iPhone Customer Satisfaction Tracker

iPhone 15 Pro Max Satisfaction Drops for Second Month in a Row

February Update:

User reviews in February showed customer satisfaction for the iPhone 15 Pro Max continued for the second month in a row, falling to 71.1%, while satisfaction on the rest of Apple’s iPhone 15 lineup ticked up in February. 

The biggest improvement in satisfaction was for the iPhone 15 Plus, which saw its customer satisfaction jump from 73.5 to 79.9 percent. The base model iPhone 15 and 15 Pro saw smaller improvements. 

Customers continue to be significantly less satisfied with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max than with the base model iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, as we mentioned in last month’s update. 

Here is the monthly customer satisfaction for all iPhone 15 models since their release in September, 2023. 

Why are the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max getting such poor reviews?

Apple continues to claim on its earnings calls that the iPhone 15 lineup enjoys 99% customer satisfaction, but as we have written about extensively before, this is not plausible. 

But exactly why customers are responding so poorly to the iPhone 15 Pro lineup is a bit of a mystery. As we wrote last month, Apple seems to have successfully addressed the early complaints of overheating. Only two of the negative reviews we analyzed from February for the Pro models mentioned overheating issues. That was down from 14.5% of negative reviews in October, 2023. 

We decided to take another look at the text content of all of the negative reviews left in February to see if any other trends emerged. Here were the main themes we found: 

• No USB-C charging adaptor included in the box

• Users didn’t think the new phone was sufficiently different from previous models 

• Users thought It isn’t worth the money to be honest and it’s sad that you have to have a different charger

Here are a few review examples to illustrate the themes above.

A Note On Charger Complaints 

The appearance of complaints about chargers is interesting. Apple first stopped including charging bricks with the launch of the iPhone 12 in 2020. But at that point, many iPhone purchasers were repeat customers and likely had a stash of little white charging bricks at home. With the switch to USB-C on the iPhone 15, many consumers find themselves needing new charging adaptors for the first time in a decade and are understandably upset Apple isn’t including them.

About The iPhone Customer Satisfaction Tracker

The iPhone is one of the most successful consumer products in history, but that doesn’t mean everybody loves it or that every single model gets a rapturous reception. At PerfectRec, we are obsessed with tracking and understanding customer review data since that is part of making accurate product recommendations. 

We decided to start sharing the review data we gather from Google to help power inform our phone recommendations publicly since iPhone satisfaction is an interesting topic to a lot of people and the satisfaction numbers that Apple shares on its quarterly earnings calls are, quite frankly, not credible. 

Our hope is that tracking iPhone satisfaction over time will help give consumers, reporters, and enthusiasts a more accurate picture of how users are reacting to the iPhone and give context to complaints and problems that inevitably arise. 

The PerfectRec iPhone Satisfaction Tracker will be updated monthly and will track the current model year. In the future, we will include monthly comparisons to previous generations. 

Methodology

• We scrape Google reviews for each iPhone model submitted by a range of merchants, including Best Buy, Verizon, AT&T and others. 

• Overall satisfaction is presented as percent of reviewers that give the product five stars on a five-star scale.

• Ratings are for the lowest storage configuration available for each model, since these are generally the best selling options and have the most reviews.  

Previous Updates:

Jan 2024: iPhone 15 Pro Satisfaction Continues to Lag Behind other iPhone 15 Models

User reviews in January showed customer satisfaction for the iPhone 15 Pro continues to be significantly lower than for other models in the iPhone 15 family. PerfectRec first noticed this trend in our initial report on iPhone 15 Satisfaction published last October. It’s worth noting that it’s unusual for the Pro model to have lower satisfaction ratings than the base model iPhone. Historically, Apple’s Pro model, which comes packed with the latest new features and best camera, have enjoyed higher customer satisfaction than the base model. With the iPhone 15 family that reversed for the first time. 

Initially, Apple faced a lot of complaints about overheating issues with the iPhone 15 Pro. In October, 2023, 15% of all negative reviews mentioned overheating issues. By January, that had fallen to just 1%. 

Percent of negative iPhone 15 reviews (1-3 stars on a 5-star scale) mentioning overheating

Despite the fact Apple seems to have addressed the overheating issue, iPhone 15 Pro satisfaction remains 12 percentage points below the iPhone 15 base model. To get a sense of what might be going on we ran language and sentiment analysis on negative reviews (1-3 stars on a 5 star scale) left at a range of retailers over the last month.

Here are some of the themes from negative iPhone 15 Pro reviews left over the last 30 days.

• Complaints about poor battery life.

• Disappointment with the small, incremental upgrades from the 14 Pro and earlier models. 

• Complaints about the physical design, including camera lens protrusion making it hard to lay the phone flat.

Earlier this month BGR reported an increase in complaints on Apple support and Reddit forums about the iPhone 15 Pro having sharp edges. So far, this hasn’t shown up in Google and retailer user reviews, but we will be keeping an eye on this trend over the coming weeks.

The 15 Pro remains the least popular Pro model ever

Our initial study of iPhone 15 satisfaction from October, 2023 found that the 15 Pro had the lowest customer satisfaction of any premium iPhone ever. Since then, the proportion of customers rating the iPhone 15 Pro 5-stars has decreased from 72% to 68%.

Other models

The iPhone 15 Pro wasn’t the only model that saw lower customer satisfaction in January. The percent of purchasers leaving five star reviews declined for all iPhone models from December. The largest month-to-month decrease was for the iPhone 15 Plus, which is generally the best-reviewed model of this generation. The month-to-month decline in satisfaction was statistically significant (p < 0.05 using a proportions test) for all iPhone 15 models. 

Early Adopters and Upgrade Cycles

Our iPhone Satisfaction Tracker is a cross section that looks at product reviews left across a range of retailers in a given month. It’s not a panel study that tracks how a fixed group’s opinion of the iPhone changes over time. 

Because of this, we suspect there might be some compositional effects based on who is buying the phone and when. For example, people who leave a review in September, the month the new iPhone was released, are probably more likely to be early adopters and frequent upgraders than those who leave reviews in July or August. They likely have a different frame of reference  perspective on what to expect from a new iPhone and might also have more familiarity with recent models.

For example, our analysis of negative iPhone 15 Pro reviews from January, five months after the phone was released, found many consumers complaining about the large lens protrusions on 15 Pro. If they had been upgrading from a 14 Pro, it is unlikely they would have made this complaint since the form factor hasn’t changed. This perhaps suggests that the people who left reviews in January following Christmas were less frequent upgraders than early adopters who eagerly purchased a new iPhone shortly after release in September.  

We suspect the early adopter phenomenon might also be responsible for the large changes in satisfaction rates on the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus models between September and October. They may have had higher expectations for the phones and been somewhat disappointed by incremental upgrades than people who bought later in the cycle and may have been upgrading from older models.

About PerfectRec

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About the PerfectRec Reviews Team 

The iPhone Satisfaction Tracker is put together by the PerfectRec Reviews Team. 

Joe Golden, Ph.D - Economist & PerfectRec CEO

Joe is an entrepreneur and lifelong electronics enthusiast with a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Michigan.

Nick Landia, Ph. D - Chief Data Scientist

Nick is a machine learning expert with a Ph.D in recommendation systems from the University of Warwick.

Chandradeep Chowdhury - LLM Expert & Software Engineer

Chandradeep is a software engineer and expert in LLM-aided user review analysis. 

Wally Nowinski  - Editor 

Wally is our data visualizations editor, with a background in politics and journalism. You can find his work cited in Fortune Magazine, 9to5Mac, Business Insider, Linus Tech Tips and  many other publications.