iPhone 16 Series Unboxing and Review

iPhone 16 Series Unboxing and Review
Introduction
this is the iPhone 16 the iPhone 16 plus the 16 Pro and the 16 Pro Max so every new iPhone as well as bucket load of new accessories and this is where we find out if these things are actually good or not

Unboxing the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus

so let’s unbox the iPhone 16 and 16 plus first and notice Apple did say this is now an even smaller package compared to last year’s phones I have to be honest I can barely tell the difference it’s about 6% smaller in reality but it does look like they have rearranged the entire inside to accommodate this shrink so now you get the phone there’s a USBC cable combined with a Sim ejector and it looks like no Apple stickers this time around and here’s our iPhone 16 these are also apparently the first iPhones to have 100% wood fiber based packaging which is good although last year’s phones had 99% so let’s not get too excited and this is iPhone 16 plus and I’m actually kind of happy about these colors this is the closest we’ve been in a long time to well just actually proper blue and pink very expensive gender reveal anyone

Audio Mixing Features

so having actually used the phones I would genuinely say the audio mixing feature is unexpectedly crazy cool so you guys start having a conversation now and while they’re talking behind the phone I’m talking to you guys standing in front of the phone so this is kind of like the equivalent of me being on a movie set and I’m the cameraman and they’re the actors that I’m filming hey let’s see what that clip looked like so open it up head into the edit and then click audio mix so there’s four options here we’ll start with a default way that the iPhone sounds and while they’re talking behind the phone I’m talking FR bit of a mess right but then you click in frame flow so you want flow it’s like really fine and eggs you want really rich my audio basically disappears it’s it’s like a magic trick there is more to this feature but I’ll get to it when we talk about the pro phones

Gaming Performance and the A18 Chip

okay so what about gaming because the iPhone 16s have jumped forward two generations in terms of their chip this time around this should be one of the biggest changes and now also means that these phones have access to that same library of console games that only the pros could play last year so why don’t we see how they run man the idea of playing like proper console Assassin’s Creed on my phone is basically a childhood dream okay really impressive draw distances meaning that like it’s kind of crazy that I can see stuff happening on the other side of this massive City the game is running smooth it’s a very consistent 30 frames per second I would say you can tell that a lot of settings have had to be very far dialed back from the console versions to the point where it does kind of still look like a mobile game but then the upside is that it doesn’t feel like a mobile game in terms of the scope of it it’s massive I’m impressed I’m not blown away but I’m impressed

Camera Hardware and Spatial Video

now two of the most obvious changes on the iPhone 16 are both camera related one is the new layout of the cameras which unlocks this new option in the camera app called spatial video and I have played around with it it’s lower quality than normal video it only shoots in 1080p but if you do somehow happen to have a Vision Pro lying around it is surprisingly transportative it really does take you there but then again you know this was the first time I used my Vision Pro since my review 6 months ago this isn’t a useful enough gadget for this feature that only works on this gadget to mean anything but that might change in the future

The New Camera Control Button

the second thing is this new camera control that you get on the side this is the thing that’s in all the Tik toks this is what people are talking about so a heavy press on it takes a photo a light press activates the Zoom slider so you have full control over Zoom by swiping along it and then a double Light press opens up a menu which if you don’t want the swipe gesture to control Zoom allows you to select something else that it can control and when I first went hands on with it my very first hot take was why like who asked for this
so now that I’ve had some proper time to get to know it how my opinion changed well it has allowed me to appreciate the attention to detail that’s gone into it I like the fact that it’s flush with the body of the phone so it’s not yet another protrusion that makes a thing uncomfortable to hold I like that you have a surprising amount of control over how the control works with settings like How firm you need to press to activate the thing I like the little bit of haptic feedback you get every time you hit a key magnification number as you’re zooming in it is quite cool that the official Apple cases cover and protect the camera control while keeping the swiping gestures completely usable but no my opinion has not changed I think this is dumb you have to lower your grip to reach it you have to arch your thumb in a way that genuinely causes me hand strain you got to hold your phone tighter than usual cuz you’re now supporting it less and after all that you’re more likely to get last minute camera Shake because you’re heavy pressing a button as opposed to lightly tapping your screen and if that wasn’t enough it also feels like in trying to make this camera control work for both the portrait orientations and the landscape orientations they’ve just made it not good with either because for portrait it needs to be higher up so you’re not going like this and for landscape it needs to be lower like here so you can actually reach it without using some weird unconventional hand claw

