A Week With iPhone 16 Pro – My Favorite Feature

Having spent the last week with the new iPhone 16 Pro Max I wanted to share a few thoughts.

Key Takeaways

• iPhone 16 Pro vs. Pixel 9 Pro XL Image Battle
• My Favorite New Feature
• Pure Hardware Innovation Getting Harder
• New Experiences Unlocked by Apple Silicon Advances

Image Battle

Camera photography is highly subjective.  But, the camera that I’ve always felt is most competitive with Apple is found on Google Pixel. So I decided to put the latest Google Pixel 9 Pro XL to the test vs. the iPhone 16 Pro and see whose default (no editing) images look the best.  Below are a handful of shots for comparison. Click to expand the images.

I share these comparisons because many people often just use the default settings for their images.  What’s interesting here is how it seems there is a wider color palette captured by default on the iPhone 16 Pro with particular picking up more natural color tones.

My Favorite New Feature

While I am by no means a professional photographer, I am fairly particular about the quality of my photos and often shoot in RAW, ending up doing some color correction post-process in Adobe Lightroom. There are, of course, ways to have more control over your photos on the device with built-in editing controls, but those who use these features are essentially aware that for them, the default settings, as good as they may be, are not good enough. Enter my favorite feature, the control pad.

The control pad is essentially professional-level color grading in real-time.  The ability to do this while looking at your frame in real time is what I was impressed with the most. For me, this let me make small adjustments so the image I was trying to take looked as close to what my eye saw as possible. Here is an example using the mural I took a picture at a beach in Santa Cruz.

While the control pad can be used with any filter, I largely preferred using it with the standard (default) image since it allowed for the most subtle adjustments without distorting too many colors unnaturally, as most filters do. I appreciate the many style options iPhone provides, but I’m largely focused on capturing the most natural colors, as close to what my eye sees as possible. I most regularly achieved this using the control pad on the standard image. The user interface is quite simple, and it’s very easy to see how simple adjustments on the control pad slider subtly improve certain tones in the image versus altering all the colors across the board like a standard filter. This is Apple making pro-level color correction extremely simple and accessible to the masses.

What makes this feature even more interesting is that it is coming to the entire iPhone lineup in the 16 family. This is one of many reasons why I believe Apple’s base iPhone 16 is the strongest base-level iPhone Apple has released in many years, if not ever. And while there are specific hardware improvements in the iPhone 16 family from last year’s models, there is a deeper observation to point out.

This observation is one I have been vocal about lately, which is that pure hardware innovation gains are so difficult year over year that most of the exciting innovations to watch for will happen in software. This is why there is such excitement for AI, and in Apple’s case, Apple Intelligence, running on our devices to unlock new, more powerful ways to get things done and unlock new possibilities. This is not to say hardware advancements are not possible year over year, only that we can’t expect significant leaps in pure hardware the way we once did during the prime of the smartphone boom. And while Apple has made upgrades by way of increasing screen size, meaningful updates in camera technology, as well as battery life, Apple’s most critical year-over-year innovation that will accelerate this trend of unlocking powerful hardware with even more powerful software is Apple Silicon.

This point is emphasized even with the control pad feature I highlighted, as it uses some of the upgraded capabilities of Apple’s A18 family, which for the first time in a long time comes to the base iPhone 16 and is a big reason why so many new computationally rich software features are coming to the entire iPhone 16 family. The point here is that in the upcoming era where software experiences will get more attention than hardware features and upgrades, the spotlight will move to ways advances in Apple Silicon unlock new experiences via software.

With the optimism and early signals of ways AI can help us get more out of the hardware we have in our hands, we still have a long way to go. Most semiconductor architectures are still playing catch up to the advances AI software keeps making. But this only emphasizes how the behind-the-scenes innovations happening in silicon will be the things that lead to the most significant new experiences that revolutionize our interaction with technology. This symbiosis between hardware (silicon) and software advancements will likely define the next era of personal computing, where the true potential of AI is realized not just in the cloud, but right in the palm of our hands.

Feature Honorable Mentions:

• The larger display on iPhone 16 Pro Max doesn’t make the device feel much larger but yields some visual difference over iPhone 15 Pro Max.
• Battery life has improved year over year from my iPhone 15 Pro Max by at least an hour or two.
• The speakers are a welcome update feeling much more full and rich