Apple iPhone 16 Pro
While I am yet to be sold on Apple Intelligence, the iPhone 16 Pro is still a very good iPhone with upgrades in most of the right places. It shouldn’t interest those who plumped for the iPhone 15 Pro, but if you’re coming from an older device this ticks all the right boxes.
Pros
- Great size
- The camera is certainly capable of greatness
- Good battery life
- No exclusive features in Pro Max model
Cons
- Apple Intelligence yet to wow
- Meagre starting storage
- Camera Control can be tough to master
Key Features
- Apple IntelligenceApple’s first AI features are here powered by the A18 Pro chip
- Impressive camera hardware48MP main camera, 48MP ultra wide camera and 12MP tele with 5x zoom – plus Camera Control
- Bigger screenThe screen is larger than the iPhone 15 Pro
Introduction
2024 is the year of AI – and with the iPhone 16 Pro, Apple is going headfirst into a new era.
Let’s ignore for a moment that the iPhone 15 Pro series can also utilise Apple Intelligence, and that many of those AI features aren’t available yet – this is the first iPhone Apple is pushing as an AI machine.
Focus too much on AI and you might miss upgrades in other areas, though. This is the biggest ‘small’ Pro iPhone to date, with a rethink of the camera process and a whole new Camera Control button.
So, with the same £999/$999 price tag as the iPhone 15 Pro, is the iPhone 16 Pro a step forward? Or has the focus on AI hampered progress elsewhere?
Design
- New Camera Control button
- Tweaked colour options
- Very light and easy to hold
Apple used to update its phone designs on a fairly regular schedule, typically every couple of years. That’s not been the case for a while now, with the iPhone 16 Pro still carrying many of the characteristics from the iPhone X – the last huge redesign.
Yes, since then we’ve had the sides flattened, the notch tweaked and the materials changed but the blueprint is still much the same. I think Apple has found a strong design for the phone, however I wouldn’t bemoan a rethink as even if you’re upgrading after a 24-month contract cycle the differences here are minimal.
The iPhone 16 Pro is slightly larger overall than the 15 Pro. It’s a few mm taller, about 13g heavier and very marginally wider. You have to put the two phones next to each other to notice and the benefits of the larger screen outweigh the altered dimensions.
I’d guess many will be coming from an iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 13 Pro, and if that’s you then the switch to titanium here makes for a lighter phone with softer edges. It’s a really comfortable phone to hold.
The Pro range remains devoid of any of the brighter, more ‘fun’ colour options found on the standard iPhone 16 range. All the Pro hues are muted and kind of dull – and there’s no real standout colour this year.
There’s a new Desert Titanium – the flagship colour found in most of the marketing – which is far more subtle than previous gold iPhone colours with no shiny sides to reflect light like jewellery. Other colour options are black, white and silver.
Rumours a few years ago suggested Apple was planning on doing away with physical buttons and ports on iPhones, replacing them with capacitive alternatives. In truth, things have ended up going in the complete opposite direction – there are now more buttons on the iPhone than ever before.
With the iPhone 15 Pro, the Action Button was added – a shortcut key that could be programmed to open set apps or enact certain functions. This remains on the 16 Pro (and has been added to standard iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus) and it’s been joined by Camera Control.
Camera Control sits below the power key and provides a quicker way to control the iPhone 16 Pro’s various camera skills. A single press from anywhere opens the camera, another press takes a photo and a longer one starts recording videos.
The button is capacitive, so when you’re in the camera you can tap it lightly to jump into a new options menu, and scroll to change lens, depth, exposure and so on. It doesn’t just work with Apple’s default camera app, with alternatives like Halide able to utilise it.
It’s a very clever idea and the tech behind it is typically Apple. There’s nice feedback from the key when it’s pressed, it’s covered in sapphire to avoid damage and it’s a quick way to jump into the camera from wherever.
After using Camera Control for about a month though, I’m still not completely sold on its implementation. For instance, the position is just a little too high up the side of the phone and I am always shifting my finger around to find it. I’d much prefer it to be lower down, like where the camera shutter button on the Sony Xperia VI sits.
It’s also generally quite fiddly. It’s great to open the camera, but trying to manoeuvre through the settings with swipes and taps is tiresome and not very intuitive. It’s far easier, quicker and more reliable to just use the touch screen.
Camera Control is a nice idea, just one that needs a little more thought before it becomes one of the reasons to upgrade.
Elsewhere, the iPhone 16 Pro really feels like a phone worthy of its high price. It’s built from grade 5 titanium with a 100% recycled aluminium thermal substructure, has an IP68 rating for protection from water for 30 minutes and totes a durable Ceramic Shield over the display.
