Happy iPhone 16 launch day! Apple’s latest iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro models are now in the hands of consumers, and we thought we’d do a quick first impressions overview for those of you who are waiting for a delivery or who are still on the fence about upgrading.
This year’s iPhone 16 is the biggest upgrade for a standard model that we’ve seen in some time. Performance is not too far off from the Pro models, the Action Button is no longer Pro exclusive, and Apple brought the fun new Camera Control button to all iPhone 16 models, not just the 16 Pro and Pro Max.
The Action Button is more useful than ever before with iOS 18 because you can assign Control Center actions and even third-party app functionality. It can turn on the flashlight, open the Translate app, toggle on Dark Mode, open your favorite app, and so much more.
Apple has talked up the new Camera Control button, which is meant to be used for taking photos in either landscape or portrait mode. It is a little confusing at first, because it’s a button, but it also supports pressure sensitivity touch gestures like swipes. The placement is not super convenient in portrait mode and can be a little awkward to use, and it takes some time to adjust to how the button works.
The button does do a lot, though, and you can press twice to snap a photo, press once and then press and hold to take a video, or use gestures to swap different tools to adjust photo parameters.
If you’re holding your camera in landscape orientation, the button placement makes more sense, but a lot of iPhone photography is done in portrait mode rather than landscape mode. Apple moved the camera lenses from a diagonal position to a vertical position, and the iPhone 16 models now support spatial photo and videos for the Vision Pro, but it’s not clear how many people are actually using that functionality.
Apple added new Photographic Styles and a handy little adjustment pad for editing the intensity and look of those styles, so it’s overall a much more useful feature than before. You can set up a favorite style and then apply it to all of your images for a custom look.
For video, there’s an Audio Mix feature that changes the way that audio sounds in your video recordings. You can pull out the voice of the subject of a video while muting the background noise, or direct all sound forward like in a movie.
There are new color options this year, and the teal iPhone that we tested was a bright, vibrant shade of blue. You can also get ultramarine (a dark purple blue), pink, white, and black.
As for the A18 chip, depending on which iPhone you’re upgrading from, you might not see any speed improvements because most iPhone apps don’t stress the CPU or GPU of modern processors, but the A18 does support Apple Intelligence. All iPhone 16 models get the Apple Intelligence features coming in iOS 18.1 and later updates.
For a smartphone starting at $799, the iPhone 16 is a surprisingly good value this year, and it’s a worthwhile upgrade if you’re coming from anything older than an iPhone 14. With the iPhone 14 and beyond, it’s a less obvious upgrade, but there are still some great features to look forward to.