iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max review: Built for Apple Intelligence*

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We are now well into the era in which yearly smartphone updates have become rather ordinary. Where the Apple Store lines would once stretch around the block and attract local news crews, today the first question everyone asks is, “Should I upgrade this year?”

The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max fit into this zeitgeist neatly. Yes, they’re better. They’re faster, have better cameras, and include one new feature (the Camera Control button). But for most of the things most people use their iPhones for, many of these improvements won’t make much of a difference over last year’s model, or the year before.

Enter Apple Intelligence. When hardware fails to excite, it’s up to slick new software to make you feel like you just have to get the new iPhone. And with all the buzz around generative AI lately, Apple Intelligence is that gotta-have-it software. It’s a suite of new AI features that summarizes notifications and emails, makes Siri a lot smarter, lets you generate custom images and emojis, transcribe calls, and more.

So important is this AI stuff to the iPhone 16 that Apple’s marketing calls them the first iPhones “built for Apple Intelligence.” (Yes, the iPhone 15 Pro works with Apple Intelligence but Apple no longer sells that model.) There’s just one problem: Apple Intelligence isn’t out yet, and it’s going to dribble out in multiple stages over months. It’s also coming to regular non-Pro iPhone 16 models.

So, why buy and iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max? Let’s see if Apple’s latest Pro iPhones can make a case for themselves.

Note: The iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max have identical features and performance, save for the obvious (size and battery life). This review covers both models.

iPhone 16 Pro design: It’s an iPhone

The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max look very much like last year’s Pro phones at a glance. Technically, both models are just a touch larger and heavier than their predecessors, and combined with slimmer bezels you get a slightly larger display: 6.1 inches becomes 6.3, and 6.7 becomes 6.9.

The titanium body and colors are basically the same. There’s white, black, and natural titanium. Last year’s special color, blue titanium, has been replaced by desert titanium, which has a bronze look to it.

The only thing that really looks or feels any different is the new Camera Control button, located about where the 5G mmWave antenna was on earlier iPhone U.S. models and the SIM tray was on some international models—about 2/3rd of the way down the right side under the power button. This new feature also comes with the regular iPhone 16.

Despite the size difference, the displays more or less look like those on the iPhone 15 Pros, with equal brightness, ProMotion, and always-on capabilities. A small improvement I really appreciate is that the display now goes all the way down to a mere 1 nit of brightness. It’s just the thing for those who use their phone in bed with the lights off—but again, this is also available on the non-Pro models.

The size increase over last year’s iPhones is not dramatic, but I still found myself gravitating more to the 6.3-inch iPhone 16 Pro while I used to prefer the Pro Max. The slightly larger display makes the smaller of the two Pro phones more usable without saddling me with the undesirable bulk of Apple’s biggest phone. If you’re one of those who doesn’t love the size of the Pro Max but uses it because you need that screen size, take a close look at the Pro this year.

There’s nothing wrong with this year’s design, but the iPhone is in serious need of a refreshed design. Big, heavy, thick metal slabs with large, offset camera bumps that make the phone wobble on your desk (and make it hard to seat properly on some charging stands or wireless chargers in cars) just feel a little old and dull in 2024. Not much has changed since iPhone 12.

iPhone 16 Pro features: Camera Control

Most of what is new in the iPhone 16 Pro is on the inside, but the one big new external feature for the entire iPhone 16 line is the Camera Control button. It’s a real physical button set flush with the edge of the body, touch and pressure sensitive, with haptic feedback.

Press the button once and you open the Camera app. You can select a third-party camera app to launch in Settings > Camera, and and app like Instagram will typically launch right into its photo/video-taking mode. Once in the Camera app, a firm press takes a photo. Press and hold to take a video for as long as you hold the button.

Tap once lightly and you’ll pop up a Camera Control function (zoom by default) which you adjust by swiping back and forth or dragging the control on the display. Double-tap lightly for a list of different functions that can be adjusted in this way: exposure, depth, camera selection, photographic styles, or tone. It does a lot—and it’s not always obvious what to press to do something.

I have mixed feelings about the Camera Control button. The full press to launch your most-used camera app is a huge boon. It’s fast, you can do it without fiddling with the screen, and it allows you to replace the camera launch on your lock screen with something else without losing any utility. Pressing the button as a shutter, or holding it down to take video, works great. It’s a gamechanger for snapping photos while wearing gloves.

