iPhone 16 Review: Features, Upgrades, and Camera Performance

The iPhone 16 offers modest upgrades, but its camera control feature and solid performance make it appealing for users needing a refresh.

### iPhone 16 and 16 Pro Review: Incremental Upgrades with Promised AI Features
* 📱 The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro were introduced as a "**widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communication device**," but they primarily offer **incremental hardware improvements** and **AI features that are not yet available**.
* 🎨 A new app called Panels has been launched to **centralize wallpapers**, which has been a frequently asked topic, and it is available on both iOS and Android platforms, supporting artists through a **profit-sharing model**.
* 🔋 The iPhone 16 features a slightly larger battery capacity, with the Pro Max claiming the **longest battery life yet**, but real-world usage shows **no significant improvement** over previous models.
* ⚡ Fast charging is now supported at **45 watts for wired charging** and **25 watts for MagSafe**, enhancing the charging experience despite the absence of a fast charger in the box.
* 📸 The introduction of a **camera control button** allows users to have **more control over their photography**, although its usability may be **challenging for the average consumer**.
* 🤖 While the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro are solid devices, the anticipated **AI features**, labeled as "**Apple intelligence**," are not yet functional, leading to a sense of **incompleteness at launch**.
* 🛒 The recommendation is clear: **upgrade to the iPhone 16** if coming from an iPhone 13 or older, but for newer models, the **incremental updates may not justify the switch**.
* 📅 Overall, these devices should be purchased for their **current capabilities** rather than future promises, as they remain **reliable but modest upgrades** in the Apple lineup.

a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communication device. Profound new intelligence capabilities that will make our platforms even smarter. So, this is the iPhone 16, and this is the iPhone 16 Pro. Brand new, and I've been testing them for about 2 weeks now. But you know what? I've been doing way longer than 2 weeks working on a new app that we are finally launching. You guys have always been asking me where I get my wallpapers. Like, it's frequently the number one suggested search result under my name. Has been for years. So, now we've put them all in one place. It's called Panels, and it's finally live in the App Store, both on iOS and on Android. Feels really good to be able to say that. So, if you're wondering where the wallpaper on these phones and the review came from, Panels. If you're wondering where the wallpaper in the last video came from, Panels. Matter of fact, almost all the wallpapers, all the devices, and in backgrounds.

you've seen in my videos for the past year have all come from panels, which is pretty sick. We have a bunch of awesome artists over there that we are splitting profits with 50/50, and there's already a ton of great collections of Art and much more incoming, and we have some pretty big plans for this thing. So, it's starting off as a wallpaper app. Now, I don't want to overpromise too much, but it's going to be pretty consistently improving over time, which is part of the reason why we're offering a subscription to support it. So, go pick it up now, poke around, find your new favorite wallpaper, your new favorite artist, and let me know what you think. It's kind of fun to be on the other side now, on the development side, where now other people are going to review what we make, which is always exciting. Anyway, so the meta with new smartphones these days is a bunch of incremental Hardware improvements and then a whole bunch of AI features that also are being added on top, which is

where the real value is, and while they're a little late to the game, Apple has hit that chapter 2 with the iPhone, whether we like it or not. So, the iPhone 16 is a minor, minor update over the 15, but with a ton of new AI stuff labeled Apple intelligence, except that stuff's not here yet, which is a little awkward considering basically all of the marketing for this phone is Apple intelligence stuff. Like, I've seen Billboards touting that as the new thing here. Their whole event was about how it's glow time, which is a reference to the new glowing Siri animation, but none of that stuff is on this phone. None of it. So, the only way to square the state of this phone right now with everything Apple has said about this phone is that it's unfinished. Like, this is the most unfinished I've ever seen a new iPhone launch. So, until we actually have all that Apple intelligence stuff, we are left with a very incremental upgrade cycle. So, there's not a lot actually physically new with this year's iPhone, but it's not

