iPhone 16 Pro review: only one reason to upgrade
let's just start with the camera there isn't really that much else to talk about with the new iPhone 16 Pro right now it is maybe one of the most unfinished iPhones Apple has ever released almost all of its highlight features are waiting on software updates that will likely stretch well into next year before they're here that's big stuff like the new Apple intelligence AI features which the company sales will start slowly arriving in October and little stuff like the complete functionality of the camera control button on the side even really minor things like that new Siri animation that inspired the name it's glow time for the iPhones launch yeah it's not here yet now the hard rule of reviews at The Verge is that we always review what's in the box the thing that you can buy right now never the potential or promise of software updates to come and that means the iPhone 16 Pro today is one of the most incremental updates to the iPhone in a long time it's a set of very nice but ultimately minor changes to the iPhone 15 Pro and the most notable change is to the camera so like I said let's just start there there are two big changes to the iPhone 16 Pro camera system there's the new camera button on the side and a new set of controls and software for how images are processed the button itself is a hybrid you can press it all the way down to take a photo or you can give it a light press to trigger a haptic click and bring up a setting like Zoom or exposure which you can adjust with a swipe a double Light press lets you switch between all these settings by default a single click opens the camera when the phone is unlocked and another press takes a photo the button is a little bit stiff a few Verge staffers found themselves moving the phone slightly when pushing all the way down to take a photo but I thought it was fine you can click away pretty fast before you outrun the camera sensor in normal mode but you can definitely outpace it if you're shooting in raw I clocked it around four frames per second which is respectable it's not anywhere close to what a modern mirrorless camera with an electronic shutter can do I was really hoping I'd find myself using the capacitive control on the button to adjust things like exposure and focal length and it's all a little bit fiddly switching between everything with the light presses and I just left it set on tone more on that later like almost everything on the iPhone 16 pro at launched the camera control button is shipping in an apparently unfinished State a future software update will let it emulate a traditional two-stage shutter button where a half press focuses and a full press takes the shot I asked Apple but there's no date for this just later this year I've had a lot of complaints about iPhone cameras over the years but setting Focus has never actually been one of them I know a lot of folks are excited about a two-stage shutter but I'm not convinced it's going to be all that big of a deal out of the box I did find myself accidentally clicking the camera control way too often I'm left-handed and the button is just where my fingers land when I go to adjust the volume with my thumb you can adjust the settings to require a double click to open the camera and that solve the problem for me right away you can set the button to open thirdparty camera apps I have a preview version of Hy that was updated to support it and it worked great overall the button is really nice to have but that's about it right now as it exists today it's not a huge improvement over shooting photos with any other iPhone the actual photos on the other hand yeah that's complicated it is safe to say that people did not love the cameras on the various iPhone 15s Apple has gotten increasingly aggressive with its approach to computational photography over the past few years and various forums and social media platforms have been filled with complaints about it for a while now my husband just got the new iPhone 15 and the camera is so bad I had no idea there was this problem with the selfie camera craziest hack I learned to fix your crappy iPhone 15 camera so I just returned my iPhone 15 the camera was so bad on it I don't want to see myself in HD does anyone know how to fix this the New Yorker published a piece about iPhone photos looking unrealistic 2 years ago we've been on this ride for a minute I've been reviewing phones and cameras for a long time but no review I ever published will ever have the same devastating impact as Alex Earl asking her 7 million followers why her iPhone 15 camera sucks actually what is wrong with the iPhone 15 camera and how do I change it every time I take photos I look like a gray ghost if I had to sum up what's going on with all these complaints it's just that Apple won't leave shadows and highlights alone it uses its photonic engine image pipeline to boost the dark parts of an image and bring down the bright parts so you can see detail everywhere but the side effect is that images seem flat because they lack contrast between light and dark I always think about this like Dynamics and music if every part of a song is loud then nothing actually seems loud that's what's been going on with the iPhone camera over time everything's getting so bright that nothing is bright right and the photos are starting to look flat so I regret to inform you that by default the iPhone 16 Pro Camera is even more aggressive about evening out shadows and highlights than the iPhone 15 Pro it's subtle but it's there you can see it with basic photos of plants with pictures of people with Street Scenes it's all just a little bit brighter a little bit flatter it's even brighter compared to the regular iPhone 16 in almost every case that's not to say that the regular 16 camera is better or even the same the 16 Pro offers a much nicer depth of field does less sharpening and performs better in low light I actually found it hard to make the 16 Pro go into night mode while the regular 16 drops night mode pretty easily it seems like the 16 Pro can just capture more light and Apple's default settings use all that extra light to wage war on shadows in a way that the regular 16 can't seem to do