The iPhone 16 Pro is one of the least-changed iPhones in recent years, while still offering the same reliable experience as before.
Apple is usually known as a company that avoids rushing out half-baked products or software features, preferring to either not enter a new field at all or to enter with a product that provides a reliable and efficient user experience. Accordingly, the iPhone 16 Pro is considered the most flawed product in Apple’s history; I’ll explain more below.
Apple is marketing the iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence and its AI capabilities; but more than a month after the phones were launched, Apple users only had a half-hearted experience of Apple’s AI with the iOS 18.1 and iOS 18.2 updates; it seems that Apple will also make its advanced Siri available to enthusiasts in subsequent versions of iOS 18.
For those who have been out of the tech world since the early months of 2024, Apple Intelligence is Apple’s answer to Google’s Gemini, Samsung’s Galaxy AI, and even Microsoft’s Copilot. According to Apple Intelligence, Siri is going to be what it was promised 13 years ago when it was unveiled; a full-fledged digital assistant that speaks to the user in natural language; of course, in addition to the advanced Siri, features such as AI-powered photo and emoji creation, text writing tools, and photo editing will also be added to iOS.
Note that to fully experience Apple Intelligence with all its features, we will have to wait for iOS 18.4; this update will be released in the early months of 2025. The iPhone 16 will be sold with iOS 18 by default.
Camera Control
Let’s start our review of the iPhone 16 Pro with the part that has changed the most: the camera, or rather, the camera button.
While Apple was rumored to be working on eliminating physical buttons from the iPhone, this year, to our surprise, another button was added to the iPhone 16 family; although Apple insists on calling it Camera Control. Unfortunately, Camera Control is crude and incomplete in both implementation and capabilities; I’ll explain below.
As is typical of Apple, the Camera Control hides a lot of engineering behind its simple appearance. The surface of the Camera Control is made of sapphire and is surrounded by a stainless steel ring that matches the body color; under this surface is a precise force sensor with haptic feedback and a touch sensor, so that the Camera Control can both simulate the shutter of DSLR cameras and detect the swipe of a finger on the button surface.
With the camera control, you can take photos, record videos, or change camera parameters; in this way, by pressing the button once, the camera application is launched, now if you press the button again, the photo is taken, and if you hold it, the video recording starts, and as soon as you lift your finger, the video recording stops.
In the camera environment, if you press the button twice slowly without lifting your finger, the photography parameters appear, you can also switch between options by swiping on the button surface, and with another slow press, you enter the desired parameter settings. Among the photography parameters, exposure, depth of field, zoom, switching between cameras, Style, and Tone are available, which we will talk more about the last two items below.
To be honest, for me and many of my colleagues at Zoomit, tapping the screen to navigate the camera menu was much easier and more straightforward than using Camera Control. Even after 10 days of using the iPhone 16 Pro, going to the shooting parameters section and swiping to adjust parameters was very difficult and time-consuming; for example, there are many times when, while swiping to adjust a parameter value such as Tone, the phone decides to exit the Tone settings and switch between parameters.
One of the problems with Camera Control is the stiffness of its button; as a result, when shooting with this button, the phone shakes; an issue that may ultimately lead to blurring of details in photos in the dark.
Aside from the stiffness of the button, the placement of Camera Control is also not optimal in my opinion; When using the phone in portrait mode, especially with the Pro Max model, you will most likely encounter problems and need to use both hands; if you use the phone with your left hand, your fingers may sometimes press the button and disrupt the phone’s operation.
iOS 18; Apple-style artificial intelligence
With the iOS 18.2 update, Apple added a feature to Camera Control that allows the user to focus on the subject by half-pressing the button, just like professional cameras and Xperia phones, and to capture the photo by fully pressing it.
In the iOS 18.2 update, iPhone 16 family users have access to a feature called Visual Intelligence with Camera Control with a function similar to Google Lens and Circle to Search; so that by long pressing the Camera Control, you can search for the subject in the camera frame or ask questions about it.
Now that the article has touched on the software features, I recommend that you read the iOS 18 review by Pooyesh Pourmohammad and the Apple AI review by Marjan Sheikhi on Zoomit to understand the ins and outs of the features and capabilities; because perhaps talking about the operating system is beyond the scope of the discussion in a several thousand word article reviewing the iPhone 16 Pro.
Apple’s AI may not have anything new to say; for example, many of its features, such as the Image Playground image generator, Image Wand, Cleanup Eraser, and text rewriting tools, have been seen before on Pixel and Galaxy phones, and here we have a more or less identical experience; but Apple’s image generator tools are more beautifully implemented than Google and Samsung’s and have more flexibility in creating AI images.
