This is the iPhone 16 – the entry-level model in Apple’s new 16 series. But first – a look inside the box – as before, you get a braided USB-C cable and a SIM tool and that’s it.
The iPhone 16 is more efficient, thanks to the A18, a 3nm SoC to the 4nm A16 Bionic. But you still get the same 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine.
RAM is up to 8GB — up from 6GB on the previous iPhone. You also get a larger battery, which Apple says is good for 22 hours of video streaming — two hours more than the iPhone 15.
The Ultra Wide camera is new, but it’s not the same new Ultra Wide camera from the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max — it’s a 12MP unit with autofocus and a macro mode. The realigned dual-camera system looks better, and can capture spatial video for your Apple Vision Pro.
The biggest addition is the new camera control button, which Apple, unusually, has also brought to the non-Pro phones.
It’s a physical button that recognizes both capacitive touch gestures and pressure. It’s very clever. You can open the camera from a locked or random screen and dive deep into the photography settings, all without touching the screen.
The new camera button
The button, spec bump, new ultrawide and battery increase amount to a solid annual upgrade. But we can’t let Apple’s stubbornness with the same old 60Hz panel slip away for another year. It’s the old 6.1-inch unit with the thick bezels, not the 6.3-inch one of the iPhone 16 Pro.
We get that most vanilla iPhone buyers don’t need or care about high refresh rates. But from a market perspective, this nearly $1,000 phone is dwarfed by nearly every mid-range Android phone launched in the last two years.
