iPhone 16 Pro reviews: Incredible battery life, camera quality boost, Camera Control quirks

September 18, 2024

9 min read

The first iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max reviews are in, and there’s a lot to digest. This early round of reviews gives us our initial look at the iPhone 16 Pro hardware changes, battery life, camera upgrades, the all-new Camera Control, and more.

iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro max reviews

Camera upgrades

On The Verge, Nilay Patel gives us the “good news” about the camera changes with the iPhone 16 Pro. The upgraded Photographic Styles feature lets you easily adjust “how the camera processes colors, skin tons, and shadows, even after you’ve shot the photo.”

Here’s how Nilay describes it in practice:

And all of these styles offer three new fine controls: there’s “color,” which is basically saturation, and “palette,” which is the range of colors being applied. Most importantly, there’s a new control called “tone” which lets you add shadows back to your photos. It turns out Apple is using “tone” in this context to mean “tone mapping,” and in my tests, the tone control allowed me to reliably bring the iPhone’s image processing back to reality by turning it down.

The tone control is semantically aware — it will adjust things like faces and the sky differently, so it’s still doing some intense computational photography, but the goal is for you to be able to take photos that look a lot more like what a traditional camera would produce if you bring the slider all the way down. (You can also go all the way up for the most intense smartphone HDR photos you’ve ever seen, if that’s the sort of thing that makes you happy.)

Turning down the tone control felt like a sigh of relief — I prefer photos with less aggressive tone mapping way more than the default iPhone 16 Pro settings and the photos produced by the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s like a haze is being lifted; images are a little punchier, a little more present. You might feel differently, but I like shadows and highlights, and the addition of the tone control lets me have them on a phone camera without jumping through the hoops of shooting in RAW and processing the photos myself.

For me, the tone control offers such a meaningful improvement to iPhone photos that it’s possible to argue that this one single camera adjustment makes upgrading to an iPhone 16 or 16 Pro worth it. I am a huge photo nerd who cares a lot about these things, and even I don’t think that that argument is 100 percent convincing, but it is very possible to make that argument, which is wild.

Read The Verge’s full iPhone 16 Pro review here.

Camera Control

Writing at Engadget, Cherlynn Low says the new Camera Control button has a “a few issues,” including the awkwardness of its placement:

The button sits a little farther from the base of the phone than I’d like, so my fingers have to reach a bit more to press it, whether I was in landscape or portrait mode. This wasn’t usually a problem when I had both hands free and could steady the iPhone with my other hand and readjust my grip.

But if you’re trying to take a quick shot with just one hand, the button’s location can feel unintuitive.

Still, even for those with the strongest claws, swiping and half-pressing and double-half-pressing on the sensor is tricky. I was only ever really able to do that if I had my thumb holding up the bottom edge and my middle, ring and little fingers steadying the right end of the phone. Maybe this is a new camera grip I just need to relearn for this button.

Low writes on to say that the “most annoying” issue with the Camera Control is its touch sensor:

The awkward placement is a minor gripe compared to what I found most annoying: the button’s touch sensor. Not only was it difficult to swipe through different settings when holding the device with one hand, it also reacts to accidental touches and swipes. Sometimes, the phone would slide down my palm and change the exposure or zoom level, completely ruining the vibe. I should point out that you can go into accessibility settings to either tweak the swipe sensitivity or turn it off altogether, if it really bothers you. Honestly, if you’re planning on making adjustments with Camera Control, it’s best to have time, patience and both hands free.

In those situations, I had a lot of fun editing settings and watching them be reflected in the viewfinder in real time. I also liked zooming in and out of subjects, recomposing a shot and tweaking exposure till I liked what I saw, before then pushing down to snap the picture. (This action does lead to some small issues, but more on the actual photo quality later.) I especially loved this while recording video, since it makes slowly zooming in or out of a subject smoother than using the onscreen slider.

