are made possible with custom silicon and highly optimized pipelines that few companies could dream of matching. Only Apple can achieve this thanks to their integration of hardware and software.⁴
(It surprises me every year that Apple uses a design that reveals individual camera, when a big self-contained camera module could blend them all together, visually reflecting their philosophy so much more.)
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But every approach requires tradeoffs. It means the camera software has to swap out lenses — even in ProRAW mode. It will lead you to think that you’re using one lens when it is substituting another,⁵ because it thinks it’s for your own good.
I am not envious of the team designing Apple’s Camera app. It has to be one app that does everything, and with every new iPhone that adds even more capabilities, that camera app runs the risk of getting heavier and more complex. However, this year they managed to integrate the new 28mm and 35mm quite well.
With the portrait mode turning on automatically when it detects humans and pets, I could see the discreet ‘Portrait’ mode disappearing altogether. With spatial Photos and Videos just around the corner, it could make sense to just capture depth data all the time, regardless of subject.
4 — An example of this has been real-time Portrait mode. Long before Cinematic Mode, Apple managed to do a real-time preview of the Portrait effect blur in iPhone Camera’s viewfinder. Google’s computational photography powerhouse, the Pixel, only managed to apply the blurred background post-capture, after a few seconds of processing. Apple first applied this blur in realtime using a highly optimized process of computing depth with the parallax of two camera in iPhone 7 Plus, but has started using a real-time machine learning network that segments subjects and generates depth from a single image along with focus pixel data that works even on single camera iPhones since iPhone XR. This is insanely impressive stuff, and solidly in the realm of things only Apple can do thanks to its super-tight integration between software and hardware.
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5 — fun test: cover the telephoto lens on your iPhone, then point the camera at stuff close to you. You’ll notice that once the minimum focus distance of the telephoto camera is exceeded, Apple Camera simply swaps in a cropped portion of the main camera, instead. I think this is clever, and reasonable, but perhaps not in a ProRAW capture mode where you want the camera to, well, let you get raw camera output.
Conclusion
The annual iPhone announcement feels like the Superbowl of tech — a huge event that everyone tends to have an opinion about. It’s exciting to have a quick hot take, and in the interest of a quick response, it’s easy to look at specifications and fact sheets and jump to conclusions. That would lead you to believe the iPhone 15 Pro Max offers little beyond its 120mm equivalent lens, but this is impossibly far from the truth.
For the every day user, iPhone 15 and 15 Pro probably offer one of the biggest camera upgrades in the history of the iPhone. Yet, people seemed to have missed this. How did that happen?
It is the details that tie all of Apple’s camera hardware and software improvements together. Most iPhone users took 12 megapixel photos, had a small-ish zoom range, and had to switch to a separate mode for portrait Photos.
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With iPhone 15 Pro Max’s default 24 megapixel resolution, added ‘lenses’ under the main camera lens, automatic depth capture for portraits, and that 5× lens, this release might not blow away on a spec sheet, but is massive for everyone who uses an iPhone to take photos.
Meanwhile, the pros get the Action button, a big step towards the phone itself becoming a dedicated camera. While I did not touch on it in this photography article, ProRes Log capture and external video recording is a big deal.
For photography, this was the year of reach and depth — and that’ll be up to us ‘pros’ to pour our own creativity into to appreciate.
Amazon is closing down Freevee, its free ad-supported video on demand service. This platform was home to original programming as well as more than from the Prime Video roster. Freevee will be phased out over the coming weeks, and its content will become available as part of Prime Video. The ad-supported tier of Prime Video is included as part of Amazon’s Prime membership for $15 a month.
“To deliver a simpler viewing experience for customers, we have decided to phase out Freevee branding,” an Amazon spokesperson told . “There will be no change to the content available for Prime members, and a vast offering of free streaming content will still be accessible for non-Prime members, including select originals from Amazon MGM Studios, a variety of licensed movies and series, and a broad library of FAST channels – all available on Prime Video.”
The free viewing platform went through several rebrands since its original launch as IMDb Freedive in January 2019. It its final phase as Freevee in April 2022.
CONTRIBUTOR CONTENT: From 2024 to 2031, there will be an annual growth of 26.00% in AI and blockchain and Spectral Labs is taking part in this revolution. Spectral Labs is on a mission to change the way users interact with decentralized finance (DeFi) using AI-powered onchain agents. These autonomous agents allow users to do complex financial tasks…Read More
Luggage storage as a vector for piling into convenience-based revenue opportunities in the business of global travel continues to put a spring in San Francisco-based Bounce‘s step. The startup has just tucked $19 million in Series B funding into its suitcase, with a plan to keep rolling revenue that’s grown 20x since its $12M Series A back in spring 2022.