comparing the iPhone 16 Pro to the Galaxy s24 Ultra and the pixel 9 Pro XL requires intense pixel peeping the pixel has the best zoom while Samsung's color handling remains aggressively chaotic I mean just look at the sky here but time and time again all three cameras produced photos that looked essentially the same all these phones are delivering small variations on the same ultr processed look and they have been for a while now but here's the good news the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro allow you to exclude yourself from this narrative entirely with a radically upgraded photographic Styles feature that allows you to directly adjust how the camera processes colors skin tones and shadows even after you've shot a photo you can pick between five undertone settings that are meant to adjust skin tones and nine mood settings that feel a lot like highquality Instagram filters you can shoot with a live preview of any of the Styles and then you can tweak the settings or even switch Styles entirely later on and all of these Styles including standard and even in portrait mode offer a new control called tone that lets you add Shadows back to your photos Apple tells me that tone is short for tone mapping and it really does mean you can bring the iPhone's photonic engine HDR processing Back to Reality by turning it down the control is semantically aware it adjusts things like faces in the sky differently so it's still doing some intense computational photography but the goal is for you to be able to take photos that look a lot more like a traditional camera if you bring the slider all the way down you can also go all the way up for some of the most intense smartphone process photos possible but you know don't do that you can even adjust the tone setting using the new camera control button you just give it a little double squeeze slide over to the right and you can adjust how Shadows look with a live preview I will just come straight out and say that dialing back the iPhone 16 Pros tone mapping makes me prefer these photos way more than the default settings and the photos produced by the iPhone 15 Pro it is such an improvement that it's possible to make the argument that this one single camera adjustment makes upgrading to the iPhone 16 Pro worth it I don't think that argument is 100% convincing but it's possible to make it which is wild Apple's complex photonic engine computational photography pipeline is basically the same on the iPhone 16 Pro as it is on the 15 Pro but the order of operations has been changed to allow for photographic styles to be edited after the fact in particular the tone mapping step that boost Shadows has been moved to the end of the process Apple's goal here is for the edits to be perceptually lossless when you take a photo in a style that's how the photo is saved but the iPhone adds a little chunk of data to the image file that allows it to undo the style and revert the image to standard before applying another style that bit of extra data results in files that are about 25% bigger than before and the whole thing means that Styles only work if you shoot in Heath which is going to break a lot of hearts out there Styles overall aren't really made for professional workflows the only way to adjust them is with this fiddly d-pad control you can't apply a style to a bunch of photos at once and trying to keep track of which photos have which Styles applied require staring into the absolute abyss of iOS file management the photos app in MAA SEO will be able to adjust Styles when it ships but Apple won't say if thirdparty apps will be able to support Styles in the future the more you play with Styles the more it seems like apple has simply given up on having a point of view for what this camera should look like Google makes a lot of noise about its real tone project which is supposed to allow the pixel to capture accurate skin tones for all kinds of people but Apple's solution is to Simply let people choose their own skin tone using the undertone Styles which works although it often changed more than just skin tone in our test photos undertones also apply to everyone in an image so if you take a photo of people with a range of skin tones they're all going to get the same effect which you can see here overall I get the idea behind undertones but the execution feels like it needs a little bit more refinement the entire Vibe of all these controls is very much you figure it out every now and again I'd be using this camera and find myself wondering where the line between complete creative expression and pure nihilism is like do we even want cameras to capture reality this reality even objective can two people ever really experience the same thing at the same time can a single slider control absolve a camera of responsibility for accurate skin tones are skin tones even something we can capture with camera lenses in physics are they actually complex collusion I don't have a lot to say about the mood Styles which are very fun and expressive they're a lot like the popular Fujifilm recipes V basically fell in love with them as a Fujifilm user oh boy do I love my film recipes these are basically Apple's version of those they're divided in two main categories the undertones which we have talked about and moods moods are the ones with more aggressive edits so you can get this washed out gold look with orange Hues almost like the portrait 400 film stock or this look with deep Indigo Blues into Shadows like you were shooting on ectac or you can go greenish blue Canan like cinel or you could just keep it simple and just add back some of those Shadows that your iPhone is desperately trying trying to lift Apple says these are perceptually non-destructive edits and I buy it the edited photos look very clean even when adjusting tone and lifting their shadows as f as allows you you're not really introducing any noise or fringing on weird artifacts if there's a specific style you like you can set them as your default and never worry about it again so that's all the photo stuff let's switch back to video so there aren't that many changes to video this year but there is one that I cannot get enough off of you can now shoot 4K in 120 