If you are recording videos of any length with ProRes, you will rapidly run out or space on even the largest capacity iPhone. So I think Apple is enabling a new use case more than cannibalizing sales of lower storage models.

They also increased the smallest storage size for the 15 Pro Max to 256 GB, which is a welcome change.

They just dropping the 156GB Pro Max SKU. The 15 Pro Max's starting price is 100 USD more than the 14 Pro Max's starting price.

Indeed. It effectively drops the price in Europe by €130 (if you wanted a 256GB model)

iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB is €1479

iPhone 14 Pro Max 256GB was €1609

That's quite nice and surprising given other companies such as Sony and Microsoft increasing their console hardware prices in Europe but not the US.

I was expecting the same pricing and storage configurations as last year at the very best but a bump in the base level storage while keeping the price the same as last year that is better than I expected.

Think it’s basically for actual professional uses for recording video (iPhone’s often get used as small high-quality cameras that can be used in places that larger cameras cannot). If you record at 4k in ProRes you will run at (potentially a lot) over 1GB/min. Adding another TB is not going to be that big a deal. I assume the main limiting thing before was having a reliable way to transfer the data out rather than some desire to prevent users from doing it.

Only for the 0.01% of users who want to do that.

Also, they kinda had to announce _something_ new this phone could do.