Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Look, the titles can’t all be fun ones, sometimes I need to just cut to the chase. For a more complete overview of the iPhone 16, check out Jason Snell at Six Colors, or Nilay Patel and Vjern Pavic talking about the camera-related changes for The Verge. That level of detail is beyond the scope of this essay from some guy with a blog.

For a variety of reasons I don’t upgrade my iPhone very often, including the reason that no one would ever send me hardware to review, and I don’t make income from reviewing hardware so I wouldn’t buy one myself “for my work”.

Usually the release date coincides with poor timing to schedule a delivery, or there’s a global pandemic and there’s no reason to go outside, or it’s just not a financially sound thing for me to do that year.

That’s fine to skip three years! I no longer have FOMO because the iPhone really doesn’t change drastically year over year, and the performance of iPhones really doesn’t degrade as rapidly as they used to.

My iPhone 13 Pro and my new iPhone 16 Pro were together on my desk, trying their best to set my wooden desk on fire, but never quite getting hot enough for ignition. One phone was easily mistakable for the other. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I’m not looking for a boomerang shaped iPhone, or any exotic changes. It’s perfect that it fits in my life exactly where the last one did. It’s an appliance.

It also makes the differences feel like more of a full upgrade. Every year has a banner feature of some sort, and taken on their own they’re good, but not mind-blowing.

I’ve got a Dynamic Island now! I have an always on Pro Motion screen! There’s an action button that I guess I’ll maybe use for something some day if I ever think of anything? I get that not-that-good-in-low-light 5x pentaprism “telephoto” and the 48 MP sensors! I get another 48 MP sensor! I have ProRAW and Log video along with all kinds of treats and goodies!

That really makes me feel significantly better about forking over the money for the phone. I know I certainly seem jaded, but I can, and do, appreciate the cumulative upgrades over my old phone. I could have probably done another year on the 13 Pro without any real hardship, but it’s the right balance to make me a happy customer.

Transfer

They have really nailed iPhone setup now. This used to be a big pain when I was on the iPhone Upgrade Program. It’s not seamless yet, but nearly everything important was ready to go. The only thing that should copy over, but didn’t, was offline map data in Apple Maps. That is a pain because you have to redraw your little bounding boxes around the regions to capture, not just redownload your old ones. I opened a feedback for that one, if someone at Apple happens to ever get bored enough to read this: FB15226274.

Camera

Most of the reason people buy new phones is to get better cameras. Apple really delivers on that. I don’t think that they are all great choices, but they have to satisfy millions of people. What many of them want is for their backlit portrait at sunset to be exposed for the face and the sun, so the default sensibly does its best to provide that experience. What’s new is that there are more ways to turn that stuff off, or to adjust it after the fact. Who would have thought it possible? Though sometimes it does feel a little like, “You don’t like it? Fine, do it yourself!” Instead of refining modes for different users or situations.

That really makes me wish there was a little help “?” icon people could tap on to get information about many of the terms Apple uses in the Camera app interface, and the Photos editing interface. No, I absolutely don’t mean some Clippy-esque TipKit walkthrough of every feature in a long spiel, I mean “just tell me what this word means and what it means to increase or decrease it.”

They pick jargon that is often specific to Apple, and adjusting it might be different from adjusting it on their last phone (like the new Photographic Styles). Do people truly understand Palette? Do they know that Undertones use image segmentation? How many people could tell you, in 2024, what the Brilliance adjustment does?

Photographic Styles

This is a pretty controversial upgrade over the old interface for Styles. These Styles aren’t like those Styles, though, so I guess they let someone throw in some wacky ideas to make it “fun”. I hate the interface. HATE.

You get a D-Pad grid with a gradient background that you adjust with your thumb near-ish the shutter button. Under it is a slider. These are driving three variables that are expressed as numbers at the top nowhere near the controls. The numbers can’t be directly edited. Oh, but the control to reset the style is up there, not down where your thumb is. Makes perfect sense.

