Apple iPhone 16 and 16 Plus review: The sensible choice (Updated)

Note: This feature was first published on 10 October 2024 and was updated on 13 November 2024 with findings on Apple Intelligence and final ratings for the phones in the Conclusion section.

I’ve always maintained that it’s far harder to design the regular iPhone as opposed to the iPhone Pro. With the Pro iPhones, it’s simple. Pack in as much new tech as you can, charge customers an arm and a leg, and watch the money roll in. With the regular iPhones, it’s not as straightforward. How do you make it special enough to stand out from the iPhone SE but not so that it encroaches on the Pro iPhones. It’s a tricky balancing act, and you could argue that Apple hasn’t quite nailed the formula yet. 

The TL;DR version:



The decision to stick with a 60Hz refresh rate display is baffling and frustrating, but the rest of the phone is solid. If you buy things with your head and not your heart, this is the iPhone to have.



Note: You can find the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus on Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store.

More buttons & a major flaw

The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus may look similar to their predecessors, but there are a number of notable but subtle hardware changes. It gains two buttons: the Action Button and Camera Control. The Action Button made its debut on last year’s Pro iPhones and it’s essentially a button that you can customise to do just about anything you want. I normally use it to quickly Shazam a song, but if I’m travelling, I might use it for translation to launch the calculator app so that I can calculate exchange rates. It’s a nifty feature that doesn’t get enough credit.

Camera Control is a haptic button designed to give quick access to the camera and its controls. A press launches the camera and a second press takes a photo. You can also press and hold it to record videos. Where it gets interesting is that you can do a single light press or two light presses and swipe to adjust settings like aperture, exposure, and zoom. Check out Camera Control in the TikTok clip below.

Coming later this year is a software update that’ll give it more features. It will act more like a camera shutter button where a half press focuses and a full press takes a photo. It'll also enable Visual Intelligence which will let users take photos and then have the phone serve up relevant information or execute actions like creating events in the calendar.

It’s been a couple of weeks now and apart from using Camera Control to launch the camera and adjust settings like exposure and Photographic Styles, I don’t use it all that much. I find that using it to actually take a photo introduces shutter shake, so I rather tap the screen to get my shot. As it is, I can’t help but think Camera Control is a bit of a gimmick. Maybe the Visual Intelligence will change how I feel about it, we’ll have to wait and see.

The other major hardware change is the colours. In response to complaints that the iPhone 15’s colours were too muted, Apple has turned the saturation dial up to 11 this year with far richer colours. The star colour for me this year is Ultramarine, though Teal and Pink look good as well. The chassis is still aluminium.

The displays are unchanged, which means sizes remain at 6.1 inches for the iPhone 16 and 6.7 inches for the iPhone 16 Plus. It also means it doesn’t get the always-on capability or the 120Hz refresh rate of the Pro models. I get that Apple needs to differentiate these models and that there are people who don’t care for refresh rates, but from a value perspective, to have a 60Hz display on a phone that costs well over a thousand dollars is absurd and unacceptable. These must be the most expensive phones you can buy with 60Hz screens. If it’s any consolation, the displays themselves are very good – they are sharp, vivid, and get really bright. 

Performance & battery

The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus get a big boost in performance this year by leapfrogging two generations from the A16 Bionic in the iPhone 15 to the new A18 chip. This chip has a 6-core CPU that consists of two performance cores and four efficiency cores, and it has a 5-core GPU. Essentially, it’s the A18 Pro chip found in the Pro iPhones with one less GPU core. 

I’ve covered the performance of the A18 and A18 Pro extensively in a separate feature so I urge you to check that out. But to put it briefly, the A18 chip is fast. CPU performance is nearly identical to the A18 Pro, while its graphics performance isn’t that far behind. Not only will it run any app and game with ease, it will have sufficient headroom to remain performant for many years to come.

Battery life has improved quite significantly. In my tests, which involved looping a 720p video at 100% screen brightness and volume with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on, I found that the iPhone 16 Plus lasted 18% longer while the iPhone 16 lasted over 40% longer. This is thanks to the increased efficiency of the A18 chip and also the fact that the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus both have batteries that are around 6% larger.

In the real world, I found that the iPhone 16 Plus could easily last an entire day, whereas the iPhone 16 might need a quick juice-up in the late evening if I was using it heavily during the day. Speaking of charging, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus charge faster too – up to 25W using MagSafe and around 30W with wired charging.

Apple Intelligence

With the release of iOS 18.1, Apple Intelligence is finally available to the public. As reported previously, not all of Apple Intelligence’s features will be available at launch. As frustrating as this can be, readers who follow Apple closely will understand that the company is a bit behind its peers when it comes to AI and is playing catch-up in some ways. Consequently, the rollout of Apple Intelligence will be done in phases.

Here are the features that are available in this initial rollout:

• Writing Tools
• Siri
• Mail
• Messages
• Photos (Smarter search, Clean up)
• Transcription
• Focus modes – Reduce interruptions
• Notification Summaries
• Safari page summaries

The Clean Up tool is something that numerous Android phones have had for a while, and it’s good to see it finally come to iPhones. The feature works mostly as advertised and can be really handy for cleaning up photos. Just look at the example below.

Writing Tools is one of the features that Apple has been hyping up, and it is arguably the most useful – particularly for folks who don’t write so well. It can very quickly clean up text, rewrite it, and produce summaries. I use the proofreading feature the most because it's especially helpful for catching obvious typos and grammar errors. But it’s not without its problems; there were instances where it threw its hands up and said, “Writing Tools aren’t designed to work with this type of content.” I chalk this down to teething woes.

