iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus tipped to get the Pro's most fun feature

(Image credit: Apple)

published 11 January 2023

Apple's Dynamic Island, which is currently only available on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, is a lot of fun – and apparently it'll be coming to the non-Pro iPhones with the release of the iPhone 15 later this year.

According to the latest reports from Bloomberg's well-connected Apple reporter Mark Gurman, the Dynamic Island is coming to all models of the iPhone 15. That could also mean that the iPhone 15 will have the same screen size as the Pro; at the moment there's just over half an inch difference between the standard and Pro models.

What's so great about the Dynamic Island?

With the Dynamic Island Apple has taken what used to be a weakness – the notch, which is the cutout where the front-facing camera and sensors live – and turned it into a selling point. The black oval at the top of the screen now expands beyond its physical size depending on what you're doing, so for example it shows me a big smiley face when I'm authenticating via Face ID and it has a little status icon showing when I connect my AirPods Max. It expands to notify me of calls, and third party apps can use it as a notification area for anything from music to fitness data.

I like the Dynamic Island a lot, but for developers it's currently an optional extra: because the standard iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 Plus don't have it, it means developing for two different kinds of display if they want to use Dynamic Island on the Pro and Pro Max. So I hope this report is true, because if it is and Dynamic Island becomes a standard feature on every iPhone then more developers will come up with creative ways to use it.

This isn't the only current Pro feature we're expecting to move down to the standard iPhone this year. We're expecting the iPhone 15 to get a similar spec to the current Pro's cameras, and there's almost certainly going to be a processor speed bump too. This might also be the year when USB-C makes it into the iPhone range in advance of new EU regulation. As ever, we'll keep you posted with the latest iPhone 15 news as it drops.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).