Image Playground is incredibly easy to use, and the results are usually close to what you have in mind. The Genmoji feature, which lets you generate your own emojis with a few words and send them to your friends in iMessage, is perhaps the most useful and fun AI tool we’ve ever seen on a smartphone, despite being an Apple innovation.
Image Wand, which turns the user’s clumsy drawings into more attractive cartoon images, is not as useful as Sketch to Image on the Galaxy S Ultra phones that support the stylus, and will probably be more useful to iPad owners.
What will likely make the Apple Intelligence experience unique and “magical” is not the image generators and writing or visual intelligence tools, but Siri; not in its current form, which is simply integrated with ChatGPT and leaves many user requests to the chatbot; but in the form that will be released in iOS 18.3 and 18.4. Apple says that the future Siri can get closer to the dream it has had for its voice assistant for years by “aware of the screen,” “analyzing user behavior,” and performing “in-app actions.” Perhaps the “real Siri” is the biggest incentive to upgrade to the new iPhones.
iPhone 16 Pro Camera
Apple’s marketing about Camera Control noticeably weighs in on the Visual Intelligence feature; But I think that if the problems and bugs are fixed, Camera Control will probably be most useful in two cases: first, while zooming in, because you can have more precise control over the zoom level, and second, for faster access to Apple’s new camera settings called Style and Tone, which are very useful for photography enthusiasts; I’ll explain why now.
iPhones usually have their own photography style; iPhone photos usually have colors close to reality with a relative tendency towards warmth, and there is no talk of saturated and high-contrast colors; of course, Apple introduced the Photographic Styles feature with the iPhone 13 to satisfy fans of high-contrast photography in the style of Google Pixels by offering different photography styles.
Apple has adopted a policy with the iPhone 15 that is not very popular with the general public; in short, in order to take advantage of the full potential of the powerful Photonic Engine to preserve the details of shadows and highlights, the iPhone overdoes HDR implementation to the point where colors and shadows lose their power and do not have the same dramatic feeling as before.
The bad news is that the iPhone 16 Pro follows the same previous policy of Apple and records the shadows weakly, so to speak; but the good news is that now with the evolved version of Photographic Styles you can breathe new life into shadows and colors. With the new version of Photographic Styles you can change the type of processing of skin tones and shadows, you can even change the photography style after taking the photos.
Before we see how Photographic Styles affect your photos, let’s first talk about the different modes. iPhone’s photography styles are now divided into two general categories: Mood and Undertone; apart from the standard photography mode, there are 5 Undertone styles and 9 Mood styles available. Undertone styles mostly adjust the skin tone of human subjects, and Mood styles offer a similar function to Instagram filters.
The Undertone styles are as follows:
- Standard: The default iPhone photography mode
- Amber: Intensifies the amber tone in photos
- Gold: Intensifies the golden tone in photos
- Rose Gold: Intensifies the golden-pink tone in photos
- Neutral: Neutralizes the warm tone in photos
- Cool Rose: Intensifies the cool tone in photos
Mood styles are:
- Vibrant
- Natural
- Luminous
- Dramatic
- Quiet
- Cozy
- Ethereal
- Muted B&W
- Stark B&W
All styles can be customized with three new parameters: Palette, Color, and Tone; Palette changes the range of colors applied, Color adjusts the saturation of colors, and most importantly, Tone changes the intensity of shadows and contrast, bringing freshness back to iPhone photos.
While Palette is set with a simple slider, Color and Tone require a control pad. Working with this pad is very difficult and tedious, because to change the value of either parameter, you have to slide your finger across the pad, and since you have no sense of the exact location of your finger, it is difficult to change one parameter while keeping the other fixed.
Ultrawide Camera
Putting aside the photography styles, the iPhone 16 Pro camera itself has undergone some major changes, the most important of which is the upgrade of the telephoto camera sensor from 12 to 48 megapixels; the new sensor uses a Quad-Bayer filter and 0.7 micrometer pixels; so it seems that the dimensions of the sensor itself are no different from the previous generation’s 1/2.55-inch model with 1.4 micrometer pixels.
To ensure that the pixels capture the right amount of light, the ultra-wide camera captures 12-megapixel photos by default, combining 4:1 pixels and achieving 1.4-micrometer pixels; but the HEIF Max photography format also allows for 48-megapixel photos, giving the user more freedom to zoom in on photos.
