The iPhone 16 is so good that you probably don’t need the Pro

The iPhone 16 I tested doesn’t have the word “Pro” in its name, but it’s easy to forget that when I’m using its new dedicated camera shutter to capture a flower in painstaking detail. Or editing the audio mix of a live musical performance with a single tap. Or playing games that were once reserved for powerful computers and consoles. Apple’s basic iPhone has never been this premium, making it an easy choice for most eager upgraders seeking out the best smartphone — and a tempting option even for long-time Pro users such as myself.

That said, the iPhone 16 isn’t going to be an obvious upgrade for everyone, especially if you’re serious about photography, like really smooth displays or just aren’t terribly hurting for a new phone right now. Wondering if you should take the plunge? Here’s what I think after a week with Apple’s latest flagship.

What we liked about it

The best iPhone design you can get

This might be a hot take, but I think the basic iPhones — with their lighter weight and more joyful colors — have long been superior to the Pros on the design front. That remains the case with the iPhone 16.

Apple’s latest entry level iPhone looks and feels a lot like last year’s model, with a “color infused” glass back that’s mercifully smudge-resistant and just a joy to hold. The rear-facing dual cameras are now arranged vertically rather than diagonally, which allows the phone to shoot spatial video but also makes for a cleaner, more uniform look. While the Pro series continues to be offered in unexciting shades of silver, black and gold, the iPhone 16 comes in a gorgeous array of hues highlighted by pink, teal and a deep blue that Apple calls ultramarine. I’d probably buy ultramarine for myself, though I do really dig my teal review unit — and not just because it happens to match my beloved New York Liberty’s team colors.

The iPhone 16 doesn’t overhaul much aesthetically, but it did gain an important new button on each side. On the left you’ll find the Action button, which was previously exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro series and can be programmed to do things like silence your phone, start recording a voice memo or open your flashlight. I personally use mine as a Shazam button for identifying whatever music is playing at my local coffee shop with a quick tap; something that’s much easier than fumbling to get the app open in time. There are near-endless possibilities if you’re crafty with the Shortcuts app; folks have used this button for everything from creating calendar events and quick notes to unlocking their cars.

One thing you won’t need to use your Action button for is opening your camera, thanks to a Camera Control — a new feature debuting on the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro series simultaneously. Located on the top right of the phone in landscape mode (just like a regular camera shutter), this button, touchpad hybrid lets you open your camera with a single click and immediately start snapping photos with another. You can hold the button down to capture some video, or give it a quick double-tap to quickly adjust things like zoom, focus and Photographic Styles without taking your finger off the shutter.

My favorite thing about Camera Control is simply having a faster way to open the camera and capture yet another shot of my dog causing mischief before the moment is gone. Once the app is actually open, however, I find it to be more of a mixed bag. Double-tapping to open your various camera settings takes some getting used to, and I’ve accidentally opened the settings dial when I meant to snap a photo — and vice versa — on multiple occasions.

Once I got the hang of things, using my iPhone like it was a point and shoot felt pretty neat. But I’ve built up so much muscle memory doing things like pinching to zoom and tapping around to change settings that this new button came with a learning curve. I also mostly use my phone to capture silly vertical photos and videos for my Instagram Stories; those deeper into the iPhone photography game will likely get more mileage out of Camera Control, especially as it hopefully improves and becomes compatible with more camera apps over time.

Excellent all-around cameras

Whether I was finely adjusting zoom levels via Camera Control or snapping selfies on the touchscreen like a layman, I generally had a blast taking photos on the iPhone 16. Heck, I even used it to shoot the entirety of my AirPods 4 review. Apple’s new flagship builds on the iPhone 15’s already excellent dual-camera setup to great effect with features like macro mode and spatial photography — even if there’s one thing keeping it from being my smartphone shooter of choice.

The iPhone 16 truly proved its worth during my daily visits to the park, where it accurately captured the bold green grass and sunny blue skies lining my view of the East River. My excessive roll of dog photos came out bright, accurate and packed with detail, and I loved using focus and depth control (a feature that debuted on the iPhone 15) to instantly change a regular ol’ photo into a stunning portrait mode shot with a quick tap of the screen. A close-up shot I snapped of a deep red hibiscus plant looked so good, you’d think it came from one of those “shot on iPhone” ads — even without the professional gear and post-production that likely goes into those.

Speaking of shooting things up close, the iPhone 16’s improved ultrawide lens can finally take the kinds of super-detailed macro mode shots that Pro users have been enjoying for years. Apple’s new phone let me see every little prickle in a bed of coneflowers, whereas I could only see the frontmost flower clearly without it. It did a similarly great job of exposing every tiny detail of the lush goldenrod and knotweed plants I came across in Central Park, though I prefer my bokeh-style shots that sacrifice detail for depth.