The packaging is, according to Apple, made from 100% fibre-based materials for the first time, with no plastic elements and the iPhone 16 Pro on the whole uses more recycled parts than previous entries. There’s 95% recycled lithium in the battery and 100% recycled gold in the USB-C connector and camera wires.
Screen
- Larger than 6.3-inch screen
- ProMotion for 120Hz refresh
- Wonderfully bright
The ‘smaller’ Pro model has a slightly larger screen this year, moving from the 6.1-inch size used previously to 6.3-inches. It’s a minor change, albeit one that I am fully on board with.
It doesn’t make the phone much bigger than the 15 Pro – most of the change comes from a slightly slimmer bezel running around the display itself – but it does give the impression the screen is a little roomier. It’s not a massive change, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many didn’t even notice, but coming from a 15 Pro Max I do appreciate the change.
Still, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the one to choose if you want a huge canvas for games, media or just flicking through your photos.
Aside from the size, both versions of the 16 Pro have all the same display tricks and skills – so you aren’t missing out if you, like me, simply prefer the smaller, more manageable form factor.
ProMotion remains a feature limited to the Pro range – although rumours have suggested it’ll finally trickle down to the standard models with the iPhone 17 – and it allows the refresh rate of the screen to move between 1Hz and 120Hz. It’ll drop down to that 1Hz when the always-on display is enabled, giving you an outline of the clock even when the phone is locked.
It’ll then ramp up when you’re scrolling or gaming. Whether the phone consistently reaches 120Hz is beside the point, as it always stays smooth and fast. I’ve always said while you might not notice ProMotion and faster refresh screens in general immediately, after weeks of use it can be hard to switch back to anything slower.
The Super Retina XDR panel is sharp and while it’s mostly the same as the one on the 15 Pro, it remains one of the best phone displays on the market. Fire up Dolby Vision HDR content from Netflix and the colours look utterly fantastic. It can get really bright outdoors too, and importantly it can get very dim too – so firing it up in a dark room won’t disturb everyone.
At the top of the screen is the Dynamic Island – a pill-shaped cutout that is both a place for the front 12MP camera and various FaceID depth sensors to sit, and sort of a secondary area for certain notifications.
This is the third time we’ve had phones from Apple with the Dynamic Island and while it’s clearly a stepping stone between the older notch and a possible future of under-screen cameras, I like it and would genuinely miss it if it wasn’t there. Or at least I would miss some of the functionality offered.
You can pin things into the Dynamic Island, like sports scores (both from Apple’s own Sports app or third-party offerings, like FotMob) and food delivery apps can show the remaining time until an order is dropped off. It gives quick access to currently playing music and podcasts, too. Not having to jump between apps – or to the lock screen – to see this information is great.
Apple’s reluctance to shift deeper notifications – like those from Messages – into the Dynamic Island says to me the long-term plan is still to ditch it completely in the next few years when the tech is more advanced.
There are, of course, benefits to having a screen free of any notch. The Dynamic Island can get in the way, especially in games, where you don’t get that proper full-screen experience.
Performance
- More competition with Qualcomm’s latest chips
- Up to 1TB storage
- Excels in gaming scenarios
A new iPhone means a new chip to power it. The A18 Pro, predictably, arrives with a focus on AI performance and it powers everything the phone offers, from the Camera Control to Apple Intelligence.
According to Apple, the A18 Pro packs a new 16-core neural engine, 6-core GPU and 6-core CPU plus an increase to the total system memory bandwidth. There’s also 8GB RAM (less than the best Android phones, but don’t let that bother you) and storage options ranging from 128GB to 1TB.
I find it frustrating Apple is still offering a 128GB option for a phone like this, as such meagre storage will quickly feel restrictive. If you’re spending this month on a phone, either in one single upfront payment or monthly, pay the extra and get at least the 256GB offering.
In my month of testing the iPhone 16 Pro with hundreds of apps, games and benchmark tests I have been impressed. It’s not a huge jump over the already excellent A17 Pro – see the benchmark graphs below for a deeper look – but Apple has cornered itself by continually releasing impressive silicon on a yearly basis.
You’ll have no trouble playing anything from the App Store, from AAA titles like Death Stranding and various Resident Evil titles plus Apple Arcade titles. Those AAA games still suffer from some bugs – the text is so small on the display – and maybe they’re not quite as optimised as they could be.
In regular use, the iPhone 16 Pro is seriously quick – although I wouldn’t expect anything less and it’s been a long time since a new iPhone felt slow. If you’re upgrading from an iPhone 13 series device, for instance, you will really notice the difference.