Market expansion and adding more verticals are on the cards for Bounce for the next couple of years.
Asia-Pacific is a major focus, according to co-founder and CEO Cody Candee, who says revenue from the region is growing by up to 4x year-over-year. He suggests the consumer behavior the startup is building toward is way more pronounced in markets like Japan, where coin lockers for luggage and convenience stores that offer much more than soda are established already.
Figuring out where Bounce needs to expand to meet traveler demand isn’t tricky, as the startup can see the locations its users are searching for. “We have more than a million people that land on our website or app every month,” Candee noted, saying this lets it create a ranked list of which areas are in most demand.
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The startup’s big vision remains serving “cloud storage for the physical world,” as Candee puts it. That translates to a mobile app that lets users (mainly travelers) find and access services for storing and moving their stuff.
Its partners are SMEs with brick-and-mortar locations that have space to store luggage (and, in some cases, accept packages), and delivery firms that can move stuff around on demand. Bounce provides its 13,000+ partners with a revenue share for servicing its app users.
With the fresh cash from the Series B, Bounce predicts it can reach around 30,000 locations by the end of 2026. However, Candee stresses that the company’s focused on “quality, not quantity” — in this context, that means locations in the vicinity of places where travelers may look to store stuff, so around mainline train stations and the like.
Bounce for hotels
Expanding verticals is another piece of the plan that will be funded by the new money, Candee said. He pointed to Bounce for Hotels, for example, which lets hotels offer luggage storage to its own guests via Bounce’s platform.
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Candee says the vertical arose organically, after the startup noticed that hotels that had been using its platform to charge non-guests for luggage storage started charging their guests, too. Bounce now has more than 100 hotels doing this through its platform, he said.
“We thought, wow, this is really interesting here,” he told TechCrunch. “I guess, you know, it was crazy a couple decades ago when it was the norm to always have breakfast included with your hotel stay. And then they split that out as a separate thing that consumers buy. And maybe we do the same with luggage storage.”
While budget travelers may not like the fact that Bounce is instrumental in turning free luggage storage into an extra hotel charge, the startup will probably dodge any blame, as that’s more likely to manifest as negative hotel reviews.
Candee also notes that hotels don’t have to charge; they can offer their guests luggage storage via its platform for free. For hotel guests, he argues, there will be the convenience upside of getting access to a whole suite of other services via Bounce’s platform.
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“Imagine you go into a hotel, you see a Bounce kiosk, and it says store your bags here, store your bags elsewhere in the city, ship your bags home, deliver your bags to the train station or wherever you want to go,” he said. “And then maybe even a fifth one: We’ve seen a couple companies pop up that can check your bag into your flight from the hotel. We can build all these things with integrations without having to do our own delivery or anything like that.”
“That really ties into the whole vision and how hotels can be an access point into that whole Bounce ecosystem,” he added. “Bounce can be more ubiquitous more quickly with more services.”
An app to tap others’ things too?
Down the line, Candee reckons ongoing shifts in the concept of ownership of physical stuff will enable the business to keep bouncing further in terms of the service mix. Think enabling users to rent their stuff, even to each other, as a sort of Airbnb for things, though he concedes that’s the “multi-decade vision.”
“This is years out, but the infrastructure to get there is all these integrations around shipping and delivery. And if we’re very successful with our vision, then the next generation from now will think that we were crazy for buying everything we needed […] to use just like one time,” he said.
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“Because the generation after us, with a Bounce world, will be one in which they say, ‘Oh, if I need to use something, I’ll just download it from the Bounce cloud. I’ll rent it, I’ll access it, whatever it is.’ So that’s the big, crazy vision of where we can go. But shipping and delivery, and furthering our core of all these storage points, is the basis of that.”
That explains why the startup’s efforts and funding are still targeted at the foundational piece of expanding its partner network by adding more locations near places where travelers are likely to want to store and move their stuff.
Currently, Bounce’s network of physical location partners touches some 4,000 cities in 100 countries. It also says its service has been used to store about 6 million bags since the app launched back in 2019.
On the logistics front, Candee reckons the direction of travel favors Bounce’s big mission, too — he pointed out that when he kicked off the startup, there was no DoorDash Drive, for example; the delivery firm’s white label API lets others tap into its logistics tech and network of drivers.