The iPhone 16 Pro is much less likely to use Night mode and long exposures in dark environments than the iPhone 16, so sometimes its ultrawide night photos are less detailed than the iPhone 16. For example, in the photos above, the iPhone 16 took an exposure of one-tenth of a second; while the iPhone 16 Pro’s exposure was 60 percent shorter, equivalent to one-twenty-fifth of a second; so it’s no surprise that the cheaper iPhone’s photo is more attractive!
iPhone 16 Pro Performance and Battery
The next big change to the iPhone 16 Pro is its chip. The A18 Pro uses the familiar combination of 2 high-performance cores and 4 low-power cores as the CPU, and this unit is accompanied by a 6-core GPU and a 16-core neural processing unit. Apple’s new chip is manufactured using TSMC’s improved 3nm lithography, called N3E.
Apple says it’s using new cores in the CPU, resulting in 15 percent faster performance than the A17 Pro, and achieving the same level of performance with 20 percent less power. Apple claims the A18 Pro has more cache than the A18 chip.
The A18 Pro’s six-core graphics are said to be up to 20 percent faster than the previous generation, Apple says. The ray tracing accelerator in the new GPU is also a 100 percent improvement over the previous generation, Apple says.
The 16-core A18 Pro neural processing unit is capable of 35 trillion operations per second, just like the previous generation, but thanks to a 17% increase in RAM-to-chip bandwidth, the new NPU performs better in real-world applications. The A18 Pro chip is connected to 8GB of LPDDR5x-7500 RAM with a high-speed memory controller.
The iPhone 16 Pro is noticeably faster than current Android flagships; the nearly 60% difference in single-core CPU performance over the Galaxy S24 Ultra is a good indication of how snappy the iPhone 16 Pro is in everyday use.
When using the GPU for calculations like blurring the background of photos and facial recognition, Apple’s 2024 flagship dictates its 95% advantage over the Galaxy S24 Ultra; although in game rendering, it still has the edge with the Galaxy and its 3rd-generation Snapdragon 8 chip.
The iPhone 16 Pro’s neural processing unit beats the Galaxy S24 Ultra by an astronomical 870% in the GeekBench AI benchmark; we’ll have to wait until Apple’s AI capabilities are released to see if the difference is logical or just a bug in the benchmark software.
Like the previous generation, Apple will sell the iPhone 16 Pro in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB NVMe storage options, while the base iPhone 16 Pro Max comes with 256GB of storage. Benchmarks show that the iPhone 16 Pro’s storage speed is no different from the previous generation.
If we put the numbers aside, we are faced with the fact that the feeling of using the iPhone 16 Pro in everyday use is not much different from the iPhone 15 Pro or even the iPhone 14 Pro. The performance gap of the new iPhone with previous generations is because the phone can still provide good performance by the standards of a few years later and, of course, handle the heavy processing of Apple Intelligence.
Another change in the iPhone 16 Pro is the increased charging speed; Apple’s new flagship now supports 30W wired charging, and when the same charger is connected to the MagSafe wireless charging pad, the wireless charging power increases to 25W, which Apple claims will charge the battery from zero to 50% in 30 minutes.
Although the wired charging speed of the iPhone 16 Pro has been increased from 20 to 30 watts, it still takes about 100 minutes to fully charge the battery, because both the battery capacity has increased by 10 percent and the iPhone charges the 85-100 percent range at a very slow rate; even with the optimal battery charging feature turned off, the phone needs about 35 to 40 minutes to complete the remaining 15 percent of the battery capacity. The iPhone 16 Pro Max also needs 120 minutes to fully charge its larger battery.
iPhone 16 Pro Design and Build Quality
Leaving aside the fundamental and significant changes to the iPhone, what you will notice at first glance is the larger dimensions of the phone, especially in the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and the thinner bezels around the display.
The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max use 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch displays, with a 0.2-inch increase in screen diameter compared to the previous several generations; so it is not surprising that the physical dimensions and weight have also increased; both phones have become about 3 millimeters taller and 1 millimeter wider, and have become 12 and 6 grams heavier, respectively; so the increase in weight of the iPhone 16 Pro is more significant, and the 16 Pro Max also sits worse in the hand than before and constantly requires two-handed use.
The bezels around the display have become noticeably thinner; the iPhone 16 Pro’s display is now surrounded by a bezel just over a millimeter thick (1.15 mm to be exact); while the iPhone 15 Pro’s bezels are about 1.5 mm thick and reach over 2 mm for the iPhone 16; of course, you should note that by putting a cover on the phone, the thinness of the bezels is less noticeable.
Another cosmetic change for the iPhone 16 Pro is the addition of a Desert Titanium color option to the device’s color lineup, removing the Blue Titanium option. The new color is more like cream with a gold frame. Other color options are limited to the neutral and unobtrusive Black Titanium, White Titanium, and Natural Titanium.
