Review: Apple's iPhone 16 Pro Is an Impressive Upgrade
Here's the iphone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max. They come with a new camera button, larger screens, a bigger battery, Apple intelligence and more. Let's take a look. I've been testing Apple's new Pro iphone models and the complete vision that Apple showed off for the iphone 16 Pro at its Glow Time event. Well, it's not complete right now features like visual intelligence, multi track recording and voice memos aren't here yet. And while I did get to test an early preview version of Apple Intelligence on the iphone 16 Pro, there are still many features missing like the chat GP T integration, Jin Moji and image playground. So let's start by talking about the hardware. I'm here at Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, home of some of the world's best chocolate. And what it takes to make a good chocolate is ingredients and how you put those ingredients together. And the same can be said for these Pro models like last year's iphone 15 Pro, the 16 Pro is made of Titanium. And if you were to look at it from the back, it looks well identical. It's not until you turn the phone around to the front where you start noticing the differences and the biggest difference is gonna be the screen because the 16 Pro has a larger screen. That's actually not the best thing about it. It's the border around the screen that really catches my eye because on the 15 Pro that border or Bezel looks like it was drawn with a big black sharpie marker. And on the 16 Pro, it looks like someone's using a fine tip sharpie to do the same. Watching videos on the screen is immersive. Playing video games is fun. I could see the screen very clearly on a bright sunny day, taking photos and video. One thing I wish that was on the phone was the Samsung anti Reflective coding that we see on the galaxy S 24 ultra. I still get a lot of reflections on this ceramic heel and the display, whether it indoors or out. Is it horrible? No, but once you see anti reflective coding on a phone, it's hard to not want it on every phone. And I I hopefully we get that maybe on future iphones, perhaps the biggest change in the design is this new button. So for you button, aficionados out there, you got another one. We got the action button last year and this year we get what's called the camera control button. And what this allows you to do is press it to open the camera, press it again to take a photo. You could long press it to record a video and you can kind of do this like light double press or like a light double pulse on it to bring up a little mini menu and change things like zoom and then you can glide your finger back and forth on it to zoom in and zoom out. You can also use that to change the aperture for portrait mode and switch between photography styles. However, the headline feature for this button isn't here, it's called visual intelligence. And what that allows you to do is use the button to open up the camera point it around the world and get context about it, maybe learn more about a building or what the camera is pointed at a lot like Google lens that's coming soon. And I feel that's really what this button is aimed for. In essence, the regular iphone 16 Pro has three new cameras. It inherits the 12 megapixel five X telephoto camera from the Pro Max. It also gets a new 48 megapixel ultra wide camera and the main camera's 48 megapixel sensor gets upgraded to a faster one. When you're taking a photo inches away from a subject, the iphone will automatically switch from the main camera to a cropped version of the ultra wide camera for better focus. The higher resolution ultra wide camera allows for great macro photos, super close up ones like this of a dragon head mask. I mean look at that fur but also food snaps like this image of a Cortado and scone ultra wide photos look good and are closer in parity to the main camera's image quality. But there's still quite a gulf between them. Check out this photo of a wine bar taken with the main camera. And here's an image of the same bar taken with the ultra wide, the ultra wide photo looks good and I like the contrast but it has less dynamic range than the main camera photo which is also brighter lens flares are minimal. Notice the street light out of frame bleeding in at the top of this photo and the soft small light flare photos from the main camera have great image quality skin tones look wonderful even in medium lighting like this photo I took of cnet's Lisa Aico and here's a group shot of some C TERS back lit and everyone's complexion has a nice soft glow, maybe a tad too soft but not plasticky or processed in any way. Images have a wide dynamic range like this one of the SOMA neighborhood in San Francisco. And here's a night mode photo of San Francisco City Hall taken on a foggy evening apple overhauled its photographic styles. And this is one of the places where I enjoy using the camera control button. The most just swiping between styles to achieve the look I want. Now I do have a couple nitpicks. One of them is actually with the new camera controller. If I'm holding the phone one handed to take a horizontal photo, I usually have my index finger across the side to help get a good grip on the phone and that can accidentally interact with a camera controller. Also in photos or when I'm reviewing a video, especially after shooting it. If I want to see it full screen, I have to tap now