The iPhones look the same, there is no innovation, Apple sells the same phone every year. We have all heard statements like this and are almost tired of them. But is there any truth to it? Should Apple even be releasing iPhones yearly?
Like it or not, the new iPhones are here, and I have been using the iPhone 16 Pro Max since day one. It’s very similar to the outgoing iPhone 15 Pro Max, but there are a few cool new features too—let’s dig in.
The Design
The last truly revolutionary change in the iPhone’s design occurred with the iPhone X in 2017. Since then, every single iPhone has evolved from that design. The iPhone 12 reintroduced the flat edges that many loved in the iPhone 4, 4S, 5, and 5S. Last year, with the iPhone 15 Pro, Apple ditched stainless steel in favour of titanium, significantly reducing the phone’s weight.
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” I don’t see the similarity design as a problem. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. A new design will attract more interest, but sticking to a familiar look means that Apple’s product development and marketing teams must work harder to sell the phones. Personally, I prefer new features over aesthetics. Looking back, I always preferred the iPhone 4S over the 4, and the iPhone 5S over the 5. Although recent iPhones haven’t changed much in design, they have consistently introduced great features that Apple can market effectively.
The 16 Pro Max has gained a bit of weight compared to the 15 Pro Max—it’s an additional six grams, but it’s quite noticeable. I still think the 15 Pro Max is the nicest “Max-sized-iPhone” Apple has made in terms of hold-ability. The 16 Pro Max has a display that’s 0.2 inches larger, which isn’t immediately apparent, but when you pick up the 15 Pro Max afterwards, you notice the slightly smaller display and thicker bezels on the 15 Pro Max. The 16 Pro Max is still lighter than the 14 Pro Max, so if you’re upgrading from the 14 Pro Max or earlier, this phone feels like it’s defying physics—smaller bezels, lighter weight, and a bigger display. But, when compared with the 15 Pro Max, not so much.
I still think the 15 Pro Max is a better size overall, but the slight increase in size on the 16 Pro Max allows for a larger battery (more on that later). I personally welcome the slightly larger display, too, since it lets you see a bit more on the screen. However, I’m not a fan of the added weight; the 15 Pro Max felt perfect in hand. While the 16 Pro Max still feels good, it’s not quite as comfortable as the 15 Pro Max.
Ideally, I would have liked the 16 Pro Max to have the same screen size as the 15 Pro Max to avoid any weight gain—but I can appreciate the larger battery. If we were to conduct a survey, I’m sure most people would opt for a bigger screen with a bigger battery. I will be in the minority here. That said, I hope this is as large as iPhones get. At 6.9 inches, we’re close to a 7-inch phone, and I hope the next design iteration does not bring a bigger phone.
On a side note, I have a theory as to why both the Pro and Pro Max got bigger this year. Apple would have wanted the 5x Tetra-prism lens to be in the smaller Pro phone too, and they couldn’t fit it in the smaller size from last year. So they had to increase the size a bit, which pushed the Pro phone to get close to the Pro Max size. So they ended up increasing the size of the Pro Max too. Again, just speculation on my side; we will never know the real reason.
The Display
The display on the 16 Pro Max is pretty much unchanged from last year, except for the 1-nit minimum brightness, which is a bigger deal than I thought. I hadn’t necessarily realised that the phone now gets darker than before, but whilst my wife and I were in bed, she asked me if my new phone gets less bright than before, and she actually liked that it did. When I am using my iPhone in bed, I have it at the lowest display brightness, and the fact that I hadn’t noticed it being less bright than before, but someone else did, means this feature is working as intended—without affecting the quality of what I was seeing on screen.
The Colours
The colours on the 16 Pro Max are still very greyish. I purchased the Desert Titanium colour only because I wanted a change from the Natural Titanium last year. The Natural Titanium is still the best colour in my opinion. I know this has been said many times, but I wish Apple would release colourful iPhones in their Pro lineup too. The best colour iPhone this year is the Ultramarine iPhone 16.
Battery Life
Apple has claimed the 16 Pro Max has the best battery life on an iPhone, and I do agree with them. After using all the high-end iPhones released in the past decade, the 13 Pro Max has had the best battery life if you ask me, but I am happy to report the 16 Pro Max has dethroned the 13 Pro Max as the king of iPhone battery life.