Then again, for scenarios where I just want to fire off a quick shot without worrying about exposure or zoom settings, the pain of finagling with the sensor mostly goes away. In exchange, being able to rapidly snap pictures is a joy. I found myself taking more pictures than ever thanks to camera control, which if you know me is a feat worthy of the Guinness Book of Records.

Read Engadget’s full iPhone 16 Pro review here.

Battery life and bigger screens

Julian Chokkattu at Wired has some details on the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max battery life – and how that might affect your buying calculus this year:

The Pro models are bigger than before. I initially saw these as minor screen size bumps stemming from the slimmer bezels around the screen, but it’s more than that. They are slightly tallerthan previous iPhones. This isn’t so much of a problem with the iPhone 16 Pro, but the iPhone 16 Pro Max was already big to begin with. Now, it’s even harder to reach the top of the phone with a stretched thumb. I don’t think a physical size bump was necessary.

I want to say you should stick with the smaller iPhone 16 Pro, but then you’re faced with choosing between a more comfortable experience versus longer battery life. The Pro Max easily beats the iPhone 16 Pro in run time, often hitting more than six hours of screen-on time with more than 30 percent left in the tank at the end of the day. You can probably take it into the morning of day two. On the iPhone 16 Pro, I was able to get more than seven hours of screen-on time, but that firmly put the battery at 15 percent after 12 hours (8:30 am to 8:30 pm). You’re more likely to need a top-up before bedtime if you’re a heavy user.

Read Wired’s full iPhone 16 Pro review here.

Kimberly Gedeon at Mashable likens the iPhone 16 Pro Max battery life to the Energizer Bunny:

Let’s start with the iPhone 16 Pro. On our TikTok rundown with the display emanating brightness at 50%, the iPhone 16 Pro lasted 18 hours and 17 minutes on a single charge. This is phenomenal considering that last year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max lasted 14 hours and 53 minutes on the same test. However, keep in mind that the iPhone 16 Plus, which is $100 less than the iPhone 16 Pro, lasted 36 minutes longer than the iPhone 16 Pro.

However, as Apple boasted, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the real-life Energizer Bunny. It just kept going, and going, and going, and going.

On the same TikTok rundown test, the iPhone 16 Pro Max lasted a whopping 25 hours and 17 minutes.

Read Mashable’s full iPhone 16 Pro review here.

Bigger screens

CNET’s Patrick Holland has praise for the iPhone 16 Pro’s ability to record 4K video at 120fps:

Not only can the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max record 4K 120fps slow motion video, it can do so with little effort. Unlike the Xperia 5 II, which required using a professional camera app to record and preserve the footage, Apple bakes in the ability right into the iPhone’s native camera app.

And the results look outstanding, which is why this feature is such a big deal. Previous slow motion videos shot on the iPhone could look good if there was a lot of light. But they topped out at a lower HD resolution and the image quality was a significant step down from regular 4K 30fps video recording.

The iPhone 16 Pro’s new slo-mo has great details, good dynamic range and accurate colors which puts it on par with regular iPhone video quality.

Read CNET’s full iPhone 16 Pro review here.

Ultra Wide camera

Henry Casey at CNN Underscored has some excellent detail on the new 48MP Ultra Wide camera on the iPhone 16 Pro:

Apple also upgraded the iPhone 16 Pro’s ultrawide camera, from 12MP to 48MP, so more of your photos can be just as sharp as your main sensor captures. I had a hard time seeing a difference in my photos here, though I can tell that the iPhone 16 Pro photos are a smidge brighter than last year’s model captured with more detail in some pedestrians and a shrub along the water. I personally prefer the 15 Pro Max’s colors here, but it doesn’t feel like there’s been any regression, just maybe a slight change (that you could tweak with Apple’s Photographic Styles).

I saw similar results looking at the macro shots I took of my heavily sauced spicy chicken sandwich, which looks sharper in the images captured on the iPhone 16 Pro than the iPhone 15 Pro Max. If you’ve previously been disappointed by the clarity of your macro photos, it looks like the iPhone 16 Pro may be the phone you’ve been waiting for.

Read CNN Underscored’s full iPhone 16 Pro review here.