Apple iPhone 16 review: Oh, so pro

The iPhone line turns sixteen this year, and for the last few years (since the days of iPhone 11), the regular iPhone models have been the confused middle child of Apple's lineup. Not quite budget, not quite pro. They've often left people wondering if they should save money or splurge for more on the Pro.
While the Pro siblings have aged to perfection, the regular one had to live in the shadows, yet being more popular than the Pros.But this year, the iPhone 16 is finally stepping out into the spotlight it deserves.
It's packed with features that blur the line between regular and Pro, making it more palatable than ever. With a new chip, a total of five buttons (the same as the Pros), and quite a few features that people wouldn't believe a non-Pro iPhone would have, this is the closest the regular iPhone has been to its Pro siblings.
So is it finally time for the regular iPhone to shed its "middle child syndrome"? Read on to find why this Sweet Sixteen might just be the most 'Pro' regular iPhone yet and why it's the iPhone to go for this year.

The iPhones, whether they be Pro or non-Pros, have looked pretty much the same for the last few years. And the Pro continues with the same design as yesteryear, though its non-Pro sibling has come to have a minor glow-up. I won't say it's a facelift, since it looks the same as last year from the front, but turn it around and you'll see what I mean. The two cameras, instead of being diagonally placed, are now stacked vertically.

Still, the 16 doesn't look entirely fresh, but people might still appreciate a change in aesthetics, as the iPhone has looked the same for the last three models (13, 14, 15). The cameras just went from vertical to... vertical.
The paint job is the most sprightly since the days of the iPhone 5c. The Ultramarine has turned out to be people's favourite, but even the Pink here is cutesy, and the Teal might be becoming a sleeper hit. The usual Black and White are also there, if that's something you prefer. Oh, and all the colours have this matte finish for another year.

As mentioned above, the iPhone 16 has five buttons. Yes, you read that right. There's the usual — power button (or as Apple calls it, the side button) and the volume buttons. Then, the mute switch is gone. In its place is the Action button, the one you'd have seen on the Pro iPhones — it's found its way on the non-Pros. While I am still using it as a mute switch, you can use it for several other things — like flashlight, recorder, or set it up to use Shortcuts. That makes the usual four.

But there's one more: the Camera Control button. Well, Apple's not calling it a button. So, I guess we'll also refrain from calling it a button, but we'll count it as one, making it five in total. I have more to say on it, but just wait until I get to cameras.

The 16 is still 6.1 inches (there's the 6.7-inch Plus model if you need a bigger screen), slim, light (also a gram heavier than the 15), and the sides (that are still made of aluminum) are contoured on the edges. If you’re coming from an iPhone 14 or older, you'd find the 16 a lot more ergonomic to hold and use.

That 6.1-inch screen on the front has the Dynamic Island, another Pro first, but that trickled down to the regular iPhone last year. The screen maxes out at 2,000 nits and goes as dim as 1 nit. So, when the lights go down, your phone doesn't, though do limit your screen time — there's Screen Time to keep a check on that.
There's not much difference between the screens on the regular iPhone and the Pro — they're vivid, equally bright (dim, as well), and great for doing whatever you want. Except Apple has gate-kept the 120Hz refresh rate (or as it calls it, the "ProMotion") and the always-on display for the Pros.

Well, I could go on and on about how missing out on 120Hz in 2024 is unacceptable, but people buying a regular iPhone wouldn't really care. Yes, 60Hz is quite antiquated by today's standards, but the animations on iOS are so fluid that you won't miss a higher refresh rate unless you have used ProMotion. The same is true for the always-on display; if you haven't used it, you won't miss it.
But it's high time the regular iPhones now get these two "Pro features." Next year, maybe? Fingers crossed.
Apple says it has improved the protection on the screens of iPhone 16. It's a new Ceramic Shield glass, and all four of the iPhone 16s have it. If Apple is to be believed, it's twice as strong as the Ceramic Shield glass on the previous iPhones, and so far I haven't noticed any scratches. Though, I haven't risked dropping it because glass is still glass.

