The underlying theme of Apple’s G event — its biggest event of the year was that Apple was really doubling down on “Pro” moniker of its devices. And that’s what one felt with the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max and even the AirPods 4 for that matter even though they don’t get the tag. Apple has refined its colourways — the lead colour is Desert Titanium which is a bronze type titanium colour. The white feels more white and the black feels more black. The main titanium colour is quite similar to last years models.
But since the size of these phones has increased, surprisingly they feel rather compact for what they are. Especially the 6.3-inch iPhone 16 Pro which is disarmingly compact and light yet offering the sturdiness of a heavier phone. The 6.9-inch iPhone 16 Pro Max is the big daddy but again it didn’t feel particularly massive compared to the iPhone 15 Pro Max or the Galaxy S24 Ultra for that matter.
The displays were very impressive and Apple has flexed its engineering might by extending the display to the far edges of the corners of the panel — enabling an almost bezel-less experience enabling the increase in the size of the screens on both the phones.
Performance has never been an issue with iPhones but Apple has really primed the pump with the new A18 Pro chipset which provides 15% bump in CPU and GPU performance while being more efficient than its predecessor. The big leap is on the neural engine which has 16 cores and does 35 trillion operations per second which is almost as much as the Snapdragon X Elite chipset that Qualcomm has just released for Windows PCs. Imagine the power of a PC on your phone with ray traced graphics for AAA games that some of these AI PCs cannot run.
More than this, Apple has new machine learning accelerators in the CPU, a video encoder which is 2 times faster which will likely leave the Android competition behind in dust for video editing.
And all of this headroom is being created for Apple intelligence which will leverage the power of the new Siri.
Another new hardware feature is the camera control button which is a neat haptic button that’s pressure sensitive. It can be pressed to launch the camera, double tapped to change modes, swiped to launch zoom functionality — its all very neat. This also plays into the “PRO” characteristics of these new iPhones.
The new cameras are of course the big attraction with Apple updating the 48-megapixel sensor for the first time in two years which is more light sensitive with 2.44 micron sub pixels and a f/1.78 aperture. The ultra wide camera now has a 48-megapixel resolution and can absorb more light — this all needs to be tested but I’m sure we are looking at tangible updates.
The video capabilities are honestly wild — it’s supports 4K video at 120 frames per second for slow motion which looks crazy cinematic. Apple has collaborated with The Weeknd to showcase this. It can even colour grade in real time and new photography styles are cool which also are not set in stone with the ability to modify them in post.
Then there are studio quality microphones which I’m sure will cause stress to brands like DJI whose microphones have become popular. There is a live audio mix feature as well and musicians can now use the voice memos app to overlay different tracks recorded directly from the phone to create a scratch track.
This is as pro as any smartphone has gotten without looking like a camera or piece of equipment that belongs in the hands of a NASA scientist.
On top of this, Apple claims that the Pro Max will have the best battery life of an iPhone which is saying a lot as the battery is already pretty good. What’s not to like.
In India these phones start at Rs 119900 for the 128GB Pro and 144900 for the 256GB Pro Max so its not got super pricey.