Video Recording and Photo Quality

separately though I will say I appreciate how you can now pause a video recording so you can have multiple separate Clips in one video as opposed to having multiple videos and also how you don’t need to stop whatever music is playing on your phone when you start recording these are both overdue but good improvements for creators in iOS 18 but what about the photo quality because while the main camera hasn’t changed on this 16 you know that new a18 chip that the phone has does contain a brand new image signal processor which every year is becoming a bigger factor for your photos so I thought this would be a fun thing to do this is the iPhone 16 this is last year’s iPhone 15 and then this is an iPhone 12 which I imagine is closer to what most of you might be upgrading from
okay I’m a jump in the shot and finger guns why did I say that right yeah there’s basically zero difference between the 15 and the 16 you can definitely see substantial upgrades from the 12 in terms of detail texture color that’s not really something to brag about that’s expected and between the 15 and 16 I can’t see anything the 16 though can get way closer to things to take macro photos now that the ultrawide camera has autofocus and there is some improvement to the colors and the overall smoothness when it comes to night photos I guess because there’s more processing in low light shots you notice the difference in the processor more oh yeah and the other thing because the chip is faster this time around these new iPhones can do way better quality quick take video you know when you’re in photo mode but you just need to capture something right now you can hold down on the camera button and iPhones used to take a squarish looking lower resolution video that’s what most phones do because when you’re in photo mode your phone is ready and geared to taking photos not video but the new phones can just go straight into full resolution 4K recording but let’s be very clear if what you’re after is big camera improvements this ain’t it that’s coming on the 16 Pros which I’m getting to

Photographic Styles and Durability

the only other camera feature that Apple did spend a fair bit of time talking about is photographic Styles and how this year they’re splitting these Styles into mood which are more the Striking filter-like settings and then undertones which are more about how you want to look in your photos traditionally iPhones have always tended to make skin tones a little warmer than they are in reality but the idea of these undertones is to give that control back to you to decide that said I’ve tested all of them and all it did was make me come to the conclusion that I prefer the standard one that iPhones have been using by default since the beginning
okay only other thing that I wanted to mention before we go to the pro iPhones is at the launch event Apple said that the glass on the front of these phones is 50% stronger than last gen and that meant basically nothing to anyone because they didn’t explain it but I think I’ve managed to find out how now so the problem with glass on its own is that the atoms within glass have a pretty weak structure their Arrangement is disordered which means that if you apply pressure to Glass the atoms can’t smoothly Glide over each other so the material doesn’t Flex it shatters and so a few years ago Apple realized that by infusing that glass with tiny clear pieces of ceramic which has a much more organized 3D Matrix of atoms they could create more structure within the display and therefore more ability to withstand pressure and so the new thing this time round is they’ve improved the organization of ceramic within the glass which increases the compressive stress capacity of the display or in other words this might not be significantly less likely to crack but if it does crack that crack is a lot less likely to spread out across the entire screen so there you go I had to make sure I got to the bottom of that one and that’s basically it for all the new stuff that the iPhone 16s do except for the action button which the pro phones had last year a better battery and apple intelligence but I’m getting to that

iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max Unboxing

okay time for the top end phones iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max they used to do this cool thing where the base phones had white packaging and the pros came with black but I guess that’s officially buried now maybe the colored dies were adding to the pollution so this is the 16 Pro which we have in the same natural titanium color as last year’s phones came in and then for the pro Max this is Desert titanium which is the only new color this year I feel like apple is really spacing out the Innovation here and honestly to me this feels disappointingly stale for the one Flagship new color

Accessories: Cases and AirPods 4

but then while we’re here this is what the new cases look like so it seems like fine woven cases are officially dead that’s probably for the best but it’s quite funny how much of a disaster that was so we’re back to Silicon now and this is I mean it’s good quality but it is expensive for a case there’s the new clear case which I would personally never go for cuz they just get sticky and fingerprint and these are the new airpods 4 with noise cancellation which come with a set of papers for some reason and then it’s just the earphones in their case and I have tested these by the way so quick Mini review good product they don’t feel too big in your ears so you completely forget they’re there they’re super light but then at the same time they give like zero indication that they could fall out when you shake your head around the noise cancellation is the best I have ever heard for earphones with no ear tips and there’s practically zero leakage either even for people sitting right next to you the sound quality isn’t as good as the a pros and I’d say that even though the noise cancellation does make them sound quite a bit better than the previous standard airpods you wouldn’t have to look hard to find better sounding earphones for $180 but they sound a lot better than the previous gen standard airpods mostly thanks to the noise isolation so I’m still going to stick to the pros but I’m glad to see that there is now a decent Apple made option for people who don’t like the feeling of pressure that you can get from ear tips

MagSafe and Charging

okay and then finally for this unboxing this is the upgraded mag safe charger it is cool how every single product down to the accessories has the same peeling experience and that it always seems to work and then the kind of chunky 30 WT power brick that lets you get the best speed out of that Max zave charger more on these in a bit

