Apple officially unveiled its iPhone 16 lineup during the company’s September 9th “It’s Glowtime” event.
Starting with the iPhone 16, Apple is sticking with the flat edge design it has used over the last several iterations of iPhone, but the iPhone 16 does sport one notable change: the camera bump. Apple slimmed things down and walked back from the square bump with cameras placed diagonally in opposite corners to a vertically-stacked array a la the iPhone XS.
As rumoured, the iPhone 16 will be available in green, blue, pink, black and white colours. The phone still comes in two sizes, 6.1-inches for the 16 and 6.7-inches for the 16 Plus. The phone also now has the Action Button that debuted on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro series.
The iPhone 16 also debuts a new camera button with touch-sensitive controls.
Apple unveiled the new A18 chip to power the iPhone 16. The chip includes a faster neural engine, increased memory bandwidth and more. A18 uses 3nm technology, a 6-core CPU and a 5-core GPU. Apple says it’s up to 30 percent faster than before and can offer the same performance as A16 Bionic while using 30 percent less power.
The GPU uses up to 40 percent faster than the GPU in iPhone 15 and is also more efficient, offering the same performance with 35 percent less power use.
Apple Intelligence
Apple’s new A18 chips plays a significant role in powering the company’s new intelligence features that happen on device.
However, when things need more computing power, things head off-device using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which runs on Apple Silicon. Apple boasted that its servers run on 100 percent renewable energy, an important note given how power-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) features are.
Apple Intelligence will also power search in the company’s Photos app, allowing users to find images with natural search queries. Notably, Google is doing something similar in its Photos app, which is now being tested in the U.S.
Elsewhere, Apple Intelligence can summarize incoming notifications and highlight priority options, placing them higher up the stack.
Siri is getting better with Apple Intelligence, with Apple promising that the digital assistant can pull details from personal context and use screen analysis to respond to queries about what you’re currently looking at on your iPhone.
Apple’s pitch is that people will be able to ask Siri to send photos from last week’s barbeque to someone, and it will be able to find the photos and send them all by itself.
iPhone 16’s new camera control button can now be used to pull up something called visual intelligence, which lets users point their camera at something they see to pull in details. Apple also namedropped Google when talking about how the feature lets you quickly search the internet for things. The whole feature seems a lot like Google Lens and Circle to Search.
Much of what Apple said about Apple Intelligence was previously revealed at WWDC 2024. You can read more about it here.
Camera updates
Apple dedicated time to showing off the iPhone 16’s new camera control hardware that allows it to differentiate between a light click or a full click. Light presses can open additional controls like zoom, while a full press will snap a photo.
Camera control includes a tactile switch to register clicks, a high-precision force sensor for light presses, and a capacitive sensor for touch input like scrolling through controls.
Apple says third-party apps will be able to leverage the camera control button too.
The company also detailed its 48-megapixel “fusion” camera, which uses a sensor crop technique to simulate optical quality 2x zoom. There’s an improved 12-megapixel ultrawide camera too, which can capture over 2x more light and supports a new macro mode.
iPhone 16 supports spatial capture as well, allowing users to capture spatial photos to view with Vision Pro.
Other new additions
Apple touted thermal improvements in the iPhone 16 that enable 30 percent better sustained performance in games.
iPhone 16 has a larger battery too, and Apple says that the improved efficiency in A18 will help it last even longer.
Additionally, Apple touted the iPhone 16’s improved durability thanks to better ‘Ceramic Shield’ that’s 50 percent tougher than previous-generation Ceramic Shield and two times tougher than glass on other smartphones.
All the new iPhone 16 models will be available for pre-order starting Friday and will be in stores starting September 20th.
The iPhone 16 starts at $1,129 and the iPhone 16 Plus starts at $1,279.
You can find all our Apple iPhone event coverage here.
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
