Every fall, Apple strives to set a new standard for the best mobile phone on the market by introducing new features to its flagship iPhone on an annual basis. While the iPhone 15 Pro featured some major advancements — including the A17 chip, lighter build, new USB-C port and Action Button — the iPhone 16 Pro, in each of its iterations, boasts subtle but still impactful upgrades, like Apple Intelligence, a larger display, new pro camera features, improved graphics and more.
Picking up the titanium device, which features the thinnest bezels of any Apple product to date, it’s clear that Apple has mastered the durability-to-lightweight ratio. The phone is finished in four high-gloss shades — Black Titanium, Natural Titanium, White Titanium, and Desert Titanium — and the physical appearance is just as sleek as its predecessors. The iPhone 16 Pro measures in at 6.3 inches and the iPhone 16 Pro Max measures in at 6.9 inches, making for the largest iPhone display to date. You’ll immediately notice a new Camera Control button on the side of the device, added to intuitively streamline user interactions with the advanced camera system — a 48MP Fusion lens paired with a faster quad-pixel sensor for 4K120 fps video recording in Dolby Vision. With two light taps of the button, users can cycle through various controls, including zoom, exposure, and depth of field, in a way that makes the camera experience even more like the real thing.
Additionally, the device includes new photographic styles, which adjust color, highlights and shadows in real time. Apple says the tool has a better understanding of skin tones, giving users more control over how they (or their subjects) appear in images. In practice, the feature seemed to effectively update Apple’s on-device images, though it will be interesting to see how the features work on personal photos taken away from the office.
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Built on the advanced A18 chip, the device is equipped with improved performance capabilities and power efficiency thanks to second-generation 3-nanometer technology, which further accelerates Apple Intelligence – the tech giant’s new digital assistant that can understand and create both languages and images, take actions across apps, and extract cues from personal context to simplify everyday tasks. When demonstrated, the tool worked flawlessly: it was able to instantly summarize a passage of text in the Notes app, create realistic message replies in Mail, easily change the tone of specified text, and transcribe and summarize audio.
Specifically, Apple Intelligence uses Private Cloud Compute to maintain the privacy of user data, securely maximizing the synergy between on-device processing and larger processes running on Apple silicon servers. The tool will be released next month as part of a free software update.
With the A18 chip, the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max now have 17% more memory bandwidth, benefiting the six-core GPU (which is also now up to 20% faster). It’s the fastest in a smartphone, according to the company, and it’s an impressive addition considering it can handle the same workloads as the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max models, but doing so 15% faster and using 20% less power. Additionally, the device’s battery, made from 100% recycled cobalt and over 95% recycled lithium, has seen a significant increase in capacity to support 33 hours of video playback.
All in all, the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max are refined additions to Apple’s ecosystem. They’re the ideal upgrade for more tech-savvy users who can integrate high-performance models like these into their daily routines, or for those who simply want to improve their phone’s camera experience.
Pre-orders for the iPhone 16 Pro (starting at $999 USD) and iPhone 16 Pro Max (starting at $1,199 USD) began on Friday, September 13, with the devices officially launching on Friday, September 20. Get a closer look at the devices in the galleries above.