Pro Audio and Studio Mix

first thing I want to look at with these phones is audio you know how we looked at the audio mixing feature on the bass iPhones well while the feature does completely work both on the non-pro and the pros it’s even better on the pros thanks to four supposedly Studio grade microphones and so I thought these phones would be a really cool way to show you this other type of audio mix called Studio that makes the microphones sound like they’re really close to your mouth check this out so this is me talking to you using normal phone audio and it sounds phone likee you hear a little bit of everything this is what it sounds like when we switch over to studio and as someone who spends a lot of time messing around with microphones trying to get the best out of every scene I find this absolutely mind-blowing it is crazy that this is recorded on a phone and nothing else
that said you can have the coolest most unique Innovative feature in the world but will I actually use this audio mix stuff probably not that often it’s nice to have the reassurance that at any time I want I can cuz every iPhone 16 is recording spatial 360 audio by default anyway so it’s not like you’re having to do or think about anything extra but yeah I am struggling to see the average user trolling through their entire library of videos tweaking whose audio they want to prioritize in each clip but different story entirely if you’re buying the iPhone as your main film making tool for most of our videos I still prefer the way that Sony camera looks and the way that a road microphone sounds but if you looking at the iPhone 16 Pro to be your primary content creation device then the audio on them just got very quickly very good

Pro Camera Performance

but camera quality should actually be the biggest upgrade this year so this is an iPhone 15 Pro Max this is an iPhone 16 Pro Max and that is a particularly challenging lighting environment we are shooting against the sun all right hit me and that looks basically the same although 16 Pro Max is actually slightly better at keeping the blue sky looking blue even through the trees but the main benefit of the new phone over the old phone is not actually meant to be picture quality it’s meant to be the fact that the new phone has a faster sensor that can capture more information quickly

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so can you take photos faster little known feature of the iPhones by the way if you tap and hold the shutter button and drag it to the left hand side you rapid fire and nope they have shot the exact same number of photos I will say though if you just Mash that shutter button then the new iPhone is definitely taking more shots and it’s freezing up less but no one does that what actually would be useful to see though is if you just wanted to take one high resolution 48 megapixel photo can the new phone take it faster so I’m going to stand in front of these phones I’m going to throw this ball in the air and we’re going to capture at exactly the same time so in theory whichever phone’s photo has the ball lower in the air has captured the photo faster 3 2 one oh my God you took these at the same time yeah it’s actually so quick you don’t even see the shutter that’s actually a much bigger difference than I was expecting it looks like I’ve used AI to remove the ball on the first photo but it’s actually just disappeared out of the frame man I swear this is like the coolest thing I own

Video Capabilities: 4K 120FPS

but the main tangible benefit to this faster sensor according to Apple at least is meant to be video where the iPhone 15 Pros can shoot a Max of 4K video at 60 frames per second the new phone can do 4K 120 but let’s actually investigate that so this is a water balloon I’m actually pretty scared this is going to be explosive oh God also separate note even though the screen on the new phone is meant to be just as bright as that of the old phone we can’t get it to the same level of brightness it seems to be consistently slightly dimmer but hey at least as far as the video quality is concerned it looks like there is basically zero compromise even though we’ve doubled the frame rate from last year I have seen 4K 120 on other phones before but it has never looked this good and the nice thing about this frame rate is you can slow that footage down four times and still get a smooth result the previous 60 frame per second footage kind of falls apart here right

Storage and Metadata

so what about how much storage space it takes up so the clip is 1 minute 25 on both phones and the storage size is not quite double but very nearly double so 1 minute 25 is nearly a gab that means that the entire storage of the iPhone 16 Pro base model so 128 gigs will be taken up with less than 3 hours of footage on the camera that is not good also another thing that I thought was interesting was let’s say I take a video at 12 frames per second I slow that down to 25% speed on my phone but then I want to share that video with someone else you get options you can either share that video with no metadata which means that the other person will just get the video as you intended it to be or you send with everything which means that they get all of this info associated with that file and they can reverse engineer it themselves and same thing for photographic Styles you can take a photo in one style you can decide later if you want to shift over to a different style and then if you share it the other person can also completely reverse any tone changes you’ve made or tweak it in a different direction all without any loss to image quality because the details of the original image are baked into the data of the shot even when it’s edited