The pressure-sensitive functions, on the other hand, are too fiddly. It’s too easy to accidentally do a light press when you mean to click the shutter, or vice-versa. Sliding back and forth to adjust a control requires a lot of fine motor control in a small space; I often found myself going past the zoom I intended and having to carefully nudge my finger just a millimeter the other way to go get it right.

I don’t really enjoy the way using the Camera Control button makes the whole camera interface go away, either, as it’s not always my only or last adjustment before I take the shot. In the end, I turned that Clean Preview option off in Settings and rarely used the Camera Control button for adjustments. I always use it to launch the camera and as a shutter, though.

As far as photo and video quality goes, Apple is once again making small but significant strides. A faster video pipeline enables up to 4K at 120fps. The Photos app lets you change the playback framerate. Improved microphones allow for wind noise reduction and better overall sound quality. The new Photographic Styles are a little more nuanced with easier control and can be applied non-destructively after the shot is taken. The ultrawide camera has been upgraded to 48 megapixels, though to my eye the shots don’t look very different from the older 12MP camera. The 5x telephoto lens is no longer restricted to the Pro Max model, so those who like the smaller Pro size can enjoy zoomier zoom. And it’s clearly the biggest upgrade from standard to Pro other than titanium.

My favorite new feature? The ability to change audio mix on a video with a tap, between Standard, In-Frame, Studio, and Cinematic. They make a huge difference. (This feature is yet another that’s also available on the standard iPhone 16.)

But these are relatively minor changes. Power-users trying to film their next indie epic on iPhone will love this stuff but the vast majority of users will find that, maybe, if they squint just right, the new iPhone takes slightly better pictures than the old one. The biggest camera upgrade this year is definitely the dedicated button, and the non-Pro models get that, too.

If you want to protect your new iPhone, read our best iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max case reviews.

iPhone 16 Pro performance: A18 Pro

The A18 Pro is similar to the A18 found in the regular iPhone 16, with a few small upgrades. It’s got the same 2 performance and 4 efficiency CPU cores but with larger caches, which should improve performance a bit. There’s an additional GPU core. The media engine (video encode and decode, image processing, etc.) is beefier.

Both chips are made on an upgraded 3nm manufacturing process that delivers better power efficiency, and Apple has improved thermal design and management to help minimize throttling when the phones get hot.

How does all this translate into performance? Well, this thing is fast. Single-core CPU performance is 15 percent higher than the A17 Pro, and it crushes every other smartphone on the market. Multi-core performance is around 10 percent faster, and considerably faster than any Android phone. It is not a stretch to say this iPhone is like having an M1 Macbook Air in your pocket, and in some ways, faster.

The GPU gets a nice uplift in performance, too. In really advanced high-end graphics applications, especially those with ray tracing, we’re seeing an improvement of 30 percent or more.

New to our testing suite is Geekbench AI, a cross-platform benchmark that performs a suite of common machine-learning tasks like object identification, image segmentation, and machine translation. It can be run on the CPU, GPU, or Neural Engine; we’re testing the latter to see improvements in Apple’s dedicated AI hardware over time.

The Neural Engine in the A18 Pro is anywhere from 10-40 percent faster than that in the A17 Pro. It’s hard to compare the same test on different hardware when it uses different software frameworks, but no other mobile device appears close to Apple’s NPU performance.

Every year we say Apple has, on balance, the fastest smartphone around. And this year we repeat that. It’s not what most people are buying iPhones for–they’ve been more than fast enough for years. There is something to be said for the future-proofing of having an overpowered iPhone today so that it can continue to run powerful software for years to come.

On the other hand, the iPhone 16 Pro has 8GB of RAM, same as last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and the standard iPhone 16. That doesn’t seem like a lot for a $1,000+ phone these days. And if you don’t think that will matter in a few years, just ask the iPhone 15 owners whose year-old phone can’t run Apple Intelligence because it has 6GB of RAM, while the iPhone 15 Pro owners can.

iPhone 16 Pro battery: A massive boost

Perhaps the best improvement of the iPhone 16 Pro hardware is its fantastic battery life. Apple stuffed in slightly larger batteries this time around, but battery life is a combination of so many things—processor and RAM efficiency, power usage of wireless chips, efficiency of the display, and more. And all of it is better.