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“I think it’ll get easier and easier to do these things,” he said. “The bigger we get doing our core business, the easier it will be to land global and local partnerships for delivery, integration, and all kinds of other partnerships we want to do.”
Bounce’s Series B was led by Sapphire Sport, with participation from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, as well as new investors 20VC Growth, FJ Labs, Shilling, and Thayer Ventures, among others.
“We’re excited to see how this new capital will fuel Bounce’s growth into new markets and power storage operations at hotels and venues,” said David Hartwig, partner, and Rico Mallozzi, principal, at Sapphire Sport in a joint statement.
“We’ve been impressed by their ability to scale their storage network with speed and efficiency, and believe they’ve only begun to tap into the potential of serving diverse storage needs,” they added.
Bluesky says it won’t use blockchains even though it’s funded by Blockchain Capital.
Its $15 million funding round was led by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital group that has invested in crypto firms, like Kraken, OpenSea, and Coinbase. Despite this, Bluesky says it’s not changing its stance on blockchains:
This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)
Apple will soon let you share an AirTags location securely with an airline
With several airlines onboard, the hope is to help sooner reunite lost baggage with an AirTag inside
“Share Item Location” will launch with iOS 18.2 later in 2024
If you’ve ever had an airline lose your luggage, Apple might have announced the best news possible. And this is one that I really wish had arrived months earlier.
As part of iOS 18.2, which is expected to launch in December 2024, Apple is giving AirTags and FindMy a significant upgrade that will likely be music to many ears. You’ll now be able to securely share your AirTags location with a specific person, but more importantly, a business.
With “Share Item Location,” you can easily and quickly generate a shared URL showing the AirTag’s location, a map, and the timestamp. Why is this so handy? Well, if you’re already in the habit of having an AirTag in your luggage, and if it goes missing, you’ll be able to share this URL with, say, an airline – like United or Delta, among others – in the hopes of getting it back sooner. The map viewable by the URL will be similar to seeing the AirTag’s location within the FindMy app, and it can be accessed from a browser.
(Image credit: Apple)
In fact, “Share Item Location” is designed for a trusted person or an airline from the ground up, in that Apple is working with many airlines to let a user share this link if a piece of luggage goes missing. Those airlines include United and Delta Airlines as well as Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling as of the time of writing.
As someone whose luggage has been lost, having an airline better equipped to handle and understand an AirTag and the location it pings will be leagues better. The goal here is that the AirTag’s location, as well as technology that airlines already have in place, can help to end lost luggage … or at least make it a faster return.
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David Kinzelman, United’s chief customer officer, said in a statement, “We know many of our customers are already traveling with AirTag in their checked bags, and this feature will soon make it easier for them to share location information with us safely and securely, helping our customer service agents work more efficiently and giving our customers added peace of mind. We plan to accept Find My item locations in select airports initially, with the goal of introducing the service systemwide in early 2025.”
It’s great that United is taking the time to integrate “Share Item Location” and the data it will bring into its systems. When this launches in early 2025 for the carrier, they’ll likely be inundated with questions. Delta is similarly excited about the new solution and hopes that it can close the gap.
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Beyond individual airlines prepping for this launch of “Share Item Location,” SITA, which runs the global baggage tracing system WorldTracer, is working to build out support for the feature. Considering it’s used at over 2,800 airports around the world, this is good news in the quest to reunite baggage.
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Analysis: This is a win for customers
(Image credit: United Airlines/Apple)
One of the biggest frustrations I had when my luggage went missing was that I could see where it was thanks to the AirTag inside, but that also meant I could tell when it was going somewhere that was the complete opposite of what a customer service representative would tell me. I could not share my AirTag’s location outside of screenshots; I just spoke to them or wrote it up in an email. It was frustrating as I had the information and could see my baggage moving the wrong way while I was told something completely different from the airline.
I truly don’t think this feature can roll out soon enough, and while I’d give the same hope as I do when recommending an AirTag is that you’ll never have to use it to track down your lost luggage, at least the airlines will be better equipped to reunite you even sooner. So yes, if AirTags go on sale again for Black Friday 2024, you should get one for every piece of luggage you own.
Predicting how trees grow could help guide planting efforts in urban areas such as New York City
Yukinori Hasumi/Getty Images
Artificial intelligence coupled with Google Street View images has created hundreds of thousands of “digital twins” of trees across North America. The simulation could help city planners better predict how seasonal foliage boosts cooling or when growing branches may require trimming.
“If you can model the existing set of trees and you have a reasonable model of infrastructure like power lines, you can understand where you’re going to have trees growing into power lines that are potentially most harmful,” says …
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