Ultra Wide and Macro Photography

however it’s actually the ultrawide cameras that I’m most curious about the new phone has a 48 megapixel ultrawide camera which will still actually shoot 12 megap photos like the last phone by default so what you need to do is to tap Heath Max here and once you’ve done that once you never need to do it again it means that from now on your phone will always shoot the highest resolution photo that it possibly can depending on what Zoom magnification you’re using although it’s not for free because everything is going to take up more storage space and also even though the main camera as we’ve seen has this faster sensor that can capture these high resolution photos quicker the ultrawide does not so that takes longer to capture on this mode that said if the quality is much better then worthwhile tradeoff let’s see oh yes actually substantial detail upgrade and actually if you look at the fabric on my hoodie you can see quite a bit less noise as well not to mentioned it’s managed to brighten my dark joggers a little bit so the high dynamic range is better it’s actually just all around a vastly upgraded photo
and also a more detailed ultrawide camera should also mean more detailed macro photos ah okay this is working a little different to how I expected so I was expecting that because this is a 48 megap Ultra wide camera you would actually be able to take 48 map macro photos but when you’re on the automatic macro mode of the phone and you take a shot it’s still actually only taking a 12 megap photo because the phone is actually cropping into that 4 8 mapel sensor to get as close as possible that said because you’re cropping in using a higher resolution base the new phone’s macros are still noticeably more detailed than the old phones I also took a bunch of night photos to see if I could spot any Trends and there is definitely an improvement but it is definitely not a massive Improvement

Charging Innovation

right before we get to the real elephant in the room with this whole Apple intelligence shenanigan let’s talk charging and by the way if you want to have basically unlimited power on the go then this mag safe power bank from ESI our sponsor is kind of wild it’s got a 5,000 Mah capacity it can charge your phone with a wire but it also supports the new ch2 wireless charging standard and that means it will charge your phone about 30 minutes faster than other power Banks like it while being 38% Slimmer and having a kickstand built into the thing they also have this separate range of cryoboost chargers which solve the biggest problem with wireless charging it generates a ton of heat and so every cryoboost charger has a cooling Fern oh I can actually feel the air coming out a heat dissipation chamber as well as AI Wizardry to keep temperatures down and therefore wireless charging fast and your phone healthy in the long term and this one charger can handle your watch your airpods and your phone at the same time but yeah I use ESR stuff on the daily because of how much you get for the money so link below for the full lineup
these new iPhones are kind of weird when it comes to charging like I said the nextg industry standard for wireless charging is ch2 which allows phones to charge with 15 wats of power these phones can actually charge with up to 25 watts if you splurged on almost $100 combo of Apple’s 25 W mag safe charger and 30 W brick you need a higher power brick because some power is lost when you’re wireless charging but then at the same time Apple’s wired charging speed is so slow compared to the competition that they are maybe the only company whose wireless charging is apparently the same speed as their wired charging feels like yet another indicator that apple is really eyeing up the idea of a completely portless iPhone one day

Apple Intelligence

okay so the final question that we need to answer is Apple intelligence is it good does it save the iPhone 16s from becoming what would otherwise be a very minor update well here’s where I have a couple of Bones to pick firstly if you buy an iPhone 16 now you will not get apple intelligence straight out the box it’s coming in a software update later although I’ve set up a beta so that I can show you now and secondly it’s not exclusive to these FMS which isn’t in itself a problem it’s good when more people can experience these features but it just makes the launch event feel a little misleading cuz Apple spent half of the iPhone 16 section talking about Apple intelligence but then the fact that almost everything also works on the iPhone 15 Pro means that those features have very little to do with iPhone 16 Hardware
anyways here’s my rapid fire thoughts having spent some time with apple intelligence now the summaries that it gives you to your emails are actually a really useful way to quickly catch up with a full context of a conversation cleanup is a really quick Snappy way to remove distractions from photos but I would actually say its results seem less good than they do on my Google pixel I really like the way that smart replies is integrated but it only works for answering specific types of questions and doesn’t exactly do it with much Pizzazz it’s a little flat with how it responds one of the key categories of features is writing tools they’re available systemwide so whatever app you’re in if you highlight a bunch of text and tap writing tools you get these options and I don’t really use any of these rewriting tools cuz I just for me tone is so important and something in my tone always seems to get lost whenever I try it the key points and summary features though are really cool at distilling big chunks of text down to smaller bites I just I don’t use them myself because I don’t quite trust them like if I’m saying something on a video to potentially millions of people I need to double triple check that that information is Right whereas getting my information through an ai’s interpretation of a source as opposed to the source itself is like a fast track to something getting lost in communication and that’s basically all I can really test properly with the current beta I’ve got high hopes for Siri once it gets chat GPT integration but right now it’s not doing much more than the Siri you’re used to

Conclusion

so as for what I think to all of these new iPhones even though it feels like we’re on the precipice of transformative Chang to the software most of those things aren’t here yet and what was meant to be one of the biggest Hardware changes this camera control is I think a bit of a stretch in both senses of the word that said while they’re not the most exciting phones to upgrade to if you’re on like an iPhone 12 and you’ve been holding out for the next thing they are safe phones to upgrade to they’re fast the Basse iPhone 16s have good screens and the pros have great screens this time although the Basse iPhones do still have that 60 HZ refresh rate which if you’re used to having better will make them feel laggy but also battery improvements are always very appreciated over here and the battery has been great on all of these new phones but more on that in my battery test which is hopefully going live in a couple of days so see you there