After two years of hand-me-down chips, the regular iPhone has finally got a new chip for itself, the A18, and some extra couple gigs of RAM (that's a bigger deal than you'd realise). The Pro models still run on the "Pro" chip, namely the A18 Pro, so there's still some variance, but much less than last year.
To make things easier to understand, let's first dive a little into the technicalities.
The A18 chip is built on the 3nm process node. What does that mean? Well, it's small, so it'll eat up less of your battery power. In turn, this will give you more battery life (more on this later).
Then, A18 has a 5-core CPU and a 5-core GP that’s just one core less than the A18 Pro. That's the only difference you'd find between the two chips on Apple's official spec sheet. The regular and Pro models of 16 are said to have the same amount of RAM, 8 gigs. Even the 16-core neural core is the same, and both are "built for Apple Intelligence." Poor iPhone 15.
Apple says there is about a 30 percent performance gain compared to the iPhone 15, and that gap widens to 100 percent when put against the 4-year-old iPhone 12.

iPhone 16 is super speedy for everyday stuff, just like the iPhones that have come before it. Opening apps, switching between them, and the AI tricks (yes, I have been using them) — are snappy. Even editing videos, photos, or all those 'pro' things are handled pretty well.
Apps stay in memory for the longest time you could leave them. One night I was ordering food, but all of a sudden I decided to check my emails, and the food ordering app stayed in memory till the next day. So, by the longest time, I mean that long.
Games run superbly as well, even better than on the iPhone 15 for that matter. The A18 brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the regular iPhones, something that only last year's Pro models could do.
And guess what? You can now also play AAA titles on the regular iPhones that were once only playable on the Pro ones, like Assassin's Creed: Mirage, Resident Evil Village, and Death Stranding Director's Cut. I tried the demo for Resident Evil Village, and it played very well.
Oh, about the heat. It does get a little warm when gaming, but not at other times. Apple has updated the thermal design, adding a "thermal sub-structure" to dissipate heat, which seems to be working in keeping the phone cool rather than just delivering a higher sustained performance for gaming.

The 16s come with iOS 18 preloaded. So, yes, you get all the personalization and customization shenanigans right out of the box. I'm not talking about just changing wallpapers to match your phone's color; we've come a long way from that. Yes, obviously, you can change the wallpaper, but there's also a lot more you can do now, like coloring the icons, making them larger, and placing them anywhere. There’s more to it, so I’d suggest you to go through the preview of iOS 18, in which I didn’t shy away of words.

Now, on to pièce de résistance of this story, the Apple Intelligence. Being the nerd I am, I jumped the gun and installed the beta to try out the first wave of Apple Intelligence features weeks before it rolled out for all of you.
I can write paragraphs on the intelligence features, but to save us some time, I'm going to redirect you to the piece I wrote on Apple Intelligence a couple of weeks ago. It discusses everything in depth, so you'll get a better idea of how the intelligence works.

But, if you aren’t in the mood for reading another 1000 words, and you just want to know how Apple Intelligence works on the iPhone that's "designed for [it] from the ground up"? So far, pretty well. Intelligence features, like Notification Summaries, Writing Tools, Reduce Interruptions, and the Clean Up, which are available right now (in beta), wouldn’t make you go "Woah, what was that?,” but you’ll certainly be left in awe, like “Wow, that was really nice.”
The best of Apple Intelligence is yet to come. Image Playground, Genmoji, and Image Wand are arriving in December, along with Visual Intelligence. The new Siri, while sporting a redesign and better natural language understanding, won't show its real smarts until next year.
Yes, I know what you're thinking: Apple isn't the first to implement these features or intelligence altogether. I get it. The iPhone is and will probably be playing catch-up to Pixels and Galaxies for some time in terms of AI. However, what really sets Apple Intelligence apart isn't just the features, but how they're implemented—with a focus on privacy, even if that means being fashionably late to the AI party.
Whatever bits and pieces of Apple Intelligence I have tried as of now are smart and play their parts, if I were to tell you honestly. And with intelligence paired with customization, iOS 18 is the freshest iteration in years.

The iPhone 16, on paper, improves upon the battery big time, says Apple, promising 22 hours of video playback. But does that claim hold up?
Well, on a normal day when I'm doing some light browsing, clicking a few pictures, taking calls and listening to music most of the time), the 16 lasts almost a day on a single charge. And even with gaming in the mix, you may need to run to the charger few hours before the day ends, but not much before.
The Plus has a bigger battery, so that would last you well over a day.
Charging the iPhone 16 is fast, not super fast like some Android phones, but you can have the 16 juiced up from 0-100% in an hour and a few minutes. Wireless charging has got a boost, up from 15W to 25W on MagSafe, though you’ll have to buy the new 25W MagSafe puck separately for that.

