iPhone 16 Pro: Not much new, but everything is better [Review]

The iPhone 16 Pro is a much-refined iPhone. All the features that make the it pro have been improved. The cameras are better, faster and higher-resolution. The screens are bigger, the bezels smaller, the chips faster. Even Siri works better!

But the bright colors of the iPhone 16 are swaying a lot of people back to the entry-level models, and I don’t blame them. The iPhone 16 Pro is for those who want the top 10%, the uncompromising best-of-the-best — if you can live with a gray phone.

This year, the best gets a little better all around. Keep reading or watch the video.

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iPhone 16 Pro review

This year, I upgraded from the iPhone 12 Pro to the iPhone 16 Pro. While the phones look quite similar, Apple’s classic incremental change makes the 2024 model quite a step up.

Table of contents: iPhone 16 Pro review

1. Design
2. Desert titanium
3. Size and weight
4. Camera Control
5. Cameras
6. Apple Intelligence
7. The last four years of features
8. Speed, battery life and charging
9. Conclusions
10. Prices

Design

As someone who upgrades every three to four years, this is the first time Apple hasn’t substantially changed the design across two of my phones. And yet, the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro feel completely different in the hand.

The new model still comes with flat sides, tall skinny buttons, circular holes, a frosted glass back and a multilayer camera mesa. But Apple changed a lot of the proportions and details over the past few years. The edges are flat, but the corners are slightly rounder, so the iPhone 16 Pro feels much more comfortable to hold than the iPhone 12 Pro. The screen bezel is significantly thinner than in previous years’ models The corner radius is larger. And the notch is now a more attractive Dynamic Island (a feature introduced with the iPhone 14 Pro).

The titanium frame (introduced on iPhone 15 Pro) boasts a soft matte texture rather than a polished stainless steel finish. It’s lighter and doesn’t even feel like metal. The frame and glass blend together. Fingerprints don’t show up as easily, but unfortunately, it does still smudge — especially on the black model.

On the inside, the entire structure of the phone actually has been significantly redesigned, making this phone far more repairable. Apple also introduced a much better thermal design — last year’s models suffered from some heat problems. The iPhone 16 Pro gets warm after a lot of time using the camera, but it doesn’t get hot.

But the elephant in the room is the significantly larger camera bump. As someone who holds their phone in their left hand, the camera bump sits right where my index finger naturally wants to rest. I have to scrunch up my finger or adjust the angle to get it out of the way. It’s like when my dog sleeps on the corner of the bed. I can scrunch up or sleep sideways, but at some point, I just need to stretch my legs. I asked my camera bump to scram and lay down in the dog bed, but it isn’t as well-trained.

The blessing in disguise is that Apple literally cannot make the camera bump any larger than this — it would start to interfere with MagSafe accessories. Apple can’t rearrange the lenses horizontally like Google, because then it wouldn’t be able to capture Spatial Video horizontally. I don’t think there’s a practical reason why the LiDAR sensor needs to be on the first floor of the camera bump — it would be much more comfortable if the corner was taken out, although it wouldn’t look as nice.

There are a few minor design elements I miss from my iPhone 4 and iPhone 5s. The round volume buttons stuck out farther and were easier to distinguish blindly in my pocket. And most of all, I liked the contrast of black glass and silver metal. In my opinion, black and silver is still the most iconic Apple color scheme.

Desert titanium

The fashionable new color this year is the return of gold, now called desert titanium. It replaces blue to join the traditional black, white and gray.

However, it’s not very gold. Desert titanium looks closer to starlight than gold, to borrow Apple’s terminology. The metal side rails offer some warmth, but the glass backplate is a pale off-white. In some indoor lighting, the glass actually shows a hint of pink.

Personally, I was rooting for the earlier rumor of bronze, or even a richer gold color. Sitting it screen-up on my dark brown living-room table brings out some of those lovely tones. But the pale white glass on the back makes this more of a white phone than a gold one. It’s pretty disappointing.

I’m not sure if desert titanium will be a big hit. I think for most people, the gold won’t impress.

Size and weight

The standard phone size goes in cycles of getting bigger screens and smaller bezels. It’s a tug-of-war that the Bigger Screen team is winning over time.

Between the iPhone X and iPhone 14 Pro, it steadily grew 18% heavier. The iPhone 15 shed significant size and weight, but just like how over 95% of diets fail, the iPhone 16 Pro rebounded 60% of the weight it had lost. The iPhone 16 Pro is now virtually the same width, a little taller and noticeably heavier than my former iPhone 12 Pro.