nothing. So, the iPhone 16 looks a little different from the iPhone 15. There was a moment in time, not that long ago, where Apple removed the headphone jack, and then there was a ton of speculation about them maybe removing all the ports and all the buttons. But instead, it's gone the opposite way, and they've added the action button from last year's pros, and yet another button called camera control, which we'll get to in a second. Aesthetically, though, there are some really poppy new colors and slightly larger protruding cameras lined up on the back of the phone. And okay, I know everyone puts a case on their phone, so this is probably nothing, but I think this is the wobbly slab phone I have ever seen, or at least that I can remember. But either way, the rest of the general shape and flat sides and dimensions of this phone are basically the same, very familiar iPhone. The pro phones are even harder to tell apart, but they do have new displays, and they are great. So, they're slightly bigger, 6.3 and

6.9 in respectively, and the bezels are, I think, actually noticeably thinner and still even all the way around. So, both sized phones are just a little larger than last year and fit bigger batteries too. And we should talk about batteries. So, when Apple unveiled all these new phones, they made kind of a big deal about how they all have slightly larger capacity batteries across the board, and that the new Pro Max would have the longest battery life ever in an iPhone, which, I mean, I would hope that your newest, most expensive, most high-tech, biggest phone ever is the longest battery. But still, they didn't give any numbers to support that, so we don't actually know how much larger in milliamp hours the battery is or how much longer the battery actually lasts. All I have to go on is Apple's website's comparison tool, which only measures in video playback hours. So, it has the iPhone 16 at 22 hours of video playback, up from 20, and the 16 Pro Max is all the way up to 33 hours versus

last year's big phones. Unfortunately, this means almost nothing to me because that video playback can be optimized with like cores on a chip. Who cares? But now the phones are out, and people have gotten them and torn them apart, measured them. Turns out the batteries are about 6% larger across the board and 9% larger on the Pro. And I found battery life about the same as last year, to be honest, like not noticeably better, not noticeably worse. I end up saying a lot of the same things about it, like it lasts me a whole day on the Pro, heavy use, no problem. What actually did make a difference to me, though, is faster charging. Less people are talking about it, but all of the new iPhone 16 lineup supports up to 45-watt wired charging now. Apple never talks about fast charging; they never brag about how fast you can go 0 to 100 or 0 to 80%. But when their phones do get slightly faster at charging, it's pretty nice. It's too bad it doesn't come with

the fast charging Brick In The Box, but I have a fast charger. I am loving the new fast charging and bursts, and also MagSafe supports with the new Puck up to 25 W wireless charging instead of 15. On the inside, these phones have the A18 and A18 Pro chips, and again, I'd be lying if I told you I just noticed any difference right out the box, and I think basically anybody would. But yes, they will benchmark 10, 20, 30% faster depending on what you ask it to do, but the extra power is definitely more about fringe activities, high-end stuff, future-proofing. I was actually more curious, though, to find that all of the models have 8 gigs of RAM now, so the Pro phone and the non-Pro phones, which usually have different amounts. No doubt this is because the Apple intelligence features, when they eventually ship, are going to need every last bit of it, but for now, hey, you can enjoy more RAM for all your other apps too. iOS 18 launched with these new phones too, so I made an entire

separate video about iOS 18, all the new features that's what's rolling out to everybody's older iPhones as well now too. So, you can put your home screen icons wherever. You can color your home screen icons. You can change your lock screen shortcuts. Basically, customize the iPhone a bit more than ever before. You could argue this makes a bigger difference to the iPhone than any of the other hardware stuff. But yeah, I'll link that full video below. But speaking of new hardware, there is one other new button. So, I guess nobody at Apple is allowed to call it a button, but I'm going to call it a button. So, this is the new camera control button on all of the new iPhone 16s. I've used and played with and thought a lot about this button. And actually, it all comes down to smartphone cameras in general. My take is that smartphone cameras are like headphones EQ. Like, you get a new pair of headphones out the box and you listen to them. You don't like them. Oh no, no, don't

