Apple iPhone 16 series: no surprises, just enough progress

It’s early September so, like clockwork, Apple has yet again announced a new line of smartphones, at pretty much the same price points, all ready to pre-order and purchase in a few days. It did so by streaming a pre-recorded presentation that basically confirmed all the leaked – or carefully controlled – information making the rounds on the Web over the last few months. If all this sounds rather boring, it’s because it kind of is. The kicker: even Apple itself seems to have more or less accepted this template as predictable but effective enough to follow for as long as humanly possible. One can easily tell by paying attention to how each one of these events is now structured and how presenters go through the motions: it’s just business as usual.

The company’s marketing team would object to all that, reminding everyone that “the iPhone 16 series is built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence” but… let’s be honest here. For one, “built for Apple Intelligence” just means that these phones sport more capable neural processing units now, nothing more (the iPhone 15 Pro models will be able to offer the same functionality). For another, Apple Intelligence seems so not ready for prime time at the moment, and it will take such a long time to make a difference in the eyes of consumers, that there’s no point trying to tie this undercooked set of machine learning functions to any particular iPhone lineup.

In other words, very few – if any – people will buy into one of the iPhone 16 models this year for the Apple Intelligence functionality demonstrated thus far. It will be arriving in bits and pieces, in different parts of the world, in different languages, over many months. It will start coming together at some point in Q2 or Q3 2025, a coherent set of AI functions that will be more useful than the “fun” or “nice to have” toys and tools it is now. By then, though, it will be time for the iPhone 17 – a fact that may mark the 16 series as the most humdrum iPhone lineup in recent memory.

So – instead of celebrating unfinished software and services that will be basically developed using mainstream consumers as beta testers – let’s take a closer look at the hardware of the iPhone 16 lineup and give Apple Intelligence the benefit of the doubt for now. Interestingly enough, there are some choices Apple has made with this year’s iPhone models that are worth commenting on.

The iPhone 16: more features than ever for the same price

It used to be that Apple reserved the highest specs and best features for the iPhone Pro models, but this time around it is the regular ones that got the most serious upgrades. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, just as rumored, now sport the physical, programmable Action Button the company introduced with the iPhone 15 Pro last year, as well as the brand-new A18 processor which is quite a bit better than the A16 the regular iPhone 15 was based on. Both the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus also come with 8GB of RAM, which is necessary for Apple Intelligence but also great for demanding AAA games.

New for this year, also as rumored, is the physical Camera Control button. This is Apple’s version of the dedicated capture button a couple of Microsoft Lumia phones and several Sony Xperia phones offered in the past, but it seems to be much more versatile in everyday use. Not only does it allow for multiple levels of pressure – which grants access to several important settings in real time and makes taking photos or videos easier than ever – but it even leverages taptic feedback and touch gestures, allowing for e.g. zoom-in/zoom-out or switching between lenses by sliding a finger across its surface.

The way Apple has implemented this capture button in the iPhone user interface seems well-thought out and intuitive, even if yours truly would obviously have to see how well it performs in real-life before making up his mind about it. Apple promises to make Camera Control ever more useful later this year by updating its software to allow for locking focus or exposure with a half-press. In terms of photography features, the iPhone 16/16 Plus offers much better image processing than its predecessor (the main camera is now a “Fusion” one), an increase of 2x in optical zoom, the Photographic Styles real-time effects as well as spatial photo and video support.

Given the fact that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus start at $799 and $899 respectively – the same prices commanded by their predecessors – they offer considerably higher value than last year, being much more well-rounded than their predecessors. Even for consumers who are not currently interested in Apple Intelligence, they make more sense than the iPhone 15/15 Plus ever did (being ready for Apple’s future AI functionality is no bad thing either). As is usually the case, the iPhone Plus lands dangerously close to the iPhone 16 Pro, but for people who love smartphones with big screens it’s still a better choice (the Pro models do not offer much more this year anyway).

The iPhone 16 Pro: less exciting than ever for the same price

Given the fact that sales figures point to the iPhone Pro models as increasingly more popular over the last few years, it’s rather surprising to see that they got considerably less love from Apple this time around. There’s a handful of upgrades worth mentioning, sure: screens are larger, bezels are thinner and the ultrawide sensor gets the 48-Megapixel treatment too. But the A18 Pro chip only offers one additional GPU core compared to the A18 of the iPhone 16/16 Plus, while all four models sport 8GB of RAM so they should perform similarly to one another.

The iPhone Pro/Pro Max models obviously come with the new Camera Control button too, as well as every other addition or improvement the regular iPhone models offer, such as the slightly faster wired or wireless charging speeds and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. But… that’s about it, basically: other than the larger, better screens and battery capacities we’ve come to expect, it’s only the materials and build quality of the iPhone 16 Pro models that make their case against the regular ones. It’s a clear win for the latter, then, which is why the former seem much less exciting this year – especially since their prices remain as high as their predecessors’ were in 2023.

There are just three changes or improvements that iPhone 16 Pro users will actually enjoy. One, Apple promises even more impressive battery life than before thanks to a new cell design and advanced power management. Two, the four microphones built into the Pro models are more capable and, paired with some clever software, they’ll be able to deliver much clearer and convincing audio in terms of directionality and depth. Three, Apple has finally, finally granted iPhone Pro users with USB 3.0-level data transfer speeds (up to 10 GB/s) through the devices’ USB-C port. Long overdue but… better late than never, right?

An iterative, evolutionary, barely-good enough lineup until the iPhone 17 arrives

If anything, this is what the iPhone 16 lineup makes rather clear: it pushed the design, functionality and overall character of Apple’s smartphones as far as they can reasonably go since the days of the iPhone 12. Apple Intelligence will try to push the envelope in terms of functionality over time, yes, but the iPhone lineup also needs a refreshed look – people have been buying basically the same phone for the last 5 years – as well as at least a couple of new, exciting features not offered by any other iPhone model before. If the iPhone 17 lineup does not offer either, Apple may get in a bit of trouble.

The rumored “iPhone Air”, the much-discussed replacement of the rather disappointing iPhone Plus, may or may not succeed in refreshing the next iPhone lineup just enough to make a difference. The fact, though, that Apple had to copy someone else’s idea – two years in a row now, with the Action and Camera Control buttons – in order to offer iPhones a new feature… well, it’s not a good sign. The company’s own efforts in bringing something truly original to the mix have not been exactly successful either, as both 3D Touch and the Dynamic Island have failed to gain much traction.

It seems that, for all its considerable resources, Apple simply cannot innovate in the smartphone space. It’s not an easy thing to do – this being one of the most mature product categories in tech – but one would have thought that if there was one company capable of coming up with completely new stuff, then it would have to be the richest one. What we’ve been getting instead, over the last decade at the very least, is a rather lazy one that depends more on marketing than on anything else. Whether that will be enough long-term in a market as fast-moving as that of smartphones is anybody’s guess, but consumers deserve better than this. One of these days they might just see it.