The new Pros are here. Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro And iPhone 16 Pro Max sport the A18 Pro chipCamera Control and “a huge leap in battery life,” Apple claims. There’s also a new main camera, a new ultra-wide angle and a 5x telephoto on the ‘vanilla’ Pro. The titanium design remains, and Apple is touting the thinnest bezels ever on any product it’s ever made. This should be interesting.
The two iPhone 16s Pro models come in black titanium, natural titanium, white titanium, and desert titanium. Preorders start on September 13, and they’ll be available on September 20 for $999 and up for the Pro and $1,199 and up for the Pro Max.
Apple Intelligence won’t be built in from day one, as rumored. Instead, it will arrive as a free software update next month with the first set of features in US English in “most regions of the world.” These include Writing Tools, audio recording, transcription and summarization, summarized notifications, Priority Messages in Mail, email digests, a redesigned Siri with richer comprehension capabilities, and Typing to Siri.
Then, “later this year” and “in the months after,” a new set of features will roll out — including Image Playground, which lets you generate images and emojis. Siri will be able to use your personal context to deliver personalized information, and gain on-screen awareness to understand what you’re looking at and take action based on it. ChatGPT is also coming at this vaguely later point, by the way.
Now that we’ve gotten all the Apple smarts out of the way, let’s talk about hardware – as much of it as Apple is willing to show us. The iPhone 16 Pro has a 6.3-inch display, with the Pro Max going to 6.9”, breaking a record for the world’s largest iPhone screen. The latest-generation Ceramic Shield on top (which still isn’t actually ceramic, mind you) has “an advanced formula” claimed to be twice as strong as the glass on any other smartphone, whatever that means.
Apple promises up to 20% better sustained performance on these phones compared to their predecessors thanks to improvements in heat dissipation and efficiency. The A18 Pro is built on a 3nm process and features a new 16-core Neural Engine. There’s a 17% increase in total system memory bandwidth, which also benefits a 6-core GPU that’s up to 20% faster than the previous generation.
The new 6-core CPU is “the fastest in a smartphone,” with two performance cores and four efficiency cores capable of handling the same workload as the iPhone 15 Pro 15% faster and 20% less power consumption.
Like the other iPhone 16s, the Pros also get Camera Control — a button that’s not a button, or, as Apple likes to say, “a result of thoughtful hardware and software integration.” It has a tactile switch that drives the click experience, a high-precision force sensor that enables the light-press gesture, and a capacitive sensor that enables touch and slide interactions.
You can use it to adjust zoom, exposure, and depth of field in the camera app, and “later this fall” you’ll also get a two-stage shutter feature. Developers can use this in their apps, too.
“Later this year,” it will “unlock visual intelligence” to let you learn about objects and places by clicking and holding Camera Control to pull up information about places you pass, add an event from a flyer to your calendar, or identify the breed of an animal, that sort of thing. You’ll also be able to search Google and use ChatGPT with the Camera Control for some reason.
Speaking of cameras, there’s a new 48MP Fusion main camera with a “faster, more efficient” quad-pixel sensor that supports 4K120fps video recording in Dolby Vision, a first on a smartphone. Apple also promises zero shutter lag for 48MP ProRAW and HEIF images. Both iPhone 16 Pros can now capture spatial photos in addition to video. There are also four new “studio-quality” microphones.
iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max can connect to the nearest satellite to send and receive text messages, emojis and Tapbacks via iMessage and SMS, even when there’s no cellular or Wi-Fi signal.