worry that's just one of the ways that these headphones can sound. You can change the EQ, and it'll sound like a totally different pair of headphones. And that's also true with smartphone cameras this year more than ever with the iPhone. So, the default photos from the iPhone look more iphony than ever. Remember how every year in the blind smartphone camera test, the iPhone loses because it kind of overly brightens all the shadows and it doesn't have as much contrast? Yeah, it's still doing that, especially in photos with people in it. But the purpose of this new button has been made very clear, and it's kind of a theme for the whole phone, which is, well, camera control. This year, Apple's kind of just giving back control of the camera to users in an interesting way, but you have to know how to use it. Like, you have to know that it's a double half press with just the right weight to bring up the sliding menu of camera controls for things like exposure compensation and zoom and photographic styles and tone, and then

play with it enough to realize that tone is actually maybe the most important one, where turning up tone actually removes shadows even more, but turning down tone brings real shadows back. But it doesn't seem to have a memory, so you have to remember to set it every time you open the camera app. But you also have this d-pad that lets you change even more elements of a photo, including undertones and mood and color, and really mess around and dial in the look of the photos you want. And this one does have memory, so every subsequent time you open the camera, it'll remember your color hue and tone. So I found that tone at around minus 5 is a nice balance for most photos that I've been taking. Feels less flat, more contrasty. This is all really useful to me, and combined with the actual new cameras on the phones, this has risen the iPhone back to the top of my personal favorite rankings of smartphones to shoot with. I just like having more control over the camera, camera control, but it is really finicky like the

placement on the side of the phone for the button is mostly ideal for landscape but would definitely be easier to reach if it was closer to the corner. But for being honest, most people take photos and videos in portrait these days, and the corner would be horrible for portrait. So, they split the difference and moved it up a bit so you could reach it, but it's still not great. And the half-press sensitivity takes some time to really get used to. I'm on week three now, and I'm still accidentally taking pictures by tapping too hard. And the scrolling, it has momentum physics, and you can accidentally scroll too far and go past the thing you were targeting. In this more continuous scrolling interface, it is just finicky enough and just hidden enough that I honestly think like 99% of people will never use this for anything other than just a camera shutter button. And I guess that's fine too. I personally did quickly get used to opening the camera quickly with the camera control button, and so I remapped my action button to something else. My

tasks app, and I've also remapped my lock screen shortcut, so it's now flashlight and my tasks app again. And you can always just swipe over sideways from the lock screen and get to the stock camera app. So if you really want, you can map the camera control button to open any other camera app on your phone, or just keep waiting for app intelligence features that this will probably make more sense for. So yeah, long story short, one, it's a button, two, it's also a customization slider, three, it's just going to be a button for most people, but also four, there are new cameras on the [Music] back. So there's a bunch of new cameras across the line for both iPhone 16 and 16 Pro. Best way to summarize it, okay, so iPhone 16 cameras are nice, like they're pretty solid main cameras, very much in character with iPhones of the past, but not noticeably better than previous years. And then the 16 Pro cameras with the much bigger main sensor and the higher resolution Ultra-wide and the 5x

telephoto are a significant step up, in my opinion, the main camera. I think it's my favorite primary sensor in any smartphone to shoot with right now. It's really good at basically everything. The ultrawide is also better, but kind of only in detail during the daytime since it's the 48-megapixel sensor now. But the sensor is not bigger enough to matter at night, though. And now my night Ultra wides all look kind of vignetted for some reason. I mean, look at that. It looks like I added a filter. But then the 5x telephoto on both the pros is also nice now. And there is some chatter about it being worse at the 3x to 4X range because you're still having to do digital zoom. And technically, that's true. But I find the 5x to be a pretty useful zoom. And it's also better at resolving all the detail past 5x than before, even without AI. Shutter speeds are super fast and freeze action better than ever before. This is kind of underrated, but I

