The new iPhone 15 Pro, Apple’s latest offering in the smartphone market, comes with a limitation tied to its ProRes video recording feature. Interestingly, the 128GB ROM variant of iPhone 15 Pro can only record 1080p ProRes videos at 30fps. However, this limitation can be bypassed if users opt to record the video directly to an external storage device. In contrast, iPhone 15 Pro models boasting a storage of 256GB or more are capable of supporting 60fps 4K ProRes video recording without any need for external storage.

Surprisingly, Apple has chosen not to mention this limitation directly on the iPhone 15 Pro technical specifications page on its official website. The limitation becomes apparent only when comparing the iPhone 15 Pro with other iPhone models in the Apple store application. The same restriction is also seen with the 128GB versions of the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro. However, these devices lack the ability to record ProRes videos to external storage. This limitation does not apply to the iPhone 15 Pro Max as its starting storage space is 256GB.

ProRes video files are notorious for their large size. According to Apple, a one-minute 10bit ProRes video is approximately 1.7GB at 1080p and approximately 6GB at 4K. This could be the reason Apple may believe that offering 4K ProRes video recording on a 128GB storage model could potentially impair the user experience. However, the option to record directly to external storage seems to effectively address this concern.

ProRes, a series of codecs launched by Apple, is designed to compress videos into smaller file sizes while maintaining high quality. It is important to note that the standard iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus do not support ProRes video recording.