Before I jump straight into the Camera Control, let me just brief you on the camera setup of the 16. It still has two cameras — a wide and an ultra-wide. The wide is a 48MP sensor, which Apple now calls a Fusion camera, since it fuses wide and 2x focal points in one sensor. Then, there's much of the same 12MP ultra-wide, but it now has a lower aperture and can also shoot at a macro level, just like the Pros. The front also continues to have the tried-and-tested 12MP camera for selfies.

To control the cameras, there's the Camera Control on the side. While Apple hasn't called it a button in any of its marketing for the iPhone 16, it is essentially a button. It clicks, and that makes it a button. Well, it’s also more than a button. It takes light presses and swipes as well. There's a whole interface built around it.
Clicking (or a double click) Camera Control opens up the camera. Then, clicking it again will take the picture. To record videos, just click and hold. Now, that's not all. It gets a little complicated here after. So, double-press the Camera Control, and it opens up a menu with different camera settings.
You can swipe through it and do a light press to select the setting you want to play around with. There is exposure, depth, zoom, cameras, style, and tone — to choose from. You can slide through the Camera Control to scroll through the settings and adjust them. Now, that's a lot going on here, isn't it?

But that's what the selling point of Camera Control is, it tries to give you complete control of your camera. But, to what extent does it succeed in it?
I was really intrigued the day Apple showed off the new iPhones, thinking of all the ways I'd use the Camera Control. Then, the day when I got my hands on the 16, I couldn't stop myself from playing around with the Camera Control. Two days later, I grew a little doubtful of it, wondering if I would ever use it or not. Now, a month into daily driving the 16, I have found my purpose for the Camera Control.
I rarely use it for taking pictures, and I clicked a lot of photos, around 5000 clicks if I were to count, so far. Whenever I used the Camera Control for clicking pictures, there’s was slight shake—very little— pressing it disturbs the framing a bit. So, I have stuck to the on-screen shutter for that, because I have been using that for ages now and it’s darn quick.
What I really used the Camera Control for is to open the Camera app with it. Then, I also find it intuitive for adjusting settings. Like zooming in and out feels more natural with the Camera Control than it does with on-screen controls. Then, I use it to change to styles, adjust tone, and exposure a lot of times — sliding through them.
One thing that I have learned using the Camera Control is that you’re going to need time with it. You won't become familiar with it in a day or even a week. It's been almost over a month, and it's only now that I've gotten into using it regularly while taking pictures. And yes, I've also somewhat learned to use it vertically, which is difficult, but if you keep using it that way, you'll eventually get used to it.
As for the pictures, they are as good as they could be on an iPhone. The 48MP camera captures sharp images with colours that look realistic and maintain skin tones perfectly. Since we're on the topic of human subjects, the portraits are as good as ever.

The main camera can also shoot at twice the focal length, and these 2x shots come out great, having plenty of details and the same colour reproduction as the 1x shots.
The 12MP ultra-wide, which now has autofocus and thus the capability for macro shots, continues to be good at capturing much wider scenes. These shots also have the same natural colour palette as the main lens. Macro shots come out good as well; you can get quite close, and details are still maintained.

In low-light conditions, both cameras capture pretty good pictures, with minimal noise and true-to-life colours. While the daylight pictures have been largely the same as the iPhone 15, the dimly lit scenes do get captured better on the 16. The ultra-wide, especially, captures sharper pictures at night. Also, here are the in full-res, in case you want to go through them.
I know what you are waiting for. Yes, the lens flare is still there, very much. It’s up to you if you look at it as an effect or a defect. As for me, while I don’t like it a lot, I do like how it sometimes gives a different character to pictures in some scenes. It’s a very iPhone thing, and honestly I’d have missed it if it weren’t there.
The cameras are simply among the best on a phone; all you need to do is point and shoot. But that has been the case with iPhones - you can't really do much beyond point and shoot. Until now.
So, with iPhone 16s, Apple is reintroducing Photographic Styles. They have long existed, since the iPhone 13, but now they have been upgraded. So, instead of being “just filters,” Photographic Styles are now more of presets, allowing you to adjust the colours, skin tones and shadows — and not just while taking picture but even after you have shot one.