The chip also enables you to use Apple Intelligence. While both iPhone 15 Pro models also support this service, no other iPhones do – so this could be an enticement for some to upgrade.
WiFi 7 support is great for those with supported routers and I noticed big improvements in speeds between the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro when running speed tests on a new router. eSim remains the only choice for US buyers while other regions retain the physical SIM slot.
Camera
- Exceptional slow-motion video
- More control over how images look, with deeper customisation
- Three very good lenses
With the arrival of Apple Intelligence, the iPhone 16 Pro feels like the first iPhone in years that doesn’t tote the camera as the biggest ‘feature’. There’s still plenty of camera changes and additions here and it makes for quite a different prospect.
Before I get into how the three cameras perform, let’s run through the hardware. The main camera stays at 48MP, the ultrawide jumps from 12MP to 48MP and the 5x optical zoom that was previously exclusive to the larger 15 Pro Max is now the same across both 16 Pro phones.
Thankfully, you don’t have to go bigger to get a better zoom. The 5x zoom shots were a huge step up over the 3x from the 15 Pro.
While there are a few welcome hardware upgrades – the higher res ultrawide is great – for me, the biggest upgrades for the 16 Pro are the added control you get about what your shots look like thanks to the new Photography Styles.
If you don’t like the default look of an iPhone 16 Pro photo, you can tweak it: make it warmer, cooler, more amber, alter the shadows and so on. You can even set these styles as a default, so all your shots will be processed exactly the way you want them. It’s quite the break from iPhones of old.
As someone who loves tweaking and tinkering with photos, I love this new direction. However, if you’re less inclined I think it makes the whole process harder to master. If you just point and shoot, you might no longer be getting the best of what the camera can offer in specific situations.
I have probably taken over 1000 snaps during the review process, and aside from the changes enabled by the styles I don’t think there are any huge camera upgrades here.
Shots from the main camera are colour-accurate, with realistic skin tones and not too heavy-handed with colours. Sometimes shots, especially landscapes, look a little flat due to an odd lack of shadows and highlights – so I often pushed these up afterwards to add more life.
At night, the iPhone 16 Pro performed well in my tests – although not noticeably better than the iPhone 15 Pro. There remains a tendency for reflections to appear when shooting bright light sources at night, and the night mode can still be a little slow. I much prefer night shots from the Pixel 9 Pro.
Arguably, it’s the video side of things that has got bigger upgrades. You can now shoot wonderfully silky video at 4K 120fps. Capture, for instance, moving animals in this mode and the results look very cinematic. There are a smattering of audio tools too, designed to focus in on specific sounds when you’re shooting video. One mode in particular did an excellent job of reducing background audio and making my voice more prominent.
Overall, the iPhone 16 Pro camera package is excellent – if you’re willing to put some time into crafting styles that produce images you like. Left on default, some pictures look flat and these might give the impression this isn’t one of the best camera phones around.
Software and AI
- Apple Intelligence brings AI features to the iPhone
- iOS 18 is more customisable
- Not all AI features are here yet
It’s fair to say that the rollout of Apple Intelligence – the brand’s flashy first attempt at AI – hasn’t been the smoothest, and I can’t imagine it’s been released the way Apple had originally intended.
It’ll be over six months after this phone’s release by the time the initial set of promised features have fully arrived, with the system itself absent at launch and not officially arriving in UK English until December. I have been reviewing the iPhone 16 Pro across its initial iOS 18 release, and the US English version of Apple Intelligence within iOS 18.1.
It’s hard to properly judge Apple Intelligence because, well, there isn’t much to it – yet. Of the promised features announced at WWDC, none of what I would call the tentpole additions are here yet. There’s no ChatGPT integration, no Gemmoji or Image Playground and Siri is still lacking its true facelift.
Instead, Apple Intelligence is currently made up of a few skills to aid your writing, some very basic photo editing tricks and a hit-or-miss summarising feature that shortens email and stacked notifications into manageable chunks of information.
Clean Up is a bit like Google’s Magic Eraser, letting you remove errant subjects or items from images – with the AI masking the area to give the impression nothing was ever there. I’ve removed people encroaching upon my landscape shots and it can produce good results, but it’s not as reliable yet as Google’s interpretation.
My issue with Clean Up is that unless you’re trying to remove something very obvious from a photo that the app is suggesting – usually a person in the background – the results are poor.
I’ve had more success, and plenty of unintended laughs, from the Summaries feature. This works in various apps, condensing wordy messages into smaller bites of text. But the real star is how it summarises message notifications, squashing together multiple texts from group chats.