frames per second and I absolutely love it at the festival in New York City I asked a bunch of people to take their video portraits and well here's what we walked away with the F 1.78 aperture of the main lens really helps to make people stand out with a subtle focused fall off in daytime and good lighting conditions it is such a joy to use especially when reviewing these clips on an iPhone's display Clips are sharp and vibr print I truly could not stop filming in this mode in low light the iPhone's aggressive noise reduction will turn that footage bit softer it still looks great on your phone but you will notice it on a larger display it's still very usable as you can see right now you can also record this footage in prores log and it makes it much more flexible in post-production but you'll need to come prepared you'll need an X fat formatted external drive with a thunderbolt 4 cable to shoot 4K 120 or even 4K 60 like last year and this will absolutely eat up your storage the slow motion 15-second clip is 5.5 GB but if you're willing to go through the trouble which in some cases means building out this silly rig it is absolutely worth it I do love how much flexibility log files give you and as a videographer I'm willing to go to distance the 4K 120 mode only works on the main 24 mm lens and in the 2x mode it doesn't work for the other two lenses the ultra wide and the 5x telephoto I really wish it was available at least for the great 5x T lens I honestly wish it was available for both of them that's fine you can keep that in aside from the crispy slow motion you're looking at a phone that performs almost exactly like the iPhone 15 Pro I have noticed a tendency for the cameras to lean towards warmer color temperatures this year just like it's doing in photos as well otherwise the ultra white is still noisy andow light and yeah the camera Reflections are still visible whenever there's a direct light source in front of you lastly there are changes to the audio processing that is embedded into your video files so let's take a listen all right so we're here at a street festival in New York there's all kinds of activity going on we got the restaurant over here got the Carnival Barker there's some kind of juice press machine running it's super loud this is just the standard audio mode what we're going to do now is we're going to switch it to in frame your CV is going to turn the camera over this way bring back to me you should be hearing me again now let's switch it to Studio mod which should sound like I'm in a recording studio even though allity should be able to get rid of all these okay we have to stop it there because that really wasn't that good but we ran that test again which was a little bit better bring it back to we're going to keep walking down the valley here going to switch it to Studio mode which even there's all of this noise should totally Focus you in on my voice like I'm talking in a podcast lastly we're going to switch it to cinematic mode should bring in more of the audio that's going around here all of these sights and sounds although lifting my voice to make it seem like I'm in a Muk so that was a little bit better but it's still nothing that impressive as the thing they showed at the keynote real quick I will have another in video coming out in a few weeks to chat more about all things video and photo for the iPhone 16 Pro so I'll see you then back to Nei so that's the big overview of the camera on the iPhone 16 Pro now if you've been paying attention to what's going on with smartphone cameras lately you'll have noticed we haven't talked about AI at all there's no video boost or face swapping no drawing to add stuff with AI like on the pixel or Galaxy phones really none of it Apple says it is going to add a feature called cleanup with apple intelligence that will let you remove objects from photos like Google's Magic Eraser but that's not shipping yet and it also seems to be about as far as the company is willing to go if you've been following the Verge you know we've been asking what is a photo for quite some time I asked Apple's vice president of camera software engineering John McCormack about Google's view that the pixel camera captures memories instead of photos and he told me Apple's definition of a photo is quote a personal celebration of something that really happened and that Apple tries to ground everything it does with the camera in the history and traditions of Photography the new photo styles for example reflect the long history of stylization in photography which is something like 170 years old so for now at least Apple's answer to what is a photo is things that really happened even as its competitors make that line fuzzier by the day everything else about the iPhone 16 Pro is incredibly incremental the display now goes down to one knit of brightness which is very nice for not waking up your partner while you do scroll in bed those displays are also bigger now the pro is 6.3 in while the pro Max has a 6.9 in display
the largest ever on an iPhone the bezels are smaller so the bump in screen size didn't make the whole phone that much bigger and they're the same thickness as the 15 Pros the slight increase in the size the regular Pro isn't really noticeable but the 16 Pro Max feels meaningfully bigger than the 15 Pro Max I have big hands and I've always picked the big phone and the 16 Pro Max is definitely as big as these things should get before they start to fold or whatever happens next inside you're looking at an a18 Pro chip which Apple claims is faster by various percentages than the a17 pro but as with all iPhones for the past few years this performance headro room is mostly about longevity at this point my iPhone 15 Pro doesn't feel slow and the 16 Pro doesn't feel faster maybe this will all change when Apple intelligence ships but we'll just have to wait and see software wise my review units are running iOS 18.0 which mainly differs from IOS 17 and there's RCS support and messages which is a huge win okay there's more to iOS 18 the home screen lock screen and control center are all radically more customizable now you can more or less theme the home screen any way you want down to adjusting icon colors