iPhone 16: Get This One Instead!
September is the month of — you guessed it, a new iPhone. Apple has again released its “best iPhone(s) ever”, with the iPhone 16 catalogue packed with the base 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max. With the current iterative nature of the Cupertino-giant towards their products, the new series of iPhones feels like a spec bump or possibly an ‘s’ upgrade from the yesteryears. All of this has been done in the name of the new alleged AI revamp “Apple Intelligence” (which has still not arrived yet). But still, if you’re looking for an iPhone upgrade, let me tell you — the base iPhone 16’s is all you need. Ditch the Pros and get this one instead. Here’s why…
Design cum Hardware:
Honestly, there’s nothing much to speak about the design of the new iPhone 16 except that it feels familiar. Well, this could be a bummer for the tech enthusiasts but for a company which accounts for more than the GDP of some countries, they have to feel familiar yet new in terms of their design to their users. To achieve that, Apple has taken some steps backwards in terms of design and has made the iPhone 16 and the 16 Plus reminiscent of the iPhone X. This has been done to make Spatial Videos for the 7 customers around the world who own the $4,000 Vision Pro. Jokes apart, the iPhone 16 also comes in new colours like teal, ultramarine blue, & pink alongside the standard black & white which are more saturated than some previous releases of the iPhones. More or less these have been the changes brought to the table by this year’s base iPhones.
Coming to the actual hardware, the base iPhone & the Plus model finally get a chip upgrade to the latest A18 Bionic, which is a 3nm chip based on the TSMC 2nd-gen fabrication process and it’s fast. Apple has claimed it to be 40% faster than the competition which means it has performance headroom for years. This performance indicates that the base iPhones will also be able to run “Apple Intelligence” locally for all the AI workloads coming to all the availing iPhones this fall. There’s also an insider leak, which suggests more RAM (around 8GB) on the phones for AI tasks. In terms of battery, the A18 is efficient enough to take care of it & on top of it, the battery capacity is also allegedly bumped up which promises to deliver an “all-day battery” just like always.
But here’s the banger. The base iPhone gets two new buttons! (one actually). This year, Apple has brought the Action Button from last year’s Pro models which indicates the imminent death of the loved Mute Switch but the one which caught the most attention was the new “Camera Control” placed below the power switch, which is a capacitive button capable of registering taps & slides paired with a “Taptic Engine” for haptic feedback. All it allows is to launch and control the camera functions from the button itself for a (so-called) better camera experience. There is also an Apple Intelligence feature called “Visual Intelligence” coming this fall & can be accessed by a hold press on the Camera Control button and is par with the Google Lens in terms of features. But here comes the catch, the new button is well-suited for anything landscape, but as soon as you use the phone vertically (which is done most of the time) it feels weirdly positioned and overall destroys the functionality of the button.
This is where the upgrades stop as the iPhone 16 still comes with the same USB-C 2.0 port, the same 60 Hz AMOLED display with no always-on display for a phone which costs $800. This kind of sorcery can only be pulled off by Apple at this point.
Moving on.
“The iPhone”:
It’s an undoubted fact that iOS — the software running the iPhone is the key to its popularity. Software features like iMessage, iCloud & FaceTime have been the only reason for 87% of the youth in the US to buy an iPhone, which shows how integral it’s to the iPhone experience. While there’s nothing much to look forward to in terms of software apart from the official public launch of iOS 18 with the iPhone 16 series, there are some behind-the-scenes software nuances enabled by the hardware for the 16 like hardware-enabled ray-tracing, a better ISP, etc. In hindsight, this is the same experience that can be enjoyed by the users having an iPhone XR and up but the key here is iOS 18. This brings some crucial experiences lacked by the iPhone before like tinted icons, unrestricted icon placements, new control centre UI, and a better calculator with more privacy features. You can learn more about iOS 18 & its features from the link below (if you’re reading from my website), but in a gist, the “new iPhone, new software experience”.
Fresh Eyes:
The cameras on the iPhone 16 & the 16 Plus have been reworked and paired with the 48 MP fusion sensor, which seems to take better and faster pictures than the previous model. While the spec sheet remains the same as last year, the company has reworked the computational photography pipeline with an improved Photonic Engine processing workload. While the benefits are not obvious, if you’re shooting in general use cases using an iPhone 11 or above, the improvements will shine in the niche cases like better detail retention, better portrait mode, night mode photos, cinematic videos, etc. The Photography Styles also gets an upgrade to feature more granularity to further fine-tune the look of the picture by the user using a cool-looking temp-pad UI.
But the one which gets the most focus (pun intended) is the ultrawide camera, which finally comes with auto-focus and can now take macro shots, which had its debut on the iPhone 13 Pro models.
But apart from this, the changes are minor. If you have an iPhone 13 or above and want to upgrade to the 16 just for cameras, don’t get it! Save up or go straight for the Pros, which have packed a lot in the cameras this year.
The Verdict:
The verdict is quite simple & straightforward. This new iPhone 16s is the one to go for this year as the feature parity between the Pro and base models isn’t large enough. Also, this will be an upgrade only & only if you’re coming from an iPhone 11 or older as most of the features remain the same more or less or you just want to get the new Apple Intelligence, this is the cheapest iPhone to get.
