The iPhone 16 is basically Apple’s gateway drug to Apple Intelligence as its new entry level iPhone. It is also the smallest iPhone one can get now at 6.1-inches with the Plus model being the second largest at 6.7-inches. It’s aesthetic updates feel more tangible than what the rumors eluded to with a vertically aligned camera array tuned for spatial video — an camera control haptic button which launches the updated camera, enabling zoom by swiping and summoning new features by gently clicking it and an action button which can launch any thing you’d like on demand. It’s colours are what make it shine with the ultra marine and teal colorways bewitching like a red Ferrari has always got my heart throbbing. And yet, this isn’t even the most expensive iPhone that Apple has on offer.
Yes it is the gateway drug to Apple intelligence which is propelled by a new chipset which is 30 percent faster on the CPU side, 40 percent faster on the GPU side with support for ray traced games that will actually be available on the iPhone 16; additionally it gets 16 core NPU that can do tango with the best Intel, AMD and Qualcomm have come up with for PCs. Yes, that’s the A18 — that now supports more memory aka RAM so that the LLM models Apple has trained can live on device. And even when they can’t, on the iPhone 16, they can parse things off from Apple’s Private Compute Cloud.
13 years on from Siri’s birth at the launch of the iPhone 4S, this year with the iPhone 16, it becomes truly smarter with generative AI at its heart which in Apple’s demos looked very handy. In fact, this Apple Intelligence hokus pokus also helps my kind to proof read articles in a heart beat. It is some thing I have been testing on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, but it worked faster on the iPhone 16.
Then there are the new cameras — the 48-megapixel primary sensor promises big updates, but this is something that needs extensive testing something that I shall indulge in. The ultra wide camera gets a 12-megapixel resolution which is the same as before but it also can now do macro photography which is going to be handy.
All of this is packaged neatly in something that looks compact, pretty in a tasteful and fun way with decent battery life. If this is isn’t Apple’s gateway drug to intelligence then what is it? A stairway to intelligence? A Led Zeppelin inspired metaphorical stairway to a universe of Apple AI? Whatever it is, things are looking good since this starts at Rs 79,900 for the 128GB model — which while not cheap isn’t going to shock