it's not the end of the world, but especially when I'm filming a video and when I check a shot, it's just one more step I have to do. And speaking of the Photos app, I am impressed with the new audio mix feature for videos and I thought the best way to show this off was to enlist cnet's Jessica Fierro and her guitar. Yeah, I'm feeling good. Yeah. All right. Take it away. Jessica. One of the cool new features on the iphone 16 is when you're recording video to have better audio, you can isolate a voice on camera. You can remove wind noise. You can even make voices sound like they're in a studio recording. We got the iphone 16 this week. There's a lot to try to. It's got Apple Intelligence you can even make on E Moi, it's not a fancy new hammer button. You can even wait for 4120. So you will miss me. You know that we're gonna test this thing just like we're doing right now. Yay. Very cool audio. Mix is a powerful tool and I'm genuinely impressed with the results. But now let's talk about my favorite feature on the iphone 16 Pro rolling Slow Mo. So the iphone 16 Pro has a new slow Mo feature. What's really cool about this is it shoots four K resolution at 100 and 20 frames per second. We've never had that high quality of slow motion video on an iphone ever. And what better way to show it off than doing some smashing. I'm here at the bay area. Smash room and let's slow mo my review of the iphone, slow motion. Amazing. Then there's IO Ss 18 which is all about personalizing your iphone to fit your needs, whether it's being able to move apps anywhere on the home screen, changing icon, color size or even removing app names. Two, adding shortcuts to the control center. I Os wants you to customize your iphone. The flashlight controls in the dynamic island are fun and useful and being able to use any emoji or live photo sticker as a tap back is such a delight. I did get to test some Apple Intelligence features in beta and while this is the headline feature for the phone, it's not quite fully baked, but what I did test that was working, I found useful and saw some real potential. The writing tools are clever. The professional style is a bit stilted. But as a professional writer myself, it's probably not something I would use regularly. One Apple intelligence feature that I did use a ton was the summarized tool especially in safari for news stories. The create a memory movie and the photos app is fun. Are you starting to notice this theme here? But probably the most immersive tool has to be the clean up tool and photos that lets you remove unwanted elements from an image. In this photo of cnet's Lisa Edo, I removed a chair on the left side and monitor on the right. I would have a hard time telling if there had been something there aside from the leftover chair wheels on the left and here's a photo of Nets Lexi Savides and Celso Bhati where I removed a person from the background who was talking to someone outside of the frame, the results look pretty good. But when I removed the van from the background of that same photo, it was replaced with some Salvador dolly like bike wheel blob Siri glowing interface looks cool and the assistant seems faster and more helpful. When talking to Siri, I can be more natural cannes what I say even mid thought. Hey Siri, what's the weather on Saturday? Hey Siri. Can you set a timer? Uh wait actually uh do you know are there any hotels available on Wednesday in San Francisco? Siri handles changing phone controls. Well, but when I asked what my phone serial number was, it was unresponsive. Same for when I asked about how much stories I had on my phone. All that to say this was a preview version and the public release comes out in October. I see the horizon where Apple is headed and I'm glad they're taking their time to get there powering. Everything is Apple's new A 18 Pro chip in use. The 16 Pro has been Peppy and being able to handle big workloads from filming copious amounts of four K slow mo to playing video games to just everyday scrolling in terms of battery. I've been primarily using the smaller 16 Pro and it gets through a day just fine. I'm probably the heaviest day of use where I was filming videos having the screen on at full brightness running Apple Intelligence. The phone started at 6:30 a.m. with a full charge and dropped to 12% by 7 p.m. I topped it off for 15 minutes which brought it back up to 37% and it made it to 1 a.m. No problem for more on the battery. Check out my full written review on CNET. There's so much to explore and hear about the 16 Pro but here are some thoughts to leave you with first keep an eye out on cnet as we will have more on the iphone 16 series, including camera comparisons with Samsung's and Google's best phones. Look if you're buying the iphone 16 Pro for Apple Intelligence, don't at least yet. If you have an iphone 12 Pro or older, then upgrading to this makes a ton of sense. If you're on an iphone 13 Pro and have a decent battery capacity still, I'd say save your money. And if you're on a 14 Pro or 15 Pro, there's no need to upgrade unless you really want to. The iphone 16 Pro is simply impressive. It will likely be even more so as software upgrades and promise features are added. But now I want to hear from you guys. What do you think of the iphone 16 Pro? Is there a feature that stands out to you? Let me know in the comments. Lastly, if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and thank you for watching.