The iPhone 16’s cameras were mostly fantastic in low light. When I photographed my bandmates outside after a sweaty evening rehearsal, every detail of their t-shirts and tattoos looked clear as day — and a bit brighter and sharper than what I got from last year’s iPhone 15 Plus. I had a similarly good experience taking photos around a dimly lit, graffiti-ridden bar, where the iPhone 16 camera revealed details that weren’t super clear to the naked eye. The low-light photos I captured at various concerts were more of a mixed bag; the color and brightness was there, but there was some obvious fuzziness once I zoomed into the musicians’ faces.

While we’re talking music, the iPhone 16 now captures Spatial Audio by default when you’re snapping a video — and better yet, lets you adjust the audio mix after the fact. I didn’t think of this feature much until I pulled up a video I happened to capture from band practice, changed the mix setting to “cinematic” and was suddenly able to hear myself and my bandmates with far better separation than before. When I later filmed a video to promote our upcoming show while walking around Times Square — a nightmare as far as ambient noise goes — I simply activated the “in-frame” setting that isolated my voice and kept the chaos around me pretty quiet. This perk seems especially clutch for those dipping their feet into iPhone filmmaking, and is just plain fun to play around with.

Apple’s new phone builds on Photographic Styles, which are a range of presets that let you customize the color and tone of your photos. New undertones like Gold and Amber let you highlight your subject’s skin tone without messing with the rest of the photo, while mood filters like Luminous and Dramatic add more light and contrast, respectively. There’s a convenient new slider tool that lets you adjust color intensity by simply thumbing around the screen, and you can now change and adjust Photographic Styles after you’ve taken a photo. I’ve never messed with Photographic Styles much, but I appreciate the improvements here, and get the sense that serious iPhone photographers will get plenty of use out of them.

The iPhone 16’s realigned cameras can now shoot spatial photos and videos that can then be viewed in all their immersive glory on the Apple Vision Pro — if you’re one of the people that happened to throw down $3,500 for one. I’ve found viewing spatial content on Apple’s headset to be a neat trick, even if it doesn’t suddenly immerse me back in that moment in the way that the company’s presentations might have you believe. The Vision Pro is still a niche luxury product at this point, but it doesn’t hurt to have a phone that’s future-proofed for mixed reality (and hopefully, a cheaper and better Vision product down the road).

Predictably great performance with a big gaming upgrade

Smartphone performance is practically an afterthought these days; the iPhone 16 screams through every combination of apps I throw at it just like any modern handset would. That said, the phone’s zippy new A18 Bionic processor enables some cool new things that are worth talking about.

I don’t need to weigh you down with core counts or explain what a GPU is; I’ll just let you know that the iPhone 16’s supercharged specs allow it to play true triple-A games like Resident Evil 4, Death Stranding Director’s Cut and Assassin’s Creed Mirage — all of which were previously exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro series for those playing on mobile.

I played a good chunk of Resident Evil Village on the iPhone 16, and was astonished. Here was a game that once required me to boot up my PS5, now playing smoothly in the palm of my hand on Apple’s cheapest new iPhone. Sure it didn’t look quite as sharp as the PlayStation version I poured dozens of hours into, but it was remarkably close for a portable port, staying smooth and responsive as I frantically fought off hordes of werewolf-like undead at medium-ish settings. This is especially impressive considering that not even the Nintendo Switch can play this game natively.

That said, my iPhone 16 got very hot after just 20 minutes or so with the game, so you might want to spread out your play sessions (or lower your graphics settings) accordingly. The new iPhone isn’t going to replace your console or PC, but having access to a handful of triple-A games — many of which can be played across iPhone, iPad and Mac — is perfect for the gaming-curious who don’t feel like buying an expensive rig just to see what Assassin’s Creed is all about.

If you’re interested in hard numbers, know that the iPhone 16 continues Apple’s usual dominance on our performance benchmarks. On the Geekbench 6 multi-core test (a good gauge of multitasking chops), the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus posted scores that more than double what we got from Google’s Pixel 9 series, and whoop the Galaxy S24 range by a healthy amount. The regular iPhone 16 models only trailed the iPhone 16 Pro series and their even beastlier A18 Pro chip by a small margin, and were pretty much on par with their pricier siblings on the less-intensive single-core test. That’s all to say that the iPhone continues to be the fastest smartphone around, and you’re really not giving up a ton of speed if you choose not to go Pro.

Excellent battery life

Another great thing made possible by that efficient A18 Bionic processor? Fantastic battery life. I spent most of my review period with the smaller iPhone 16, which left me with around 40% to 50% left in the tank after a typical day of browsing, texting, streaming and playing too much Marvel Snap. Naturally, heavy camera use and beefier gaming ate up more battery, but I never ended the day with a fully dead phone.

The base iPhone 16 lasted through a respectable 15-plus hours of 4K video playback on our recently reworked battery test, while the iPhone 16 Plus and its bigger battery survived for a stronger 19:41. Those numbers are short of Apple’s estimates of 22 and 27 hours, respectively, but still enough for multiple flights’ worth of movie binging.