The idea is smart – instead of reading 20 messages from an overactive group, the AI will give you all the details in one notification. Sometimes in my testing it worked great, but most of the time it struggled with the perceived wit (or lack thereof) and frantic group chats – often producing sarcasm as fact and generally missing the point. As Lewis put it in his iPhone 16 review – “there’s nuance to human communication that Apple Intelligence seemingly doesn’t quite understand.”
Most phone-based AI systems we’ve tested so far, whether it be from Samsung or Google, have included some sort of writing guidance features. Apple Intelligence is no different, with it able to rewrite text to check for errors, alter the tone and so on.
The results are…fine? No AI writing engine is very good, and stuff tends to that unnatural tone. But, if you’re not a writer and want some reassurance, either over spelling or tone, it can help.
The final part of the currently available Apple Intelligence feature set is Siri enhancements. Siri has a fancy new animation when it kicks into gear, pulsating the sides of the display with a red glow. Apple’s voice assistant has also ingested loads of How To guides, so you can ask it ‘How do I turn on dark mode’ and it’ll list the steps. More Siri features are coming down the line, too.
While Apple Intelligence is the headline grabber, iOS 18 is a big update elsewhere. There’s a new Passwords app, RCS support and a far more customisable home screen. You can now tweak icon colours, tint them dark or make them bigger.
There’s also Apple’s impressive long-term software support to take into account. The iPhone XS – released six years ago – got the iOS 18 update, to give you an idea of how well Apple handles its long-term support.
Battery Life
- Heavy users will be running low by the end of the day
- Lighter users can make it comfortably through
- Charging is fairly quick
The iPhone 16 Pro can’t match the 16 Pro Max or iPhone 16 Plus for sheer endurance as Apple’s larger phones always win out simply because they have more room for a bigger battery. For a smaller iPhone though, the 16 Pro is one of the more impressive.
How long the phone lasts is always going to depend on how you use it. I’ve always said the iPhone Pro Max range can be a two-day phone for lighter users, with previous Pro phones coming closer to requiring a charge every night.
I think, and my endless testing proves, that the iPhone 16 Pro can be as close to a two-day phone this size iPhone has ever been, if you’re a lighter user. For me, I still have tended to need to charge every night, with the phone usually sitting between 20 and 10% at the end of the day.
Battery life is certainly improved over the iPhone 15 Pro by a couple of hours. Probably not by enough to upgrade, but good to know anyway.
There’s, of course, no charger in the box and no huge update to overall charging speeds. If you’re charging the wired way, with a plug capable of outputting 30w a full charge will take around 90 minutes, and you can get 50% in between 25-30 minutes.
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Should you buy it?
Buy if bigger phones aren’t for you
The iPhone 16 Pro is one of the few phones on the market that is both small (ok, maybe not as small as the Mini series, but it’s still comparatively small) and seriously powerful. Unlike in previous years, you’re not missing out on big features by not going for the Max.
Don’t buy if you expect a full Apple Intelligence experience from Day One
Apple intelligence is categorically, at this stage, not a reason to buy an iPhone 16 Pro. That feeling might change down the line, but if you’re expecting a complete experience at the beginning you’re going to be disappointed.
Final Thoughts
With or without the full suite of Apple Intelligence features, the iPhone 16 Pro is a very good phone. It’s not without its missteps though, and for the first time I think the camera system is actually less intuitive, with more work needed to achieve really exceptional photos.
There’s still a lot to like, and if you’re coming from anything but an iPhone 15 Pro the benefits are here. It’s a better size than previous ‘small’ Pro iPhone models, it has better battery life and the areas that were already very good remain so, including the wonderful screen.
Go for the iPhone 16 Pro Max if you’re after the best choice for media – that huge screen is ridiculously good – and go for the iPhone 16 Plus if battery is more important than fancy camera extras. Still, with everything considered, this is probably the best iPhone for most people.
How we test
I have been using the iPhone 16 Pro as my primary for the past month, beginning with the pre-Apple Intelligence release of iOS 18 and then moving across to iOS 18.1. I have benchmarked the device using standard tests, put its display to the test with HDR video and taken over 1000 photos with the camera system. I have also compared it to the iPhone 15 Pro, some of the top Android devices and the iPhone 16.
Tested for a month
Shot over 1000 photos
Tested with benchmarks and real world use
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FAQs
Apple Intelligence is also available on the iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max plus various iPads and Macs with M-series chips.
Until iOS 18.2 arrives, it’s in US English only. Additional countries and regions, including the EU, will arrive in 2025.
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