You can choose from five "undertone" settings for adjusting skin tones and nine "mood" settings that feel like high-quality Instagram filters but are more of Lightroom-ish presets. The best part? You're not locked into your choice. You can shoot with a live preview of any style, and then tweak the settings or even switch styles entirely after taking the photo.
There are three fine controls for these Photographic Styles that you could play around with to alter the picture to your wildest thoughts. You know what, these controls let you make the pictures look like they aren’t clicked from an iPhone.
Spoiler alert, you can finally dial down the aggressive HDR effect that iPhones are known for, bringing back those lovely shadows and highlights that give photos more depth and character.
To start with, there’s "colour," which is essentially saturation, and "palette," which adjusts the range of colours being applied. But the star of the show is the new "tone" control. This one lets you add shadows back to your photos, bringing them closer to what a traditional camera without all the machine learning and artificial intelligence would produce.

These controls are semantically aware, meaning it adjusts things like faces and sky differently. And just so you know, these Photographic Styles and the granular controls are same across all the four iPhone 16 models.
When you find the right "Photographic Style" for you, you can make it your new default. To do this, you need to dive into the system settings menu and go through a setup process, selecting four photos to preview in the new style. It's not as straightforward as just picking a style in the camera app, so it can be confusing at first.
On to videos, the iPhone 16 is the second best phone to shoot videos on, with the best being the Pro iPhone. The videos from iPhone 16 come out stable, with plenty of details, and true-to-life colours, just like you’d expect from an iPhone. It can record in Dolby Vision. Cinematic mode is great as well. And while the regular 16 can't shoot in ProRes, the Audio Mix feature (which the 16 Pro also has) is one feature that does help make videos a little ‘Pro’fessional.
Audio Mix lets you to adjust the audio quality of your videos to suit different scenarios. For instance, Studio mode eliminates background noise, making you sound like you're in a professional recording environment. Cinematic mode, on the other hand, focuses on voices in the center of the frame while adding a touch of ambient noise for a more natural feel.
I've tested all three modes in different situations, and they work as advertised. The Studio Mode, in particular, impressed me during a video shoot with a lot of background noise. It effectively removed all the chatter from the background, though the subject's voice did sound slightly artificial.
One more new thing that the iPhone 16s camera can do is click pictures and record in spatial mode. It’s a great feature, as you won’t need to have the more expensive Pro models, but only if you have a Vision Pro at your disposal. Otherwise, it won’t be of much use. But hey, even without it, you still get a fresh-looking iPhone 16.

Every year it's the same question: to go 'Pro' or not, and every year everyone tells you the same: if you have the money, then go for the Pro. But may be not this year — not for everyone.
Why, you may ask? Well, I have given enough reasons in the 3,000 words above, but let me wrap things up for you. For starters, the regular iPhone 16 costs Rs 40,000 less, being priced at Rs 79,900, while the iPhone 16 Pro comes in at Rs 1,19,900. So, you are saving some serious money. Still not convinced, there’s more to it.
With all the hand-me-downs over the years, the regular iPhone has grown closest to its Pro cousins. It shares some of its aesthetics with the pricier Pro models and even has more colours to choose from, performs as well as its cousins, takes great pictures, and lasts all day long. Not to miss, but it also have the AI chops, just like the Pro — although that shouldn’t be your only reason to get the 16 (except those with an iPhone 15), since it’s still very much a work in progress.
It can do everything that a pro would do on their iPhone when they're not being a pro. Put against the 16 Pro, there isn't much that the regular 16 can't do. Yes, everything will feel pretty fluid on the Pro, thanks to ProMotion. It also has an extra graphics core so it can eventually handle graphically intensive tasks better. There’s an extra camera as well that can zoom in way farther and the whole trio captures even better videos.
The question is: who really needs these extras? Except for perhaps the high refresh rate, these features are primarily for 'Pro' users who treat their phone as more of a "tool."
In short, the iPhone 16 is a great iPhone and a great phone. So, this year, more than ever, whether you're new to iPhone or upgrading from an older model (and feel you might not be making the most out of a Pro) — the standard iPhone makes the most sense for most people.