globally and the lock screen now allows you to change the quick access buttons to thirdparty apps the preview build of highlight I was testing supported this so I switched in for the system camera which is nice once more camera apps support this you'll end up with a lot of ways to open the camera from the lock screen now you'll be able to set the action button the camera control button and the lock screen button to different camera apps you want and still have the ability to open the system camera by swiping to the right it's pretty neat the new control center was a little bit of an adjustment if you're like me and you've used it by pure muscle memory for years even the switch from squarish buttons to circles is a little disorienting the whole thing is now organized into vertical sheets favorites media controls home controls and the various radio and network controls you can move these controls and groups of controls around it will resize them as you like and generally create a little free form Command Center of your go-to settings this one is going to come down to how much time you want to spend creating the perfect arrangement of of controls I'm a huge nerd I cannot wait to spend an hour or two getting it just right Apple says the iPhone 16 Pro gets significantly better battery life than the 15 Pro although the company won't quote anything other than video playback time which it says is 4 hours longer the pro Max is supposed to have the best battery life ever on the iPhone a claim which is also apparently measured only by video playback the battery certainly held up for full days during my testing which was very heavy on camera usage but the real test is how well these batteries hold up over time after Year my iPhone 15 Pro Max battery capacity has dropped to 93% and it now struggles to make it through a day it's something to keep an eye on Apple did update the mag safe charging system which can now charge it up to 25 watts using the new ch2 compatible mag safe Puck and a 30 W charger I charged my review unit for a while at full speed and it didn't even get warm which I think is impressive price-wise things are the same as last year the iPhone 16 Pro starts at $9.99 while the larger Pro Max starts at $1.99 you can get them in desert natural white and black titanium which all look fine I'm a little jealous that the regular iPhones get fun colors this year but I stick these things in cases anyway so maybe it doesn't matter speaking of the regular iPhone 16 we've gotten a lot of questions about whether spending the extra money on the pro is worth it this year since the specs seem so close together Allison's been reviewing the regular iPhone 16 here's what she thinks if you're thinking that this is the year to opt out of the pro series and maybe pick up the 16 or 16 plus my answer is a resounding maybe for someone upgrading from an older non-pro iPhone I think the answer is an easy yes you get the action button that was only on last year's Pro Models the camera control is here and the colors on the regular 16 is here rule you also get an A8 chip it's not the A8 Pro chip that's in the Pro Models but it's in the same generation which hasn't been the case with the last few iPhones prices are the same this year it's $7.99 for the iPhone 16 $8.99 for the iPhone
16 plus so it kind of feels like you're getting some improvements without having to pay a bunch of extra money that's great that said there are still good reasons to pay up for the 16 Pro you still don't get a telephoto lens on the regular 16 and yeah you get that 2x crop zoom and it's fine but you don't get the quality or the reach of a dedicated 5x lens there's no promotion display here either so you're going to have to settle for a standard 60 HZ refresh rate for what it's worth I got used to it pretty quickly but the pro screen is noticeable smoother it's 2024 Apple what's the deal just put a promotion screen in these phones but even if you don't love the camera control and apple intelligence somehow never ships I still think it's a good year to upgrade if you're used to a fast refresh rate screen and a 5x telephoto lens then I think those are going to be hard compromises to make in the 16 if you don't mind crop zoom in a slower screen then what you get here is pretty good plus you've got that new action button to play with and some really fun colors to choose from not a bad deal at all the regular iPhone 16 does seem great but for me I have to have the best camera and I have to have the best display so the pro is it so that is the iPhone 16 Pro so far it really does feel like apple intended to ship these things with apple intelligence but it's simply not here yet and the complete feature set Apple's announced with things like image generation and chat GPT integration won't be here until next year and if you're in the EU or China you might be waiting for quite a while longer than that as Apple navigates various regulations in those regions to even launch the stuff at all all of that is to say that the iPhone 16 Pro as it exists today is a remarkably iterative update to the iPhone 15 Pro and the 15 Pro will even be able to run Apple intelligence when it arrives so there's almost no reason to upgrade from last year's model and I'm not at all convinced that it's worth upgrading to the 16 Pro from older Pro Models just yet either the camera control is nice but not game-changing and unless you're excited about dialing in the new photographic Styles and that tone control you might find the default settings to be a step backwards in photo processing if you can't tell I am personally thrilled by the tone control so this is an easy choice for me but it feels like it's worth waiting a tick for everyone else that's not to say that the iPhone 16 Pro is a bad phone it's a great phone with some fascinating ideas about smartphone photography embedded in it but like I said at the beginning it's also clearly unfinished and I think it's worth waiting to see if Apple intelligence can complete some of these thoughts before spending the money on an upgrade every every year I watch a Packers game while shooting the iPhone review 13 to nothing Packers backup quarterback we're doing great
2024-09-21 16:34