The 16 Pro Max has a 4,685 mAh battery over the 4,312 mAh battery on the 13 Pro Max, and this is definitely noticeable. The iPhone 15 Pro Max has a 4,422 mAh battery for reference. The iPhones kept getting better battery life until the 13 Pro Max. The 14 Pro Max had a noticeable dip in battery life – I think this was because of the Always-on Display, which I always had on. The 15 Pro Max was better than the 14 Pro Max but not as good as the 13 Pro Max. The 16 Pro Max, however, as I said, is better than the 13 Pro Max – with the Always-on Display set to on (with just the time on, and notifications and the wallpaper turned off).
I set my phone to charge to 80% of the battery, and that is more than adequate for my use, except when I know I am going out and using my phone for photography, I do not charge my battery to the full 100%.
I recently was in Japan for a couple of weeks. I would leave home at 100% battery and use the phone for Apple Pay, calls, maps, take about 800 RAW photos, a lot of videos, and use other apps, and would get back home around 11 pm at night. During the day, I would top up my phone from about 35% to 80% once using an external battery pack. In my experience, this phone has got great battery life just as promised.
With USB-C, it is much easier to find a charging cable when you are out and about. The new iPhones also support faster MagSafe charging, although I haven’t tried it, as my beloved MagSafe Duo hasn’t been updated yet (and still uses Lightning!)
The Performance
I am not going to do a Geekbench comparison of how great the single-core and multi-core performance of the A18 Pro chip is, but this iPhone is no slouch. Which is true of the iPhone before that, and the iPhone before that. iPhones were never slow to begin with, and it is very true this year too.
I picked up my old iPhone 14 Pro Max and it was still as fast as the brand new 16 Pro Max I now have. I tried using an older 11 Pro Max and the phone was still usable; the “slowness” I found might be just the 60Hz display. These are for random and simple tasks like opening up Todoist to add in a task, of course, but the newer processor is faster in more intensive tasks. I exported a CapCut video which took a few seconds less than the 15 Pro Max.
The new processor also allows for new features, like 4K 120fps recording and a faster neural engine for Apple Intelligence. But in my opinion, this iPhone is not necessarily about what it can do today; it’s about being able to keep up in five years’ time. It’s about future-proofing—there is a lot of legroom for the future when the operating system demands more processing power, and if history is any indication, this phone will still deliver in half a decade’s time. I say this as someone who upgrades to a new phone every year, but if I don’t, and decide to do the sensible thing of upgrading only when needed, I know the phone I have in hand will still be as fast in years to come.
The Thermals
The iPhone 15 Pro Max did have an overheating problem; although I still maintain that I wasn’t really affected by it, it was a problem nevertheless. My 15 Pro Max did get a bit hot to the touch, but it never bothered me. I feel as though I haven’t pushed the 16 Pro Max to its maximum, but the phone doesn’t get as hot as my older 15 Pro Max (which again wasn’t a worrying problem, in my opinion).
Apple adding a graphite sheet to the internals of the 16 Pro Max has definitely helped with the thermals. The 16 Pro Max has a faster chip than the 15 Pro Max and requires higher performance from the chip too, so these changes are always welcome. This should help with both the performance and the battery life of the phone in the long run and in day-to-day use.
The Camera and Camera Control
The last few years of iPhone Pro upgrades have mostly been about the camera and this year is no different. Talking about the camera is what Apple spends its most of their time on the keynote. It is the reason I tell myself I need an iPhone every year, after all the best camera is the one with you, so why not have the latest iPhone?
The Camera System
Compared to the 15 Pro Max last year, the main camera, now called the Fusion camera, has a faster sensor. Pair this with the A18 Pro chip, and taking photos in ProRAW feels noticeably faster. This is a welcome change—not that the 15 Pro Max or the 14 Pro Max was a slouch in years prior—but the 16 is noticeably faster if you are trying to take a photo of something that moves quickly, say like a bird; you can get faster shots in before you lose your subject.
The ultra-wide lens, however, does get an upgrade to 48 megapixels. The size of the sensor hasn’t changed at all, but the number of pixels packed into the sensor has quadrupled. In my experience, the photos look very similar to the 15 Pro Max. There is a bit more detail in the macro shots, but it isn’t worthy of being wowed by or anything like that.
At night/low light, the new 48-megapixel ultra-wide lens doesn’t switch to Night mode as often compared to the 15 Pro Max, resulting in photos that look close to real life (in terms of light it still looks like a darker night photo), but in terms of personal artistic choice I prefer the night mode photo on the 15 Pro Max. However, when you manually turn on Night mode, the photos on the 16 Pro Max tend to look better.
