It’s September, which means that Apple is already readying its latest hardware. At its latest hardware event, Apple announced new watches, but the announcements everyone cares the most are, of course, the iPhones. Apple just unveiled the iPhone 16 lineup, and the vanilla iPhone 16 is carrying a lot of changes compared to previous entries.
Apple just launched the iPhone 16 and the iPhone 16 Plus, the latest non-Pro smartphones in the company’s range. Upon first looking at it, you’ll immediately be able to tell it apart from its many predecessors. Apple opted for a small design change here, making the camera bump notably smaller—it looks pretty similar to what Apple did with the iPhone X and the iPhone XS back in 2017 and 2018. Most of us have grown accustomed to looking at Apple’s square camera module, but Apple apparently thought it should be switched up. It’s still present in the Pro series, since that has three cameras, but with this new design, they certainly look more like distinct product lines.
That’s not the only change we’re getting here. The iPhone 16 comes with a new Ceramic Shield screen technology that’s 50% tougher than the screen in previous iPhones, as well as a screen that goes as high as 2,000 nits of brightness or as low as 1 nit. There’s a new, redesigned (and huge) Action button that can be programmable to your liking. You can map it to things such as shortcuts or specific actions. It can also be used as a powerful tool for taking photos—you can use as a shutter, to change controls and modes, or to change depth of field/zoom/other features.
The phone packs the 3nm six-core A18 processor, with two performance cores and four efficiency cores boosting performance by 30% from the A16 Bionic while also making it as efficient as possible. With this, the iPhone 16 is ending Apple’s recent trend of using last year’s Pro chip on the new lower-priced iPhones. There’s also a new thermal design to dissipate heat better and improve sustained performance in gaming, and the GPU supports real-time ray tracing for games. Other specs include an improved main 48MP “Fusion” camera and a 12MP ultra-wide camera with autofocus, with the camera system being able to take things such as “spatial” movable photos.
AI (or Apple Intelligence, I guess) is a big part of these phones’ announcements. We already saw a big part of these AI features back at WWDC 2024 a few months ago. There are co-writing tools that you can use to rewrite messages, search tools to look across pictures and videos, or even small things such as priority notifications or summaries in emails. Apple is implementing AI in a way where it’s not overly invasive, but still manages to provide cool, actually useful features that most people might actually use. We’ll have to see how well it actually works, but Apple Intelligence features won’t be available out of the box—you’ll have to wait for a software update.
Apple wants to make sure that you’re aware that its AI models are secure and private, with a new system called Private Cloud Compute—your data is never shared with Apple, won’t be used to train its models, and the company says that third-parties can fully verify that this is the case. Apple is also adding a new feature called Visual Intelligence. It works fairly similarly to Google Lens, where you can point your phone at something and it will search for what’s in your screen—it will search about a restaurant, an event, an animal you came across to, and more. It uses Google as its backend, so we’re certain that it’s just a glorified Google Lens shortcut.
The iPhone 16 will be available for pre-order this Friday, September 13th, with general availability a week later on September 20th. The iPhone 16 will start at $799 for the 128GB version, while the iPhone 16 Plus will cost $899 for the Apple will give you up to $800 off the iPhone 16 with an eligible trade-in, so that’s pretty cool if you’re looking to save some money.
Source: Apple YouTube
