I’m obsessed with music, but since I got my iPhone, I wouldn’t even think about buying a Bluetooth speaker, the speakers are that good.

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I recently started using the iPhone 15 after five years away from an Apple smartphone, and as my previous articles about the iPhone’s dim 60Hz screen and pleasantly nostalgic form factor may have indicated, returning to iOS has been a bit of a rollercoaster.

However, there is one thing about the iPhone that I am absolutely delighted with – a feature that I am happy to call the best in its class.

It’s not the Dynamic Island with its useful notifications, or the 48MP main camera with its excellent low-light performance, or the USB-C port with all its connectivity options – in fact, my favorite thing about the iPhone 15 is that it was part of the lineup iPhone from the very beginning.

I’m talking about the unassuming speaker located along the bottom edge of the iPhone 15 and connected to the speaker grille at the top of the screen to provide stereo sound. I’m constantly amazed at how fantastic this tiny two-channel system sounds, especially compared to other phones in my rotating array of smartphones.

Sound off

As a lover of music and consumer technology, I was genuinely puzzled by how Apple was able to squeeze so much bass and presence out of such a physically small speaker, but at full volume, I found that I could hear songs clearly from any room in the house.

I remember well a time when phone speakers were something of an afterthought, a decidedly suboptimal way to listen to music on your phone. My first smartphone, an early HTC One, had a speaker grille that was about a centimeter wide, which sounded predictably terrible.

However, that didn’t stop me from listening to music on it – I’ve continued to use the phone’s speakers since then, mostly just to put something on while I’m doing housework or getting ready to go out.

However, the iPhone 15 is the first phone I’ve used that I feel provides a full listening experience rather than just being able to play something.

Lately, I’ve been avoiding the Amazon Echo smart speaker and Presonus Eris 3.5 monitors scattered around the house for the convenience of the iPhone—it’s physically impossible to reproduce the rich sound of a 3-inch speaker using a smartphone. , but the iPhone 15 gets close enough that I rarely feel like I’m missing out on background listening.

It’s not that I don’t care about sound quality – I buy music online quite regularly for the best quality sound and even write my own music. The combination of simplicity and quality that the iPhone offers is truly hard to beat.

In fact, with the proper speakers already installed and the portability solved by the iPhone, I found myself not tempted by even the best Bluetooth speakers—a necessity in my music-listening arsenal in years past.

Overall, the iPhone 15 is a reminder of Apple’s engineering prowess and how far phone speakers have come. Audio is rarely the reason a phone makes it onto our list of the best phones, but music lovers shouldn’t ignore this underrated aspect of the iPhone’s performance.

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