The 0.5x ultra-wide lens has a focal length of 13mm. I was expecting Apple to give us a few choices of focal lengths, like the ability to switch between 13mm and 18mm, just like how the main Fusion lens gives you the options of 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm. But that isn’t for this year—it might never happen—but that would have been nice, now that the sensor has more pixels to play with and it should help with the digital crop like on the main lens.
The 5x telephoto lens is unchanged from last year, which is a shame because it is my favourite lens on an iPhone yet. It gives you great zoom and lets you take really cool photos with background compression. I would have loved to see some change in this lens, but I guess we will have to wait until next year. On a side note, I am glad the smaller iPhone Pro now gets this lens too—the 5x lens is of much better quality than the 3x, 2.5x or 2x lens ever was.
Apart from these changes, the camera produces images very similar to the 15 Pro Max, which gives you that flat iPhone image that you either hate or have learnt to live with. I switched to shooting exclusively in ProRAW since the iPhone 14 Pro Max a couple of years ago and haven’t looked back. I love the detail that ProRAW gives me to edit the photos to my heart’s content. But that might change…
Photographic Styles
Photographic Styles were first introduced with the iPhone 13; I tried it for about two seconds and gave up—it was a gimmick then and it is a gimmick now.
But the new photographic styles on the new iPhones are a game-changer. Earlier this year, I wanted to expand my photography and got myself a Fujifilm X-T3, and my favourite feature has been the film simulation recipes/presets that I can add to a photo. The new photographic styles are to iPhones what the film simulations are to the Fujifilm “real” camera.
There are many photographic styles to choose from (14 in total), with five undertones and nine moods. All of the styles have varying Tone, Colour, and Palette settings that can all be adjusted. But if you were to just apply a style and take a photo with zero adjustments, the photos come out great as the defaults are pretty good.
If you dislike the default iPhone photo look, picking a photographic style and then turning on the toggle to preserve the photographic style (in the camera settings) is the way to go. Apple is basically giving you the freedom and choice to let your photos be however you want them to be. You can overdo it so it looks like trash, or you can spend your time crafting the default look you want your photos to have. Just like the iOS 18 Home Screen, you can leave it as default or customise it to either look great or look bad—the choice is yours.
Another great thing about the new photographic styles is that they can be changed after you have taken the photo. This is drastically different from how the photographic styles worked in the iPhone 13, and this is different from my “real” Fujifilm camera too. If you don’t like how the style looks on a certain photo, you can always go back and change it to something you like.
Personally, I still shoot ProRAW as it offers more flexibility when editing. What I would love, maybe in the next iPhone, is the ability to shoot both a HEIF with a photographic style and a ProRAW at the same time. My “real” camera lets me do this and it’s great. I am sure the A18 Pro can handle this easily, and it looks like a choice that Apple has made for the user to either shoot in HEIF or in ProRAW. If there is one thing I would change about the 16 Pro Max, it would be to shoot both at the same time.
During the iPhone 16 keynote, Apple spent a lot of time talking about Camera Control, but I think the greatest iPhone camera-related features this year are the new photographic styles and the freedom they give you to let your images look however you want them to.
Camera Control
I wrote a lot about the camera control; whilst it’s good, I don’t think it’s great or the reason why you should go out and buy an iPhone 16 right now. I think Apple overshot what it wants Camera Control to do; it tries to do a lot by default, which becomes overwhelming after a few minutes. What Apple should do is cut back on all the things that this button wants to do by default, but give the user the ability to customise this button to whatever they want it to do.
Another annoyance is that this button is meant to be the fastest way to get to the camera. I still find the Action button to be the fastest way. The Camera Control button only launches the camera when the phone display is lit up, so if you click the Camera Control whilst taking the phone out of your pocket, the camera won’t open as the display is not active/on. You can mitigate this problem by changing a setting which allows double-clicking the Camera Control button—which launches the camera even when the display is off. But for me, the Action button is still the fastest way to the camera.
I am happy that the Camera Control exists, and I use it often; it’s just that it tries to do too much at the moment, but these are software changes that can be rectified in a future update. I am sure Apple already knows how and what people are using the Camera Control for, and in future iOS updates, this button will realise its full potential. Even if nothing happens, this is another hardware button that I can use to launch a third-party camera app, or it can still be the dedicated Visual Intelligence button for when that launches.
