Apple has revealed the iPhone 16 – the handset that could decide its future. At an event in California today, it showed off four new versions of the iPhone 16, alongside a new Apple Watch and AirPods.
Many of the changes to this year models are largely as expected, and keep to the pattern established by Apple. The camera is better, the display has changed slightly, it includes a new button on the side and the battery will last for longer.
You can see the value of some of those changes in a moment of using the new devices. But the full impact of the new device might not be felt for years.
The Independent was among the first in the world to try the new iPhone, in the minutes after it was launched, during an event at Apple’s California headquarters. Even in those first few minutes, the paradox at the heart of the new iPhone was clear: it is a modest upgrade that offers relatively minor if helpful updates, and it could be the most consequential product release for Apple in years.
A first impressions review of Apple Intelligence makes little sense. On the one hand, it doesn’t yet really exist, since it has not been publicly released and Apple is still making changes to it; on the other, it’s already possible to use it on the iPhone 15 Pro, since it has been released in an early beta. Besides, it is a deeply personal feature, and so little can be learned by using it in a busy and loud room on a device that belongs to someone else.
But early experience suggests that Apple aimed for the less spectacular and more practical uses of artificial intelligence. It won’t conjure up new worlds, easy ways of generating misinformation, or give you a chatbot that you can befriend or fall in love with. It will just make everyday tasks slightly less bothersome: instead of reading through a huge message thread, you can read a summary, for instance.
It does that perfectly serviceable. The summaries are accurate and the writing tools are precise. The relatively restrictive nature of the AI tools means that they are also less likely to go wrong, and while it will occasionally make a mistake, they are not going to be outrageous ones.
But the new iPhone is not only a vessel for Apple Intelligence. Apple made the kind of changes that would otherwise be enough to make the phone a healthy year-on-year upgrade, if our attentions weren’t distracted by the radical changes offered by AI.
There are changes to the outside of the iPhone 16 – in fact more of them than had been rumoured, since it has both grown in size and acquired an extra “camera control” on the side. It would take some concentration, but you could easily tell both the Pro and non-Pro models apart from last year’s, which is not something that would be possible with every iPhone of recent years. And all those initial changes seem positive, though minor.
The cameras do seem a little sharper, though it was hard to tell in the harsh blur of the demo area. It is not possible to test the battery claims in such a short time, though if they are true they will be a welcome help. And anyone coming to the new line-up from a phone that is a couple of years old will get the benefit of new upgrades such as the very helpful action button, which lets you choose a quick shortcut to get somewhere in the phone.
The most obvious change in the iPhone 16 is the camera control. It looks like a button – you can’t actually press it, but it uses precise vibrations to make you feel like you can, like the later versions of the home button – and it sits almost flush with the side of the phone, safely away from the existing volume and sleep buttons.
Its value is immediately obvious. You can open up the camera in a flash and then hold it like a traditional camera, clicking away rather than awkwardly having to press the button on the screen.
But the real value will take a little longer to work out. When the camera is open, you can swipe up and down on the control to zoom in, or press to use that same mechanic to change other parts of the camera, such as the exposure. This feels like it will be very useful but will take some getting used to, since the same small size and precise control that makes it helpful also means that it’s easy to slip or get confused.
In a normal year, the reaction would probably have been positive if a little placid: it is offering evolutionary upgrades that respond to users’ needs without radically changing the world, as Apple’s more gradual iPhone updates tend to do. The updates are smart and helpful, even if they might require a little more work to fully make the most of them.
But this is not a normal year. The iPhone 16 is a revolution for Apple and the tech industry hiding inside a relatively evolutionary device.
That device is a quiet joy, offering improvements and fixes that would make the phone a good buy for anyone looking to upgrade. But the phone is only half the story – it’s the new tools sitting inside it that are the real breakthrough, and we’ll only really be able to tell how good those are after getting to know Apple Intelligence, and when it gets to know us.