Notification summaries can also be handy, particularly for keeping track of the latest sports scores and news. It’s not perfect since it doesn’t know which piece of news or scoreline should be prioritised, but it’s still good enough to give a quick snapshot of the latest happenings.

Though these features don’t drastically change the user experience, they are undeniably nice and could be helpful in certain situations. Furthermore, some features, like call and audio note transcriptions, are features that users have requested for a long time.

On the whole, I view this as a promising start to Apple Intelligence. Word on the street is that features like Image Playground, Genmoji, and ChatGPT integration are coming with iOS 18.2, which will be available sometime in December.

It’s all about Photographic Styles

There are some hardware tweaks to the iPhone 16’s camera system, but it’s mostly the same as the iPhone 15. The arrangement of the camera has changed. The two cameras are now stacked on top of each other to allow the iPhone 16 to take spatial photos and videos for the Vision Pro. The main camera is unchanged and still has a 48MP sensor and f/1.6 aperture lens. Happily, the ultrawide camera has been improved. Though the sensor is still a 12MP unit, it now has a faster f/2.2 lens – which should improve low-light performance – and supports macro photography.

Video modes are unchanged. You can still record 4K Dolby Vision videos at up to 60fps, which should suffice for most users. Apple is keeping the ability to record 4K 120fps Dolby Vision videos and its new Audio Mix feature exclusive to the Pro iPhones. 

The biggest update to the cameras is actually in the software. There’s a new imaging processing pipeline, and it appears Apple is turning up the dial on its image processing yet again. Objects have the tendency to be oversharpened leading to a "hard" and "crunchy" look. That said, the regular iPhones are noticeably better at nailing the exposure compared to the Pro models, so photos taken by them are more vivid and contrasty, and has less of that washed out look.

Fortunately, you can correct any colour discrepancies yourself because Apple has updated the Photographic Styles feature with five “skin undertone” settings that adjust skin tones, and nine “mood” settings that can alter the vibe of a photo. Furthermoe, there’s a control pad that lets you adjust “tone” and “colour” more finely so you dial in your preferences more finely to nail the look you want. In many ways, it's like Fujifilm's famous photo filters but with a ton more customisation and flexibility.

Since you can set up a Photographic Style to be applied to every photo you take, I used the “Standard” style and turned down the “tone” setting and slightly raised the “colour” setting to force the iPhone to bring back shadows and produce more contrasty and punchy-looking photos. And because Photographic Styles isn't a destructive edit, you can tweak it to your heart’s content in post.

As you can see from the sample images on this page, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus generally take great photos that are sharp and detailed. But more importantly for me, they are noticeably better at correcting white balance and getting the exposure right. The main sensor might be smaller than the Pro models, but in most situations, the results are indistinguishable. It’s only in really low-light situations that you can see the iPhone 16 struggle. But even then, that can be mitigated with a steady hand and Night mode. And although the ultra wide camera has been improved, it’s still noticeably less sharp and detailed than the Pro iPhones. 

But having said all this, I need to clarify that the difference isn’t night and day. It’s only really noticeable if you view them at full resolution on a big screen – which is the kind of thing only reviewers like me would do. In other words, most people will struggle to notice the differences. 

Final thoughts & buying advice

For most people, the regular iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus are the phones to have. They come in great colours, have nice displays, excellent performance, improved battery life, and cameras that take mostly good photos if you bother to do some tweaking. And even though Apple Intelligence isn’t ready yet, it’s good to know that these phones will be able to support it when it’s available. For me, their only glaring shortcoming is the lack of a high refresh rate display. Some people won’t care, but to my eyes, it’s jarring to see a choppy 60Hz display on what is ostensibly a flagship class or at the very least a high-end phone.

Should you get a regular iPhone or one of the Pro ones? It boils down to a couple of things. Do you really need a 120Hz display? Is an always-on display necessary? Is the 5x telephoto camera crucial? And do you need “Pro” features like the ability to shoot 4K 120fps Dolby Vision footage, the Audio Mix feature, ProRes videos, and 48MP ProRAW photos? For most people, given that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus are so capable, I’m guessing the answer is no. But Apple is the master of seduction and there’s no denying that the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max are hugely desirable phones – whether you need all of their extra features or not.

Owners of last year’s iPhone 15 and 15 Plus are arguably in the trickiest spot. Last year’s phones are still great, but they are now outdated in some ways because they don’t support Apple Intelligence. It remains to be seen how useful and how much of a difference Apple Intelligence will make, so I won’t run out to upgrade just yet. For now, it’s best to adopt a wait-and-see approach. 

If you have an older iPhone – iPhone 14 series or older – the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus represent a fantastic opportunity to upgrade. Even without Apple Intelligence, they are solid phones, and upgrading you gets you the convenience of USB-C charging. The ability to simplify your charging cables should not be overlooked. 

This is a good year for the regular iPhones. With the Action Button, Camera Control, and substantial upgrades to the processor and camera, it can be argued that they get all, if not most, of the features of the Pro iPhones that users would want. Shoppers who shop with their heads instead of their hearts will inevitably arrive at the conclusion that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus are the phones to buy.

Note: You can find the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus on Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store.

	Click to see the score breakdown
	Click to see the score breakdown

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