Similar to what we saw on our performance tests, you’re also not giving up a ton of battery life if you pick these over the iPhone 16 Pro or 16 Pro Max, which posted respective times of 16:50 and 20:40. Apple can’t quite seem to crack the battery life code in the way that Samsung has — the Galaxy S24 Ultra lasted nearly 25 hours on our test — but these are still impressively long-lasting phones for most people’s daily use habits.

Those upgrading from an iPhone 14 or older should note that the iPhone 16 charges via USB-C in addition to good ol’ MagSafe and Qi wireless charging. That means that your old Lightning cables are no good here, but also that you can charge your iPhone with the same cable you’re probably using for your MacBook, iPad and virtually every other tech product in your home.

What we didn’t like about it

Camera zoom is still behind the competition

As much as I’ve loved taking photos on the iPhone 16, I couldn’t help but miss my iPhone 14 Pro every time I tried to zoom into something. This is ultimately still a two-lens phone, and not having the advanced telephoto camera you’ll find on the Pros makes a big difference when you’re comparing the two side-by-side.

Like last year’s model, the iPhone 16 packs an “optical-quality” 2x zoom that’s meant to be crisper than the digital zoom we’ve gotten in years past. It’s certainly a nice step up from the iPhone 14 and older, but the gap between the iPhone 16 and the competition becomes pretty stark once you want to get a good look at something from a distance.

Apple’s base phone didn’t do much to help magnify a distant blue sign when I used the 2x zoom, though its text was pretty clear once I cropped in after the fact. When I used the maximum 10x digital zoom, it was just barely legible, with lots of fuzz around the letters. This trend continued when snapping some much smaller signage in Central Park, which was pretty much unreadable from any zoom distance while coming through super clear at 10x on the iPhone 16 Pro.

When photographing the giant red letters of the famous New Yorker Hotel, the iPhone 16’s shots looked just fine at 2x — but incredibly blurry and washed out at 10x compared to what we got from the 16 Pro. That’s not to mention the Galaxy S24 Plus, which is in a class of its own zoom-wise and was able to handily magnify all of these subjects at up to 30x digital zoom. The iPhone 16 is still a great camera phone; just don’t count on it for getting good shots from far away.

The best display and audio features are still Pro-exclusive

The iPhone 16 packs so many Pro-level features that it feels greedy to complain about what isn’t here, but the few omissions do stand out. As someone spoiled by the ultra-silky 120Hz ProMotion display on their iPhone 14 Pro, I always have a hard time going back to the comparatively choppy 60Hz screens on the basic iPhones. It’s far from a dealbreaker and something I got used to, but a 60Hz phone display is starting to feel dated in 2024 — especially when competing entry level models like the Galaxy 24 and Pixel 9 sport buttery 120Hz displays that feel as good to scroll on as an iPhone Pro does.

I also didn’t realize how much I’d miss the Always-On display offered on the Pro series, which allows things like your clock and widgets to persist on your screen even when your phone is sleeping. It’s a small perk, but one that makes my phone a lot more glanceable and less like something I constantly have to engage with.

This is a smaller and more personal nitpick, but I was also bummed to learn that the upcoming multitrack Voice Memo feature will be exclusive to the iPhone 16 Pro series due to those phones’ “studio-quality” mics. This perk could be a great and easy way for musicians like myself to turn their shoddy song ideas (of which I have many) into more fully-formed demos, and its exclusivity is a bit puzzling considering that most iPhones can run full-on multitrack recording programs like GarageBand.

Apple Intelligence is still a question mark

The iPhone 16 is one of the few phones that will support Apple Intelligence, which, like the AI baked into nearly every major tech product of 2024, promises to make things like searching, writing and creating easier. It’s hard to say if it’s a selling point for these phones just yet, because you won’t be able to use it until it launches in beta sometime in October.

Apple Intelligence will have its own take on features we’ve seen on most smartphones this year, including the ability to rewrite your text with a specific tone or generate silly images and emojis based on prompts. You can also expect a fully reworked Siri that you can talk to more conversationally (or type queries to when you feel like being discreet). There are a few convenient-sounding perks I’m genuinely curious to try out, such as its ability to summarize long email chains or the fact that you can take a photo of a concert flier and immediately have that event added to your calendar.

How it compares on specs

Bottom line

With the arrival of the iPhone 16, I’ve never been more torn over what iPhone to get next. It looks and feels better than the Pro, has the same cool new buttons, lasts long on a charge and is only marginally less powerful than the pricier model. If you’re getting your first iPhone or are upgrading from a regular ol’ iPhone 14 or older, this is without question the one to get. It even comes in pink!

That said, as someone who’s tasted the forbidden fruits of the Pro world, it might be hard for me to go back to basics. The iPhone 16’s lack of good zoom is a bummer for those who like snapping cool cityscapes, and niceties like an ultra-smooth, always-on display are the kinds of things you don’t realize you need until you’ve experienced them. The iPhone 16 Pro is the way to go if having the best possible camera and battery life is your priority, and the discounted iPhone 14 or budget-priced iPhone SE are both fine for folks who just need the basics. But the iPhone 16 is the best $799 phone Apple has ever launched, and one that’ll suit most people well for a very long time.