The iPhone 16 Pro’s exterior design is otherwise no different from the previous generation; we see the same flat titanium frame with flat glass panels on the back and front of the phone, which are assembled with great precision and form a solid structure with IP68 certification.
Unlike the iPhone 16, there have been no changes to the back panel painting process and camera arrangement, only the display coating has been upgraded to the third-generation Ceramic Shield, which Apple says is twice as strong as the previous generation.
We talked about Camera Control and its not-so-ergonomic location on the right side of the frame at the beginning of the article. Other than this new button, the rest of the buttons are the same as the previous generation, the volume control buttons and Side button are in the right place and provide very good feedback, and the Action button, like the previous generation, allows you to customize it.
iPhone 16 Pro Display and Speaker
Finally, another not-so-changed part is the iPhone 16 Pro display, which uses the same 120 Hz OLED panel with LTPO technology; of course, this year, due to the 0.2-inch increase in the display diameter, its resolution reaches 2622 × 1206 pixels with a very good density of 460 pixels per inch. As before, the display supports HDR standards including HDR10 and Dolby Vision; so, like a few generations ago, we are either with a 10-bit panel or 8bit+FRC.
Thanks to LTPO technology, the iPhone 16 Pro’s display can change the display refresh rate between 1 and 120 Hz depending on the type and speed of the content, so that the phone can display smooth animations, match the frame rate of games and videos, and not harm battery life.
Apple says the iPhone 16 Pro’s display supports the P3 wide color gamut, like its predecessor, reaching 1,000 nits in manual mode and 2,000 nits in auto mode or while playing HDR video; but the key difference between the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro is the minimum brightness of 1 nit.
Zoomit’s measurements confirm Apple’s claims about the iPhone’s brightness; we measured the minimum brightness of the iPhone 16 Pro at 1.35 nits, which is significantly lower than the 2.15 nits of the previous generation; but the maximum brightness in manual mode and while playing HDR video is no different from the iPhone 15 Pro, at 1,044 and 1,950 nits, respectively. It goes without saying that the iPhone 16 Pro reached 1,296 nits in auto mode and while playing SDR content (applications other than HDR video playback); but it is likely that it can approach the same 2,000 nits in bright ambient light.
With over 99% sRGB and DCI P3 coverage with an astonishing 0.6 gamut error, the iPhone 16 Pro Max has the most accurate display among the smartphones reviewed by Zoomit; note that Apple’s phone doesn’t require you to manually change color profiles and automatically selects the appropriate color space depending on the type of content being played.
The iPhone 16 Pro uses stereo speakers, with the main channel located at the bottom edge of the frame, and the second channel is the call speaker. The iPhone’s volume may not be as loud as competitors such as the Pixel 9 Pro or the Galaxy S24 Ultra, but the speaker output quality is at a higher level; the iPhone’s sound is clearer and its bass is much more punchy than its competitors.
Summary and comparison with competitors
With the resumption of the iPhone registry in Iran, we will finally see official sales of Apple phones in the country after a three-year absence; although official imports of the iPhone 16 family have not yet begun, the country’s customs recently announced the final price of the iPhone 16; therefore, taking into account a moderate level of profit for importers and sales agents, the price of the iPhone 16 Pro and the price of the iPhone 16 Pro Max for consumers may start at around 80 and 95 million tomans.
If the estimated prices for the registered iPhone 16 are correct, it doesn’t make much sense for iPhone 15 Pro and even iPhone 14 Pro users to spend a few tens of millions more to buy the iPhone 16 Pro; unless the 5x telephoto camera (for iPhone 15 Pro users and both 14 Pro models), 15-30% faster chip performance, or Apple Intelligence (for iPhone 14 Pro users) are critical for them.
iPhone 13 Pro or older model users have more reasons to buy the iPhone 16 Pro; better battery life, more RAM, a more efficient camera, a brighter screen with Dynamic Island, a faster chip, and perhaps eventually AI capabilities can all justify the expense of upgrading from the iPhone 13 Pro to the 16 Pro.
If the ecosystem is not a limiting factor for you, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, even a year after its launch and at a much lower price, offers you more or less the same promised Apple Intelligence experience with Galaxy AI, and in most cases, it appears on par with the iPhone 16 Pro in terms of photography and video recording, and even better.
What do you think about the iPhone 16 Pro? Do you think Apple’s camera controls and AI capabilities are attractive enough to convince users of older iPhones to upgrade? Please share your views with us and other users.