love this like this shot came from a moving car at highway speed, and so did this one. So, that's sick. And the ease at which you can get a shallow depth of field with a close-up subject is on par with any other big sensor Android flagship, like S24 Ultra or Pixel 9 Pro. And no, Apple has absolutely not fixed the lens flare issue with point lights at night. So, for those who are wondering, sorry, but aside from that, video is very impressive. I'll be publishing the next autofocus video on the Silverado EV pickup truck pretty soon, so subscribe over there for that first of all. But that's going to be shot entirely on iPhone 16 Pro, and I've been very happy with it. And Apple also added a 4K 120 FPS mode to the pro phones, and it's sick. It looks great. It is really convenient to shoot and edit. The only thing you got to be careful with is storage, 'cause it can really eat up storage. Like, you can get up to near a gig a minute, and that's before you even

do 4K 120 ProRes or ProRes log, but yeah, I still love shooting it anyway. It also proves to me that they have the processing power and the sensor readout speed to do 8K 30. They just choose not to, and I wonder why sometimes. This also the first year they're using the term Fusion camera, and you kind of have to dig in a little bit to try to figure out what that means. Turns out it's basically the same thing as last year's punch-in Optical quality Zoom, but with a slightly updated image processing pipeline. Cool, but also that Zoom is not technically one-to-one Optical quality because the photo sites are smaller in that smaller crop. Nevertheless, iPhone 16 camera good, iPhone 16 Pro Camera great. [Music] There is something truly weird about this product being launched at an Apple event called glow time and not launching with the thing that glows, the new Siri. There's something weird about people happily going out to a Fifth Avenue Apple Store this week, which is literally

glowing with rainbows now and walking out with a brand new phone that doesn't have that. Like, there's something just off about billboards and marketing material and all highlighting Apple intelligence and Tim Cook saying this was the first phone built from the ground up for Apple intelligence. The next generation of iPhone has been designed for Apple intelligence from the ground up. Yet, this phone does not have Apple intelligence at all. It's all coming soon and coming later this year and into next year eventually with software updates. But if I've said it once, I've said it a million times: never buy a product based on the promise of future software updates. Buy it for what it is right now when you buy it. That's been the golden rule for forever, but yet here we are. Times have changed. This has been a common trend alongside AI, and you think Apple might be immune to it, but they're not. They're a public company, and just like lots of other public companies, they've sort of caved to this pressure that they have to appear like an AI.

first AI forward company like a leader in AI. So, they have presented a ton of AI stuff that they are working on, and they've done the song and dance of like, Hey, we are AI first, and the phone's built from the ground up for AI. It's our whole theme this year. But the fact of the matter is, it's not good yet. It's not. It's actually not even finished. If it was, they'd be shipping it, but it's in beta, and they're still working on it, and they'd rather keep working on it than ship it to you now. So, how do we square this? Do we even square this? You remember the rabbit R1? The rabbit was a little AI in a box, pretty classic 2024 product. When I reviewed that rabbit, it was basically useless, like literally almost none of the functionality was working as it shipped. And so, I said so in the review. Same with the Humane AI pin, really, really, really bad product, missing almost all of its functionality, worst product I'd ever reviewed. For now, both of those products

have started to get some updates since I reviewed them, but again, I can only review what's in front of me. Like, I got that thing in the mail just like real customers are going to get that thing in the mail, and now it feels like the new iPhone is suddenly in the same boat. So, I guess the difference between the rabbit and the Humane pin and the iPhone is, well, one, the iPhone is a fine standalone product even without the promised stuff, and it's buyable and usable, where the other two, not so much. But two, is that Apple at least now has some element of a track record of developing and shipping things that they promised, where Humane and rabbit didn't. So, you could argue there's some dimension of trust to this and that Apple is really leaning heavily on how much you trust them, because to be honest, to me, it's really bold to be shipping the product like this without any of these big things that you're promising. Like, they must really believe in themselves to eventually ship this stuff.

