iPhone 16 Review-in-Progress: Now With More Buttons!

The biggest test of Apple Intelligence and whether it vibes with the masses will be whether Apple can sell its AI future on its most colorful, approachable iPhone. The iPhone 16 is the model for the typical Apple user—a person who wants the prestige of Apple’s prowess while saving a little money on the stuff they wouldn’t seek to use anyway. Not everyone is trying to make movies with their iPhones.

We will follow up with a full iPhone 16 review in a few days. Apple gave us the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus for review at the same time as the iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max. You can’t learn everything about a phone in a week, but you can understand where it’s headed. If the regular iPhone 16 was what you were looking at, you’re looking at a colorful future with Apple Intelligence. And if you’re not ready for that kind of life on iOS, then this is the perfect time to sit back and watch what happens, though you might miss out on the new fusion camera system.

Built for Apple Intelligence

In my iPhone 16 Pro review, I talked about how much I appreciated Apple’s slow approach to marketing its version of artificial intelligence as I’ve felt lambasted by it on the Android side. It’s the same strategy for the iPhone 16. If you upgrade to the iPhone 16, you will be among the first to try Apple Intelligence features, including writing tools, summarized Mail and notifications, and a more contextual Siri. It’s Apple Intelligence unobtrusively attempting to improve the value of the typical things you already do with the iPhone. And if you don’t want to use fancy features like Clean Up to edit the photos you take with the iPhone, you don’t have to! Ignore that it exists and move on.

The rest of the iPhone 16’s insides are a definite bump from last year’s release. The Plus has the same 6.7-inch Supper Retina XDR display, and the iPhone 16 is 6.1 inches. Both come in an array of stunning, bold colors. Apple seeded us specifically with an iPhone 16 in Ultramarine and an iPhone 16 Plus in Pink. I like it when Apple skews more vibrantly than it does pastel, and you can get a closer look at some of the colors in our initial hands-on session.

The inside of the iPhone 16/16 Plus features the new A18 chip. This is unlike last year’s iPhone 15 lineup, which featured a spruced-up A16 Bionic chip. The A18 is ripe for Apple Intelligence, which is why it’s precisely the iPhone to get if that’s something you intend on futureproofing for yourself.

Brand new buttons

This year’s iPhone 16 comes with last year’s iPhone 15 Pro’s Action button and brings you the Camera Control button, which you can set to launch a camera app of your choice. It employs the same taptic mechanism as the Camera Control button on the Pro series. There’s an API to go with it, so Apple’s invested in this one for the long haul. You can buy cases for the iPhone 16 through Apple that help enable the capacitive shortcuts for the button.

A better camera—seriously

© Florence Ion / Gizmodo

The iPhone 15’s camera was fine, really, but it was rather basic compared to what its Android competition was attempting with its similarly-priced devices. This year, the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus feature a 48-MP Fusion camera and a 12-MP Ultra Wide. They are stacked this time, rather than diagonally set across from one another, so you can shoot spatial videos and photos to enjoy through a headset. The camera system looks much better from behind, with the flash sitting just to the side of the two lenses. I plan to take the camera out and about and offer a longer assessment of its abilities in a future update.

If you choose the iPhone 16 because of its camera capabilities, the good news is that you have access to the same Photographic Styles available on the Pro. The iPhone 16 is still pretty limited in optical zoom compared to the Pro lineup, but it doesn’t have the glass required to look that far. The iPhone 16/16 Plus is limited to 2x optical zoom.

Should you buy the iPhone 16?

There’s no need to have FOMO for the iPhone 16 quite yet. The one upside of wielding last year’s iPhone 15 is that you’ve bought yourself some time before inevitably faced with the choice to use an Apple Intelligence-branded feature. We’ll have more on the iPhone 16/16 Plus in a few days. The iPhone 16 starts at $800, and the iPhone 16 Plus starts at $900. Both are on sale Sept. 20.