The primary critiques of the iPhone 16 Professional and iPhone 16 Professional Max have been shared immediately by choose media retailers and YouTube channels, forward of the gadgets launching on Friday. Additionally try our iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus overview roundup.
iPhone 16 Professional and Professional Max fashions characteristic 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch shows, respectively, up from the 6.1-inch iPhone 15 Professional and 6.7-inch iPhone 15 Professional Max. Different new options embrace a Digital camera Management button, an A18 Professional chip optimized for Apple Intelligence, a 48-megapixel Extremely Huge digicam, help for 4K at 120 FPS video recording, longer battery life, quicker charging over MagSafe, and improved microphones.
Critiques
The Verge‘s Nilay Patel on the Digital camera Management:
It is fairly enjoyable to flip the telephone on its aspect and shoot with the button like a standard digicam, though the bodily button is a bit stiff — just a few Verge staffers discovered themselves shifting the telephone barely when pushing all the way in which right down to take a photograph, though I assumed it was superb.
I discovered myself unintentionally opening the digicam rather a lot at first since I am left-handed and the button is positioned the place my fingers are likely to relaxation after I maintain the telephone. You may set it to require a double-click, and that solved the issue for me. You may also set the button to open third-party digicam apps; it really works nicely with the brand new model of Halide that is been up to date to help that performance.
He concluded that the Digital camera Management is just not an enormous enchancment:
General, the button could be very good to have, however that’s about it proper now — because it exists immediately, it’s not an enormous enchancment over taking pictures images with some other iPhone.
He believes the iPhone 16 Professional has solely iterative upgrades at launch, with Apple Intelligence and extra Digital camera Management capabilities coming later this 12 months:
Because it exists immediately, it is a remarkably iterative replace to the iPhone 15 Professional — it is onerous to seek out causes to improve from final 12 months’s mannequin. And I am under no circumstances satisfied that it is price upgrading to the 16 Professional from older Professional fashions simply but, both — the Digital camera Management and Motion Button are good, however not sport altering, and except you are enthusiastic about dialing within the new Photographic Types and the brand new tone management, you would possibly discover the even-brighter-and-flatter images to really be a step backward in picture processing.
The smaller iPhone 16 Professional fared nicely in Tom’s Information‘s Mark Spoonauer battery-life check:
On the Tom’s Information battery life check, which entails steady net browsing at 150 nits of display screen brightness, the brand new iPhone 16 Professional lasted 14 hours and seven minutes, which is a giant leap from the ten:53 from the iPhone 15 Professional, and sufficient to simply crack our listing of one of the best telephone battery life.
Whereas it was believed that the iPhone 16 Professional helps as much as 45W wired charging, Spoonauer didn’t truly see any enchancment throughout his testing.
Gizmodo‘s Florence Ion on real-world battery life:
For now, I can let you know the iPhone 16 Professional, with its smaller battery pack, carried out impressively on a day trip into town. I nonetheless had 20% battery towards the tip of my transit journey again to the automobile after six hours out and about with the AirPods 4 with ANC engaged in my ears. I additionally began the day with 83% on the iPhone 16 Professional, solely to finish up at 24% battery after seven hours of putting in software program, taking pictures images, taking a telephone name, listening to a podcast, and taking part in just a little Apple Arcade.
Geekbench benchmark outcomes already confirmed that the A18 Professional chip is as much as 15% quicker than the A17 Professional chip, as Apple marketed. iPhone 16 Professional fashions proceed to have the quickest CPU in any smartphone, and that appears to be evident.
WIRED‘s Julian Chokkattu on efficiency:
These telephones are powered by the A18 Professional chipset, which is way and away probably the most highly effective smartphone processor in response to my benchmark checks, simply blowing away a lot of the Android competitors. It has one further graphics core in comparison with the A18 within the iPhone 16, however the CPU cache sizes are bigger, which suggests as a complete, the A18 Professional remains to be usually quicker than the A18.
PetaPixel‘s Chris Niccolls touched on the iPhone 16 Professional’s new 48-megapixel Extremely Huge digicam in his photography-focused overview:
The ultra-wide digicam has additionally been improved to a brand new 48-megapixel sensor with autofocus that may ship first rate macro capabilities with extra element than earlier than. The aperture is similar as earlier than at f/2.2. I like now having the choice of 48-megapixel RAW recordsdata though, in real-world conditions, the decision doesn’t match that of a typical Bayer sample sensor at 48 megapixels. Oddly, Apple additionally determined to not implement the choice for a 24-megapixel HEIF file, which it does have on the primary fusion digicam. The additional megapixels are pointless for social media purposes however at the least panorama and macro photographers can squeeze some extra element out of their RAW recordsdata.
He additionally touched on recording 4K video at 120 FPS:
On the video entrance, the headline addition is the power to document as much as 4K 120p with a really high-quality look because of ProRes Log. You may also retime the 120p footage right down to 1/5 velocity for a 24-frame-per-second timeline proper on the telephone and it’ll present it to you in real-time as it’s rendering. Velocity ramping may be completed very merely throughout the identical interface permitting for some dramatic wanting sluggish movement pictures.
Engadget‘s Cherlynn Low on the brand new “studio-quality” microphones:
For probably the most half, going to Cinematic or Studio modes from Normal resulted in a noticeable discount in environmental noise. My favourite is Studio, which usually appeared to enhance voice readability as nicely, making folks sound like they may very well be speaking on a podcast.