It’s treading dangerously close to the size of my least favorite iPhone ever, the 7 Plus.

Camera Control

The iPhone has a new button on the right side that opens the camera and controls various camera functions. It’s in the perfect spot, in my opinion. Holding my phone in my left hand, it sits right beneath my ring finger. In my right hand, I can easily slide my thumb down to click it.

Apple has a perfect track record of pressure-sensitive and haptic features. The 3D touch display was great (until it proved incompatible with display designs), the fake clicking Home button was delightful (until Home buttons were removed) and the Magic Trackpad is the gold standard.

The Camera Control is the first time Apple has combined haptic feedback and pressure sensitivity on top of a real clicking button. My intuition expected it to feel like an actual camera — with two strong clicks — so the first time I tried to activate the on-screen controls, I accidentally took eight pictures. Instead, you only need to put a little bit of pressure on it to activate its other functions.

First, it opens into a zoom control. A quick swipe will always bump up by an optical zoom level, but if you move slowly, it’ll let you zoom in precise increments. Double-half-click to switch between other adjustable settings like exposure, focal depth, styles and tone.

Of course, if you can’t be bothered to figure out that interface, you don’t have to. You can just use it like a button that clicks to open the camera and clicks to take a picture.

The Camera Control being flush with the side of the phone is a very bizarre choice, in my opinion. It screws over case manufacturers, who either have to cut out large holes in the side of their cases or add additional cost to their designs with a capacitive sensor area. If it protruded a little bit, they could easily design a case that protects around the edge of the phone and lets you access the Camera Control without adding additional cost. And for those of us who like to use a phone case-free, a protruding button would make it feel more like a real camera shutter button, and wouldn’t lead to any more accidental pressing than any other button.

Cameras

Photographic Styles

Photographic styles give you the option to re-process a picture with an entirely different color palette. It’s kind of like how different camera film can have more warmth, more contrast or lighter shadows, except you have the power to change it after the fact. Applying a photographic style to an otherwise ordinary photo can turn it from “Hmm, nice picture” to “Oooh, that’s a nice picture!”

It’s much better than using a filter, because it’s nondestructive and can use the extra sensor information. For example, applying the sepia style to the image above brings out more detail in the dark areas of the image, like Indy’s nose.

For anyone that complains that iPhone pictures look too drab, too gray or too boring, this is the feature for you. You can set a particular style you like as your new default if you want everything to have a more saturated or more vintage look.

Minimum focus distance

Over the last few years, the minimum focus distance of the main lens has nearly doubled. The minimum focus distance is how close you can get to something before it can’t focus any closer and gets blurry. On my iPhone 12 Pro, I tested this to be about 8.7 cm. The iPhone 16 Pro, I was astonished it was 16.7 cm.

But the iPhone has three cameras on the back, and wants to be clever. When you get too close for the 1× lens, it secretly switches to the 0.5× lens and crops inwards. On earlier phones, this was really noticeable because the ultrawide lens was kind of crappy.

The new ultrawide lens has a much bigger sensor, so the difference isn’t quite as obvious. But you can still see when it switches over if you’re in a poorly lit room and you have the eye for such a thing. It’s most noticeable if you’re shooting an image where the focus is just below the cutoff.

48 MP ultrawide sensor

The ultrawide camera truly sings when you let it do what it’s supposed to do: take incredible macro shots and wide landscapes.

The macro shots are incredible. You can just … keep getting closer. And closer. And so much closer than you thought you could, and somehow it still captures these beautiful shallow depth-of-field images.

The 48 MP ultrawide landscape images are beautiful. You can capture huge vistas, but the 8,064 × 6,048 pixel resolution means you can zoom in and crop to your heart’s content.

The larger sensor means it’ll do better in low-light. The camera won’t switch to night mode or do as much noise reduction.

Higher frame rate video

Slow-motion video has a big upgrade this year with 120 fps video in 4K. You don’t have to swipe over to the Slo-Mo setting anymore — just tap where it says “60” in the upper corner to switch to “120.” You have three different speeds you can slow down to: 50 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent.

More important to me than 4K 120 video are the improvements made to 4K 60. Before, the camera system only had the bandwidth to record 4K 60 on a single lens at a time. Once I started recording, I couldn’t switch to the 0.5× or 2× lenses. That odd limitation is no more. I can freely switch between all three.

Four-mic array with Spatial Audio

Additional microphones significantly reduce wind noise and enable new audio mixing features. Audio quality doesn’t make headlines, but these are both great improvements that will upgrade all of your videos from now on. Classic Apple.