In the old interface you had two notchy sliders. They were sort of equally unhelpful about what they did but they intuitively felt more like the other photo editing controls instead of a guy who hasn’t worked with photo editing before but has some fresh ideas. What really frustrates me is that when you lift up your thumb you can change what you were happy with when you decided to lift up your thumb, and there’s no easy way to nudge it back without trying to do it over again.

Having said that, it only bothers me when I want to change these values before taking a photo, but like the previous Photographic Styles, you can leave it on a single setting for a very long time. Even though tweaking it after shooting is just as fiddly in that interface, it feels far less time sensitive.

However, two things that are still baked into these HEIF files are denoise and sharpening, with no option to reduce or disable them in the Photographic Styles pipeline. Like many people I find that the sharpening on the iPhone can go a little overboard, and in low light these upgraded cameras still produce impressionistic results.

This also doesn’t do things like allow you to set a white balance, or at least pre-populate the Warmth and Tint (those are your white balance sliders, folks). Those are non-destructive post-edits. However, now that pre-edits are now non-destructive and accessible as post-edits, it would be nice to reconsider the overall adjustments as a whole.

You can modify any of the boxed Undertones or Moods, and the settings can be preserved, but you can’t make your own setting, or share one with a friend. Won’t someone think of YouTubers that want to sell photography preset packs and “LUT” packs?

I would encourage Apple to look at what Fujifilm has gotten right with their film simulations, and the ecosystem surrounding it. Or what Panasonic is trying to do with LUTs on the S9, which then match LUTs applied to videos shot on the S9.

People eat this stuff up if you give them good presets and the option to truly do their own thing. iPhone owners can’t even drastically repurpose styles they aren’t using. Like Luminous? Ethereal? Who is using those? You’re not going to have a mood that emulates the textured shadows and warm highlights of certain “classic” film stocks, but you think people want their memories to be a glowing, digital haze?

It’s like there are some of the best and brightest people in the world working on the Camera app, but unfortunately I don’t understand their taste.

Still, the saving grace continues to be that these can be edited after the fact now. The previous iteration of Photographic Styles resulted in people generally leaving it on pretty conservative settings because if you turned “tone” down too much you could bake it with a too-dark shadow for a certain shot that was clipped of information to edit later. That’s no longer the case, and the new way seems to work as promised. No perceptible difference in quality from editing a style after the fact. It’s not a RAW file, but it’s light and it works.

Camera Settings

I know that this isn’t really specific to the iPhone 16 Pro, but it has way more Camera settings than any iPhone that came before it, and they’re all located in terrible places. You should be able to get to the Camera Settings from the Camera app, because there are really big, and very important things in there, that affect the app, including things like your default Photographic Style, file formats, and what settings should or shouldn’t be preserved.

One of the common complaints of camera-cameras is that they can often have complicated menu systems that make it difficult to find what you need quickly. A lot of manufacturers provide things like a quick menu overlay of common settings you need, perhaps even letting people control what’s in those quick menus.

If you think you need to change one of those when you are in the Camera app, you need to go back to your home screen, find Settings, then go down to Camera, then drill into it’s menus to find things. You should be able to change file formats in the app, not just toggle one high resolution format on or off.

However, that’s not where all the Camera Settings are. Oh no, now we have the Camera Control Button the majority of its settings are under Accessibility, unlike the Action Button on the top level, I might add.

This is where you adjust many things about the button that are not about accessibility. Like there’s nothing in here for audio feedback or haptics for people with vision impairment, it’s just things like if the button can show the adjustments menu, and pressure and speed options.

Camera Control or TouchBar 2

I don’t hate this button, but I don’t love this button. It doesn’t feel like a fully formed idea, and we already have been promised features that will ship later for the button, so who knows what might eventually happen with it.

At the moment it has strong TouchBar vibes. I never really loved the TouchBar, and it was a product that was also an incomplete thought. This Camera Control has the same hallmarks.