so that people aren't mad. But yeah, there's that's the AI world we live in, I guess, is that everyone has this pressure to feel like a leader in AI and be shipping all these new features and stuff. But a lot of it not that good yet, not that done yet. So I'm planning an entire separate review of Apple intelligence as a whole when it comes out. I've been using some of the features in 18.1 beta on my 15 Pro, but even this is really limited. Like, it's basically just writing tools and the new Siri animation. But they have a long way to go. I'll say get subscribed to see the Apple intelligence review when it drops, when it's done, because clearly it's a big part of this [Music] phone. So you made it this far into the video, or you skipped ahead to this chapter because you just really wanted an answer on if you should buy these phones or not. Fine, either way. So okay, you should buy the iPhone 16 if you're on

an iPhone 13 or older, and you know that phone is on its last legs, and you're really looking for an upgrade to a new iPhone. Fine, anything newer, and it probably won't feel like it's worth an upgrade, and you should buy the iPhone 16 Pro if you really want a better phone in cameras or displays. That's really the two places where the pro shines over the regular phone. The cheap iPhone really has never looked better, honestly. It has the camera control, it matches the RAM of the more expensive Pros, it has the more interesting colors if you're into that, it has the action button now too, and it has the same brightness of a display. And it also goes all the way down to one nit, just like the pro screen. Now, I personally cannot use a 60 Hz $800 phone in 2024. I just can't do it. And there are lots of people just like me who will immediately have to upgrade to the pro just for that. But there are also tons of people who don't even notice or care.

about promotion, which I know it's kind of hard to wrap my head around too, but for those people, yeah, this phone, the base phone, is going to be great. But then, it's someone who shoots a lot of photos and videos and, you know, social media stuff. The autofocus channel between all that, the cameras are better enough on the pros for that to be worth the upgrade for me. But yeah, I still say buy it for what it is today, not for what it could be tomorrow. And even without any of the AI stuff maybe ever coming to these phones, they're still rock solid, very, very incremental upgrades. Thanks for watching, catch you guys in the next one, peace. [Music]

iPhone 16/16 Pro Review: Times Have Changed!

Marques Brownlee

The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro feature minor hardware updates and new AI capabilities, but the promised Apple intelligence features are not yet available.

The new app, Panels, offers a collection of wallpapers from various artists, with plans for consistent improvement and a subscription model.

The iPhone 16 introduces new colors, larger camera protrusions, and an action button, while the Pro models have slightly larger and improved displays.

The iPhone 16 series has slightly larger dimensions and thinner bezels compared to last year, with a 6% to 9% increase in battery capacity.

The new lineup offers faster charging, with 45-watt wired and 25-watt wireless charging options.

All models now have 8GB of RAM, and iOS 18 introduces new customization features for home screen icons and lock screen shortcuts.

Camera Control and Customization on the iPhone 16

The iPhone's new camera control button offers users more control over photo settings, including exposure compensation, zoom, and tone.

The button's placement and half-press sensitivity can be finicky, making it challenging to use effectively.

The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro feature new cameras, with the Pro model offering a larger main sensor and higher resolution Ultra-wide lens for improved photo quality.

The iPhone 16 Pro's telephoto lens is a standout, offering excellent performance and useful 5x zoom.

The ultrawide lens has improved with a 48-megapixel sensor, but struggles with night shots.

The camera's fast shutter speeds and ability to create a shallow depth of field are impressive, while the video capabilities, including 4K 120 FPS, are convenient but storage-intensive.

Apple's New iPhone: A Controversial Launch

The new iPhone's marketing emphasizes Apple intelligence, but the phone lacks these features at launch, with updates promised later.

This trend of selling products based on future software updates is criticized, yet Apple is under pressure to appear AI-focused.

While the iPhone is a usable product on its own, it raises questions about Apple's boldness in shipping without delivering on promised features.

The pressure to lead in AI is evident, but Apple's new features in the 18.

The iPhone 16 is a good upgrade for those with an iPhone 13 or older, while the 16 Pro offers better cameras and displays.

The base iPhone 16 has impressive features and colors, but the 60 Hz refresh rate may push some to upgrade to the Pro.