The iPhone 16/16 Pro are Apple's experimental device
We've got four iPhone 16 series in new colors, 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, which the boxes show on the back of the phones. Then, the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, which show the front.
In the box, you get the USB-C cable, again, braided and high quality, and then a tiny little bit of paperwork in this pill shape. And then you'll notice no SIM card tool, same as last year, and no stickers this year. There are no stickers included in the iPhone 16 box at all. They just can't stop removing things.
These phones are the same sizes as last year for the base,6.7 inches for the Plus. But with the bigger batteries inside. So the back of the phone, it's a little paler, but the glass around the camera is a bit darker, and the rails of the phone are a bit darker, so this is nice.
With these Pro phones, I think there's a reason they show the front of the phone on the box because, if they showed the back, you literally could not tell the difference versus last year.
At least this one has slightly thinner bezels they can show. And yeah, this year is gonna be the Natural Titanium iPhone 16 Pro. It's gonna look and feel basically exactly like a titanium iPhone 15 Pro
first up, there is a size difference versus last year. The base phones are the same sizes, 6.1 and 6.7 inches in the same body sizes. But the Pro phones are both bigger. The iPhone 16 Pro goes from 6.1 to 6.3 inches, and even though it has thinner bezels, yes, the phone is slightly smaller and slightly wider. And then, the iPhone 16 Pro Max goes from 6.7 inches to 6.9 inches diagonally, which is now just an absolutely gigantic phone. I mean, it was already huge, but it's now even taller and wider. Biggest phone they've ever made.
The new A18/A18 Pro in these phones are new versus last year. Really not noticing, like, a huge difference in performance with these brand-new phones. Obviously, you're going to feel that more at the very high end and in the long term as these phones age. These phones across the board have eight gigs of RAM now. They all have eight gigs of RAM.
Apple was giving us a lot of talk in that keynote about how these are the first phones built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence. Is that what this means? I mean, you clearly need a lot of memory to run these AI models, and there's also a more powerful neural engine on all the phones compared to last year. So maybe that's a part of it, too. But all that talk, and these phones all launch with iOS 18.0, which has exactly zero AppleIntelligence features on them at launch out of the box.
The biggest physical change on these new phones is this added button here. While Apple avoided calling it a button during their keynote and interviews, it is indeed a physical, tactile button that depresses and clicks. The button is exclusive to camera functions—pressing it opens the camera, pressing again takes a photo, and holding it records video. It's also touch-sensitive with a vibration motor to mimic a half-press feel. Users can swipe or double-tap to switch between camera settings like zoom or styles. Though it feels finicky and redundant at first, it simplifies controls by hiding on-screen buttons when in use.
The placement feels like it was made with landscape in mind, but landscape ideally would've been at the corner. But they also know a lot of people take photos and videos like this, so it can't be all the way at the bottom. So they moved it up. So, it's kind of splitting the difference here. Also, third-party apps will be able to plug into it if they use the camera. So this is already working with Kino, and it's supposed to start working with Snapchat pretty soon as well. And you can imagine other apps that use the camera will just decide what they want to do with it.
How cases would deal with this new button surface thing. So it turns out there are basically two options. Option number one is just about on the side of the case. Just cut it out, and expose it to the finger. So it's fine. That's probably what most cheap cases will do, but that also means it's no longer going to be flush with the side of the case. But then there's option number two, which is what Apple's first-party cases do, which is putting in this little insert, which has glass and transfers the capacitance from the button outside of the case to the Camera Control of the phone itself and maintaining that flush feel. And it feels like it works pretty well. The half press still works fine, the swiping still works fine, and the vibration motor transfers through.