Video
Just like the photos, the video looks very similar to the iPhone 15 Pro Max from last year. The one additional benefit is the ability to shoot 4K at 120 frames per second. Annoyingly, this is limited to only the Fusion lens, so you can shoot 4K120 at 1x or 2x, but not 0.5x or 5x. I can’t think of another time Apple limited certain video features to a single lens. In the past, all video-related upgrades and new features have been applicable to all lenses. I believe this has something to do with the faster sensor on the main lens. I’m hoping this comes to all lenses in future iPhones.
This minor annoyance aside, the video quality at 4K120 (and other frame rates) is outstanding. The fact that you can shoot ProRes Log at this quality means you should seriously consider getting an iPhone if you are going to shoot professional-level video.
I haven’t had a chance to play with the new “studio quality” microphones as much as I’d like, so I am not the best person to talk about audio quality. But the 16 Pro Max has newer audio-related features compared to previous iPhones. Again, if you want a top-notch video production device that fits in your pocket, the iPhone is the way to go, and Apple is running laps around the competition.
Apple Intelligence
As usual, Apple’s marketing was in overdrive with the launch of these iPhones, and Apple Intelligence was what the marketing was all about. It felt a bit excessive given that Apple Intelligence didn’t launch until almost five weeks after the launch of the phone, and then only in the US. The rest of the world is still waiting for it. Plus, the Intelligence features that have launched so far have been very limited.
I have been using Apple Intelligence by changing my phone region to the US (I live in the UK, in case you didn’t know). Whilst the new Siri animation is great, notification summaries are really helpful, and basic Siri commands are faster, there is a sense of “is that it…?” This is because all the promised Apple Intelligence features haven’t been released yet. And this feeling of ‘is that it?’ will probably carry on until Apple releases all Apple Intelligence features demoed during WWDC, the important one being the personal context that Siri can grab information about to be a useful assistant (which is coming around March 2025).
By the time these features get released, we would be about six or seven months into the life of the iPhone 16s, raising the question: why not wait another six months and get an iPhone 17 with more features?
The iPhone 16 phones have features to be marketed and need not be so dependent on Apple Intelligence itself, but Apple went with AI being the main marketing point of these phones. Not to mention that all these AI features are also coming to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max from last year.
I would say that if you are reading this and still considering an iPhone 16, Apple Intelligence should not be the reason you buy one, at least not yet. It is not fully released yet, and while it looks promising, buying a product on the promise of a future feature is plain stupid (excuse my bluntness).
Closing Thoughts
The iPhone 16 Pro Max is an iteration of the 15 Pro Max, which was an iteration of the 14 Pro Max. Expecting a drastic change to the iPhone every year can be detrimental to the whole iPhone brand. Apple can’t afford to change something so much that the familiarity of the iPhone gets lost. The iPhones have to appeal to those who have no clue what MS DOS is and to those who grew up using a rotary phone.
The smartphone, and the iPhone, has matured as a device. When a product category matures, a major upgrade every year is not going to be feasible. Looking at the 15 Pro Max from a year before, it looks like not much has changed, but compare the 16 Pro Max with the 14 Pro Max, and the list of upgrades looks longer, or compare it with the 12 Pro Max (the last time the design actually changed), and the list is even longer. The 16 Pro Max has some quality-of-life upgrades over last year’s phone, like the faster wireless charging, the faster Fusion camera sensor, or the 1-nit brightness. These might not look like big upgrades, but in daily use of the phone, they all add up. And there are big upgrades like the 4K120 video capabilities and Camera Control.
For those of us enthusiastic about tech, we expect something drastic every year, and this year is not it. But I can assure you Apple is already working on the next big upgrade for the iPhone. And in the meantime, all that matters is that every year there is something that gradually iterates on the iPhone. As long as there are yearly updates to the product line, people have a choice of upgrading or not. Most people are sensible—they don’t upgrade to the latest iPhone every year; phone contracts are usually two to three years, and that’s what the usual upgrade cycle is. The older your current iPhone is compared to the 16 Pro Max, the longer the list of upgrades there is.
So should you upgrade? It depends on what you have at the moment and what you prioritise. But should Apple be iterating on the iPhone every year? Of course they should! Iteration is what progresses technology. You can only get to an iPhone X by making an iPhone and iterating to the iPhone 7. You can only get to the next big iPhone update by iterating yearly. People who want to, and can afford to, will upgrade; the others won’t, and shouldn’t. iPhones have matured now; a sign of maturity is that you don’t have to upgrade yearly, but if you do, you gain the benefits. And if you don’t, your old iPhone is still a great device.