Wind noise is the unexpected killer of an outdoor shoot — it can totally ruin a video. It’s only been mildly windy here in Ohio the last week, so I haven’t been able to do a true stress test. But I ran around in my yard as fast as I could (not very fast) and couldn’t get it to make any wind noise. Further testing needed.

You’ll hear Spatial Audio recording if you play back your video over newer AirPods, a surround sound system or a Vision Pro. You can adjust the mix of the audio after the fact — turning up dialogue or turning down background noise. Apple’s names for these different audio mixes are sort of esoteric — Standard, In-Frame, Studio and Cinematic. (Here’s what they actually mean.)

5× telephoto zoom

The biggest tweak to the smaller phone is old news to the Pro Max — the 5× telephoto zoom. This gives you an incredible amount of optical reach. It’s a welcome change for those of us who hate being forced to choose between camera and comfort.

Unfortunately, the sensor in this lens still hasn’t been improved in a few years now. It could do well with that 48 MP treatment.

Apple Intelligence

I’ve been using Apple Intelligence on my Mac for about a month now, but this is my first time using it on my phone — how a vast majority of people will experience it. These features are available in the iOS 18.1 public beta if you’re brave and will be available in October if you’re patient.

Visual Intelligence, a feature exclusive to the iPhone 16 line, is not yet available for testing.

Writing tools: This is a set of features that can proofread, change the tone of or reformat text. I probably won’t use it much (I’m already a professional writer), but if you’re not a great writer, these tools might elevate your writing ability.

What I find useful is its ability to reformat anything into a bullet-pointed list or table. No matter your writing skill, converting a document format is a universal pain in the ass.

Summaries: If you get a rush of notifications in a row, you’ll see a summary describing the whole lot of notifications instead. These have about a 90% hit rate. Usually it can accurately summarize a string of texts, but occasionally, it’s missing an important piece of context and comes up with something totally wrong.

Where it really shines is in Mail, where instead of seeing the first two lines of text in the mail list, you see a one-line summary. This is fantastic. Emails with a one-time code will always show you the number inside the notification banner.

Image Clean Up: This is a new tool that lets you intelligently erase objects from a picture. This works great if the thing you’re erasing doesn’t overlap anything else that’s important in the image and is completely surrounded by a similar pattern it can replicate. Dust and hairs on a black shirt, a smoke detector on a ceiling, a calendar on the wall, something sitting on a table.

But it’ll try to fill in whatever you ask it to. It just might not do a very good job. A car on a busy city street? It’ll probably mess up the signs and buildings behind it. Try to replace a giant, central part of the image? It’ll struggle to fill it in.

The one thing it won’t do is replace someone’s face. It pixellates the results. But this can be considered a feature — if you want to post a picture on social media but need to hide someone’s identity, pixellating their face with Clean Up is a quick way to disguise them.

Siri: Even in this beta, this is not the (allegedly) super-smart Siri that will be able to take complicated instructions, questions, see your screen and do things for you inside apps. This version of Siri can understand you better if you trip up over your words. In a few days of testing, Siri seemed to understand me a bit better, with very few misses.

But I think it’s misleading that Apple rolled out the new visual look for Siri before the real smart Siri ships next spring. Ordinary people will see the flashy new design, try it out, realize it isn’t much better and write it off, potentially ignoring the actual new Siri that’s expected to come later.

The last four years of new features

A tiny, tiny minority of people upgrade every year — personally, I’m coming from an iPhone 12 Pro. These are the features I’ve heard about, discussed and used incidentally on other people’s devices or in Apple stores, but are new to me personally.

Dynamic Island: The notch is now a floating cutout in the screen that can animate and show things happening in the background, like music, navigation, timers and more. It’s like the iPhone equivalent of the Mac menu bar or the Windows system tray. Fantastic.

My only quibble is that I wish the actions for tap and long-press were reversed. Tap should expand the controls, long-press (or a second tap) should take you to the app. Doing it this way would encourage multitasking without completely switching contexts.

ProMotion: The high refresh rate display. Animations and UI runs at a smoother 120 fps. With the clever custom display controller built into Apple silicon, it can match the frame rate of 24, 30 and 60 fps of video content, or drop down to 1 fps when the display is static and you’re reading text. (Like right now!) Some people love it, some people hate it, some people literally don’t notice. For me, this is like going to a Retina display all over again. Now, I want my Mac to run at 120 fps, too.

Always-on Display: After you hit the side button, the display doesn’t completely shut off — it can persistently show your Lock Screen, notifications and wallpaper. It only turns off the display completely if you have it face-down on a table or put it in your pocket.