We use Geekbench 4’s old battery rundown test, which loops the Geekbench 4 CPU and GPU tests (with short breaks between) until the battery dies. We do this after setting the display to a constant brightness of 200 nits with all adaptive brightness features off. That’s about as bright as you would set it in a normal office environment.

We expected and improvement, but not this much of one! The iPhone 16 Pro lasted 54 percent longer than the iPhone 15 Pro, and the 16 Pro Max kept running for about 43 percent longer than the 15 Po Max! We got almost 19 hours on the Pro Max and about 16.5 hours on the Pro.

I can’t say I experienced a 50 percent improvement in battery life in my day-to-day use, but it definitely lasted hours longer. For several days, I took my iPhone 16 Pro off the charger in the morning at 90 percent (where I set my charge limit with iOS 18’s new options) and finished the day with 40 percent. Only when I ran through several strenuous benchmarks or played a high-end 3D game for hours on end did I ever come close to running through the battery.

Everybody loves longer battery life, and the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max deliver a big boost over last year’s model. And if you’re coming off a phone that is two or three years old, it’s going to feel like your new iPhone is lasting literally twice as long.

iPhone 16 Pro Apple Intelligence: Not included

If the new iPhone just a little faster, or takes a little bit better photos or videos, it’s not going to inspire users to upgrade. Battery life might, but what we are looking for are major new features. Camera Control is one, but the big one, the one that’s supposed to sell you on the iPhone 16, is Apple Intelligence, Apple’s name for its home-grown suite of generative AI tools.

The marketing tagline for the iPhone 16 Pro is “Hello, Apple Intelligence.” Apple calls it “the first iPhone built for Apple Intelligence.” It will summarize all your notifications! It will make images and custom emojis! It will erase people from the background of your photos! It will transform Siri into a super smart personal assistant that actually understands you! The Camera Control button will launch a new Visual Intelligence feature that gives you AI-powered info on whatever you point your camera at!

You’ve probably seen the ads showcasing these awesome features. They may make you want to run out and buy an iPhone 16.

There’s only one problem: It isn’t out yet. And it’s not going to be out soon, not really. Apple Intelligence is coming to iPhone 16 in bits and pieces over the next half year, or longer if you don’t live in an English-speaking region. Apple isn’t even clear about whether the entire European Union will get Apple Intelligence at all.

We have a breakdown in our guide that describes the features and when they are coming, but only the first tranche of AI features are available for us to test in beta: notification/email summaries (very useful), writing tools (less useful), and a Siri update that makes it understand you a little better (meh) and gives the screen a full glowing edge (nice).

In other words, the selling point of iPhone 16 is nothing more than a pinky-swear from the world’s most valuable megacorp. This is a phone designed to run, and marketed on, untestable promises.

We’re reasonably sure about the quality and usability of the AI features coming in iOS 18.1 because we’ve been testing it for weeks, but without the ability to thoroughly test the others, we can’t possibly consider them as a feather in the iPhone 16’s cap. So consider this part one of our review.

Should you buy the iPhone 16 Pro?

More than ever, it’s hard to recommend the Pro model iPhone over the non-Pro model. It’s a tiny bit faster, has a dedicated 5x telephoto camera, and can take some really fancy high-end video in formats that only pros will care about. It has ProMotion and an always-on display, but frankly, it’s kind of crazy that Apple doesn’t include those things on the regular iPhone at this point.

The big selling points—longer battery life, the Camera Control button, Apple Intelligence (eventually)—are all available on the non-Pro model which also now has the Action button, the new Photographic Styles, and macro photography, too.

In benchmarks and specs sheets, the iPhone 16 Pro is clearly better than last year’s iPhones, but when you use it every day, does it really feel different? Without Apple Intelligence, the most substantive improvements are longer battery life and the Camera Control, both of which are on the regular iPhone 16.

Perhaps, when all the major Apple Intelligence features are actually available, our recommendations will change. But for now, the iPhone 16 Pro, for as good as it is, might not be worth your money. Our recommendation is to hang on to your current iPhone if it’s only a year or two old. If you’re coming from an iPhone 13 or earlier, it’s time to upgrade, but even then, the iPhone 16 or 16 Plus is a better deal than the iPhone 16 Pro for all but the most demanding and picky iPhone photographers and videographers.

Source : Macworld