My iPhone 12 Pro served me well through photographing overnight train trips and journeys through Germany, but its cameras were getting a bit long in the tooth compared to the latest phones. The time was ripe to upgrade to an iPhone 15 Pro Max, so I went to my carrier store and picked one up. But there was a problem. Upon receiving a case that I ordered online, I realized I’d gotten an iPhone in the wrong color. Should be easy to switch it out, right?
Right?
On the whole, it took me over a month to swap my phone out for another one in a different color. I drove to multiple stores. I called helplines. I ended up having to ship my phone to a regional warehouse, and then call to see if I could get a new one shipped out. Well, it could’ve been easier if I’d made some different choices.
In the end, I got what I wanted: an iPhone 15 Pro Max that exactly matched a case with lots of personal meaning. If you could honor your childhood iMac with your stylish case, wouldn’t you? In the hopes you never have to go through something similar, I’ll tell my tale of wrong assumptions and belated discoveries — along with the lessons about the phone industry I learned along the way.
The new iPhone 15 Pro titanium colors, from left to right: Black, white, blue and natural.
Life is easier with lower storage
The easiest thing to do would be to drive back to the Verizon store and swap it out for a white one. But since I needed a white one with 512GB of storage, I figured I’d call first. After speaking with a helpful employee, I learned that any location should have the configurations on hand.
Tragically overconfident, I drove out to the closest Verizon store, according to Yelp. Unfortunately it was a third-party store that couldn’t handle my exchange. So I drove to the next-closest official Verizon retail location that had a white iPhone 15 Pro Max but only the 256GB model. The employees there found a store with a 512GB version in white that was another 20-minute drive away.
Sadly, the inventory software was wrong, I was told. What’s more, the staff there didn’t think Verizon sold white 512GB models in-store. I’d have to special order it — by calling that centralized hotline.
A few days later, I called the hotline, and a friendly operator helped me order a white 512GB iPhone. But first, I had to ship my current phone back, and that meant swapping service to another phone in the meantime. Luckily for me, as a reviewer, I had a few lying around.
I hastily agreed to transfer service to another non-iPhone I had on hand (the operator just needed its IMEI number). But I foolishly forgot that that phone was locked to a different carrier. To add insult to injury, I had been calling the operator on my blue iPhone 15 Pro Max, which I didn’t realize would be a problem until the call went dead when she transferred service.
Phoneless, bereft in a cold and uncaring world, I drove across town to pick up my old iPhone 12 Pro that I’d left with my family to upgrade to from their older iPhone. I can’t remember the last time I went anywhere without my smartphone’s data umbilical to the outside world; it was so surreal and isolating that it forced me to reckon with our modern phone dependency.
In any case, I drove back to the original Verizon store to help transfer service back to my old iPhone 12 Pro, where I ran into another fun reality of modern smartphone switching: Bridging the world of SIM and eSIM.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max in its white hue, wrapped in Spigen’s iMac-looking case.
The takeaways of torturing myself
Unless you’ve done this carrier retail store rodeo before, you probably don’t know that it can be tricky to get the right color and storage configuration. Most people, myself included, usually pick from what they have available. I just happened to have a specific (and glorious) vision for how I wanted my phone and case to look.
It was a surprise to discover that, at least in my area, Verizon stores don’t have every single color and storage configuration. If you want one that wasn’t normally sold in-store, you have to order it from a regional warehouse. Not a big deal on the whole, but interesting to see presumed market forces decide in-store options. Most buyers are probably fine with the titanium blue color for the iPhone 15 Pro series, since the other choices are white, black and the gray-tan “natural titanium.”
I could’ve made my life a lot easier if I had just bought the iPhone 15 Pro Max through another retailer or via Apple itself, simply returning and exchanging it for the proper color and configuration. But not every online or in-person retailer has financing options like a carrier, nor would they have the same trade-in deals that might be more generous at carriers running promotions.