The Camera Control is overloaded with options in the Adjustments menu with no way to remove ones you don’t use, or wouldn’t use in that interface element, and the variable pressure required to move between all those options means I’m starring at the small overlay to make changes instead of what I’m photographing.

That really takes me out of the moment, and even when everything is working right it’s slows me down. For all the talk of emulating the experience of real camera controls it’s anything but. The best controls on cameras are tactile and have clear overlays in your viewfinder, or LCD, not just on the button or knob.

That’s like the TouchBar where it can be any control! But you have to look away from what you’re doing to use that interface that has no physical resistance.

I wonder if they made the haptics more evocative for each Adjustment mode, or it had the haptic feeling of clicky friction that you get from the Digital Crown on the Watch, if it would give me enough feedback to use it without focusing on looking at it. It could also help to show the setting that was being adjusted as part of the whole camera interface overlaid around the photo you’re taking instead of as a tiny strip under the button.

And just like the TouchBar, I don’t think it’s an abomination, I just don’t think someone thought this through very well.

Most of my “evidence” of someone not thinking this through very well is the fact that half-press to focus wasn’t the first thing they shipped, which I’d have to say is bar none one of the most common physical interactions people have with shutter buttons on cameras. Instead it’s the control-strip-like parade of touch-based sliders that went out the door first. A truly baffling decision.

I’m really not sure what this half-press shutter experience will end up feeling like, because the button doesn’t have a tremendous amount of travel, or anything that feels like the tactile bump of a half-pressed shutter button. Right now the mechanics of it feels pretty binary, while the touch sensitivity seems to be where half-press will have to live. I don’t know how you do a half press without triggering the slider to adjust a setting.

We’ll just have to wait and see if someone really did think this through, or if someone came up with an idea for a new kind of button and they tried to make it fit this role. Maybe all this swiping should have been on the Action Button which still seems to be flailing to be anything other than silence ringer.

In the meantime, I’m probably going to stick to using the shutter button on the screen because I can just barely tap it and take a photo instead of applying enough force to push the button that the camera tilts when taking the photo.

Case

I use the Apple Silicone Case. I’ve used it since the iPhone 6, and I haven’t come across an alternative that I prefer. I know it’s not for everyone, of course, but it’s good to know that I have one less thing to make a decision about. The colors this year aren’t my favorite, but “Denim” is fine. What I’m mostly grateful for is that the quartz pass-through for the Camera Control button works as advertised. I’ve seen people struggle with the third party cases this year, and I don’t envy them. I do think this is pretty silly that every time there’s a new iPhone a bunch of case sellers have to roll the dice on what’s going to fit and function. I certainly wouldn’t buy any of these cases without a quartz pass-through.

Apple Intelligence

Sigh. I really just can’t get excited for Apple Intelligence snf it just makes it all feel like a weird lie that the marketing for the device leans so heavily on this. These are features that people are so far from experiencing that it feels irresponsible to market them.

When I preordered my iPhone it had a big Apple Intelligence logo on it. Like it was shipping with it, and would be a factor in my purchasing decision over another iPhone or something. Even though all 16 models have it.

My iPhone 13 Pro would never be able to run Apple Intelligence, but I wouldn’t really be missing anything this year. Is my purchase on some chart of “customers are converting to devices with Apple Intelligence” and then lines zig zag upwards? It leaves me with a kind of strange sourness whenever I see one of those Apple Intelligence ads begging people to get the new iPhone for these features that will change their lives.

Then I just go back to using this otherwise completely delightful iPhone and don’t dwell on it, because at the end of the day, I’m buying the iPhone for other far more tangible reasons and it does satisfy those.

Nice New Appliance

The iPhone 16 Pro continues to be the best in the world, even if it’s only incremental changes every year. Follow my one neat trick of buying a new one every three years. You don’t need to replace your washer and dryer nearly as often. Even the things that I don’t love are things that can be tamped down or turned off, or, quite frankly, they just become things you don’t think about in three years time.