iPhone 16/Pro Impressions: The Great Separation!

All right, I'm back. I'm back from Australia, all the way from Down Under, and I did bring exactly one souvenir with me. But I flew in this morning 'cause Apple said they were going to announce some stuff, and they did.

There was an event today. So here's my first impressions. So, we got the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro today, along with new AirPods and Apple Watch.

And I've got some hands-on and some first impressions for you of all that stuff right here. So, let's just start with the new phones. We knew this was coming, right?

A very, very minor incremental overall update. But somehow, Apple still got to try to get people to buy it. So what will they do?

iPhone 16 looks very much like iPhone 15, but there's some new colors, as you can pretty much always count on. This year, it's ultramarine, which is kind of this indigo, pretty sick, teal, pink, black, and white. And the cameras, instead of being diagonally oriented, are now lined up again next to each other, like it was back in the iPhone 10 days.

But it's not just a retro touch. That's also so it can shoot spatial videos and pictures now. So, the sensors are aligned with each other again.

But then everything else, the rounded corners, the size of the regular phone and the plus phone, the speakers, the antenna lines, everything just basically the same. Not much new going on here. Inside, they bumped it up from the A16 Bionic to a new A18.

So, there's some solid performance improvements in the 20 to 30% range, better ray tracing, and a two times faster neural engine, and 8 gigs of RAM for all that Apple intelligence stuff. Really, the most underrated new hardware to me, though, that they talked about is Apple briefly mentioned that these new phones will all have larger batteries. And so, that seems to imply that it will actually have better battery life.

But also, at no point did Apple ever say any numbers. Not a single number was uttered during the battery section. No graphs or anything like that.

So, we don't know exactly how much bigger this new battery actually is. And the only numbers we've been able to find is, if you look on Apple's compare page for the phones, it said the iPhone 15 would get a battery life of 20 hours of video playback, and this new 16 gets 22. So, I'm going to be putting these through the paces.

You already know if you want to get subscribed to be among the first to see the full review, that's when we'll be able to figure out if it's actually a significant improvement in battery in other ways. But as of right now, better battery, sure. And then, I never thought I'd say this sentence again, but this new iPhone has two new buttons.

So, first of all, it gets the action button from last year's Pro. So, now you can do the exact same customized shortcuts from a flashlight or Shazam to a Siri shortcut or whatever you want. And then, there's also another new button called camera control.

And this second button, it's kind of. . .

It's a touch-sensitive cutout covered in sapphire with a taptic engine behind it. Now, it does actually move. It is an actual button, just to be clear.

But just like the trackpad on a lot of modern laptops, the vibration motors clicks to also make a half-press feel like you're clicking a two-stage button, like a camera shutter button. And it is also very convincing. So, the magic of this camera control area is what they're calling it.

It is pressure-sensitive and it's basically a tiny trackpad on the corner of the phone. It's capacitive sensitive, so you can swipe and do gestures along the corner of the phone. And so, Apple's decided everything that this button will do will be camera-related.

So, if you press it from the lock screen, it opens the camera app. And then, when you're in, you can click it again to take a photo or long press to start taking a short video. But then, you can do a little half-strength double tap to open up a menu for different camera options and then slide your finger along this camera control to change them.

So, you know, it takes some getting used to. You've got to get used to the placement of your hand and how fast you swipe. But once you kind of know what you're doing, it feels pretty smooth.

And it's pretty sensitive and intuitive. So this is all a bunch of functionality that's being added basically into Apple's camera app. But Apple's also said that third-party apps that use the camera will also be able to take advantage of the camera control.

So, Snapchat, Instagram, Hi, etc. They'll be able to also use the slider. So, I think it's pretty cool.

I think it's technically very impressive. I'm just trying to figure out kind of similar to the action button how useful it will actually be. Like, it is kind of in this awkward spot on the bottom right of the phone.

It makes sense as a horizontal shutter button, but they're kind of splitting the difference, trying to also make it usable in a vertical orientation. I just. .

. I'm curious how many people actually use this regularly, 'cause again, it is on all the phones. But, yeah, that's about it for the 16.

I mean, the display also does now drop down to one nit minimum brightness. So, that's great at night. It is also still a 60 Hz display on an $800 flagship in 2024.

So, that's really disappointing for me personally. But, overall, this phone is. .

. I'd say it's still pretty tempting to say that this base model is probably a. .

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