iPhone 15 Pro Max autofocus issue

I've been having weird autofocus issues with my 15 Pro Max - it just always gets the autofocus wrong. This has never happened on my 14 Pro, and the both of them have the same camera system and lens for the main camera, so I'm not sure what's going on.

Take a look at these comparison photos between my 14 Pro and my 15 PM (all photos were taken using the main camera, in HEIF Max, 48MP).

In this comparison image, I tapped on the phone case area at the back of the store to autofocus, but the image from the 14 Pro comes out a great deal sharper than the one from the 15 PM in that area.

However, the Airpods display (the lower red boxes in the original photos) is much sharper in the 15 PM image, which means the 15 PM was actually focused to around that area/plane instead of the phone case area in the back.

I've done the same test in a couple of different scenarios throughout my day, and the 15 PM always misses autofocus on faraway objects when I tap to focus, and instead has nearer objects appear in focus. I can confirm that the autofocus is doing something with the lens, since I can see the preview image moving in and out of focus whenever I tap a different part of the frame.

However, I can manually focus the lens on faraway objects.

In this comparison image, I tapped on the blue skull for autofocus. The skull in the 15 PM image looks softer than the 14 Pro image (and again, nearer objects appear sharp), but when I manually focus the 15 PM on the blue skull using ProCam, the 15 PM is capable of producing an image as sharp as the 14 Pro. So, the lens is capable of focusing on faraway objects, but the autofocus system just isn't driving the lens to focus on where I tap properly.

(I highly doubt that this is due to motion blur - I took multiple shots each time with each phone and the 14 Pro always looked much crisper, while the 15 PM always looked blurry in the tapped area)

Has anyone seen this before? Would this more likely be a hardware issue or a software issue?

Additional info: 15 PM is on iOS 17.0.2, 14 Pro is on iOS 17.0.1