I’m trying to get used to it, but I find it somewhat unnerving. I’m deeply afraid of display burn-in and I also want the best battery life possible. I kind of want to turn it off, but I’ll give it another week or two to see if I can get used to it.

Even if you have the always-on Lock Screen turned off, Standby still displays always-on. That’s a good balance.

Action button: This button replaces the ring/mute switch, and you can customize what it does. I couldn’t decide on one thing, so I made a multi-feature Shortcut. It brings up a menu asking me if I want to add an item to my shopping list or to a note, and a couple of other things. Over time, if I discover I only really use it for one thing, I’ll move away from the multi-menu and simplify to just one.

Whether you find it useful seems highly dependent on which size of phone you get and how you hold it. I have the smaller phone and hold it my left hand, so it’s easy to press at any time with my thumb.

USB-C port: This probably won’t have as big an impact on me as it will other people. I don’t own a MacBook or iPad, and I already charge my phone pretty much exclusively via MagSafe. I regularly plug my phone into my Mac to record videos and take screen recordings, so the one and only Lightning cable in my life was swapped out with USB-C, and that’s about that.

In fact, it might have a net negative effect on my life because USB-C ports are harder to clean and remove dust — and I live with two big, fuzzy dogs.

Portrait mode improvements: You can convert a regular photo to a Portrait mode photo after the photo has been taken, and you can adjust the focal point. Both of these changes are incredible. Portrait mode is no longer a separate “mode,” really, since you can apply it at any time.

Cinematic mode: This is like Portrait mode artificial blur, but for video. Just how it took Portrait mode a few years to start looking good consistently, Cinematic mode seems to have gotten a lot better since it debuted in the iPhone 13 Pro. The results look pretty convincing now. It can also shoot in 4K, though only at 24 or 30 fps.

Action mode: Action mode stabilizes a video if you’re running or shooting a fast-moving object. I tested this by running around, making absolutely no effort to hold the camera steady. The video came out looking like a swooping drone shot — if the drone were only flying about four feet off the ground, that is.

Spatial video capture: Considering the other changes to the image signal processor and the big bump in resolution in the ultrawide camera, I expected the iPhone 16 Pro to be able to capture spatial video at a higher resolution — or at least a higher frame rate. But no, it’s still limited to 1080p 30 fps. I’m one of the few iPhone 16 Pro owners who actually owns a Vision Pro, so this is disappointing to say the least.

I think my desire for 4K 60 fps will outshine my desire for spatial video. Spatial video also looks much better recorded on a Vision Pro rather than on an iPhone, anyway.

Speed, battery life and charging

The A18 Pro chip is very fast and the battery lasts all day. This hasn’t really been a problem for a number of years now, but I might as well mention it. Remember when iPhone reviews would always have a section talking about call quality? Like, speaker volume, dropped phone calls and voice clarity? I feel like this section is heading in the same direction.

It’s fast.

The graphics support live raytracing and mesh shading, which would probably be very impressive if you could find any games that support it.

I had a day out and about on Sunday. An hour and a half of navigation in Maps with the screen bright the whole time, two hours and 40 minutes of podcasts over Bluetooth, an hour reading in Mona, 47 minutes solving word puzzles in News, 40 minutes in Safari, 46 minutes playing Photo Roulette, 47 minutes reading my RSS feeds, reading email, texting in Messages and Snapchat, taking a bunch of pictures.

After 15 hours and 15 minutes — half the time being active usage, half in my pocket — it was back on my MagSafe stand with 28% charge. Pretty damn good.

For some people, my unusually active day is their average. If you drain batteries faster than me (or you play Pokémon GO) you’ll appreciate the 45W wired fast charging. Get yourself a hefty charging brick. It supports 25W MagSafe charging as well via Apple’s new cable puck, but it may be a while until third-party accessory makers roll out higher-power charging stands.

Conclusions: iPhone 16 Pro or iPhone 16?

More than ever, the pro iPhone is a professional iPhone. A pro camera, with a pro display and pro graphics. If you’re not a Pro, the regular iPhone 16 is truly great enough for nearly everyone, with nearly all the same features.

But if you appreciate the differences, spend the extra $200 – $300, you’ll love the iPhone 16 Pro.

★★★★☆

Pricing

None of the prices in the United States changed over last year:

• iPhone 16: $799
• iPhone 16 Plus: $899
• iPhone 16 Pro: $999
• iPhone 16 Pro Max: $1199

All models are available for ordering online and in stores.

Buy them from: Apple

Apple did not provide Cult of Mac with a review unit for this article. See our reviews policy, and check out more in-depth reviews of Apple-related items.