That said, the bigger iPhones tend to have the best battery life. The iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus handily gave me hours of extra run time over their smaller siblings. You can easily take the bigger phones into the morning of a second day on a single charge, even with heavy use. If battery life is your top priority, choose between the largest models.
All of these iPhones have the Action button, which replaces the Mute switch and is now configurable, so you can replicate the Mute switch functionality or execute another action, like turning on a flashlight or triggering a shortcut. They all also have the new Camera Control button (yes, it’s a button). You can use it to open the camera and take a photo, but a light press shows different camera modes and you can slide your finger left or right across the button’s surface to cycle through various modes, zoom levels, and more. Eventually, you can use this button to trigger Visual Intelligence, Apple’s version of Google Lens—point your iPhone at something in the real world to get more information about it.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Every iPhone 16 model can now take advantage of a cool video feature called Audio Mix. This lets you change how your videos sound when you’re editing them by choosing a sound profile. These include In-Frame, which focuses the audio on whoever is in the frame; Studio, which makes it sound like you were in a studio, cutting all background noise; and Cinematic, which makes sure whoever is at the center of the frame comes in clear, with a little bit of ambient noise mixed in. This feature performs slightly better on the iPhone 16 Pro models since they have upgraded microphones.
The redesigned Photographic Styles are also available in the entire range. These are almost like filters but better—instead of changing the look of the whole image, these Styles can maintain skin tones so they don’t look weird and can adjust other parts of the photo like shadows and highlights. They’re among the standout features on the latest phones, so play around with them! Apple is also giving you more control over how your skin tone looks, instead of going for more of a one-size-fits-all approach like Google does with its Pixel phones.
Apple Intelligence is the headline feature, and the only way to try out the new artificial intelligence capabilities is to use a phone that supports it: the iPhone 16 range, the iPhone 15 Pro, or the iPhone 15 Pro Max. I covered these features in broader detail in our iOS 18 guide and evaluated many of them in my iPhone 16 Pro review, but to summarize, it includes a revamped Siri experience, real-time audio transcription in Voice Notes and Notes (even call recording), and writing assistance features like proofreading and changing the tone of your messages. Other features such as the ability to generate images will come later.