Apple iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus review: In the pink

Ooooh. PINK! These are the first two words that fell out of my mouth when I first extracted my review sample of the iPhone 16 Plus from its box. Not “oooh – vertically orientated camera lenses” or “wooow, look at that sexy new camera button” or even “gasp – consider the implications of the more big leap in processing power”.

All of those things are new to the iPhone 16 Plus and the iPhone 16, of course. But that colour, coupled with the matte glass finish is just lovely. If it isn’t to your taste, you can also get your hands on the iPhone 16 Plus/16 in black, white, green (“Teal”) or blue (“Ultramarine”), but I just happen to think this pink finish is the most eye-catching of the lot. It is, truly, a lovely looking phone.

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Apple iPhone 16 Plus review: What you need to know

The new iPhone 16 Plus isn’t all about the colours, however. I’ve already intimated this above but there are plenty of other new things about the iPhone 16 worth taking note of. Although this still very much looks like the old iPhone 15 Plus from the front – the screen is the same 6.7in across the diagonal (the iPhone 16 measures 6.1in across), the borders are the same thickness and the resolution is identical – the frame and rear of the phone are all new.

There’s a new camera bump design, which incorporates the phone’s main 48MP camera and new 12MP ultrawide camera in a vertical stack instead of a square as before. This is a neater arrangement to my mind, although I appreciate it may not be universally accepted as such.

The customisable Action button remains in place from last year and there’s an all-new key located just along from the power button: the touch-sensitive, haptic camera button. This gives quick access to the camera app and allows you to quickly adjust various parameters by tapping and sliding your finger along it.

Up front, the screen is clad in Apple’s new 2024 Ceramic Shield glass, which it says is now 50% tougher than before. And last, but by no means least, the iPhone 16 Plus and 16 come with the same Apple A18 processor as featured inside the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, with bigger batteries than before and faster wireless charging.

The iPhone 16 family of phones is also the first to be “built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence”, the tech giant’s first move into the world of AI, including a far more advanced (and hopefully more effective) version of Siri.

Alas, Apple Intelligence is one of those “coming soon” features. That’s certainly disappointing so for now I’d encourage you to judge the phone on the merits of its hardware. Apple promises it will make its debut for US users in October, while internationally we’ll have to wait a couple of further months. It should debut in the UK in December – so maybe wait until then.

Apple iPhone 16 Plus review: Price and competition

The good news is that prices, for once, haven’t risen since last year, so you’re effectively getting a better phone for the same amount of money – especially good news considering the 2023’s iPhone 15 was cheaper than the iPhone 14 that preceded it.

The Apple iPhone 16 starts at £799 and the Plus model starts at £899, with 128GB of storage. Add £100 to these prices for the 256GB model or £200 for 512GB and you max out at £1,099 for the most expensive iPhone 16 Plus. If you want to move up to the Pro model, with its bigger screens and even faster processor, then prices for that start at £999 for the 128GB 6.3in Pro and £1,199 for the 6.9in Pro Max.

Those prices look pretty good when you compare it with the recent Google Pixel 9. That also costs £799 and gets you a phone with a 6.3in screen, 128GB or 256GB of storage and a similar camera setup: a 48MP main camera and a 48MP ultrawide shooter.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 is the next up in the list of obvious alternatives, and it’s currently much better value, with the 6.2in available for around £600 and the 6.7in Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus model available for as little as £717. That phone is due a refresher in January 2025, when we expect the Samsung Galaxy S25 range to be launched; in the interim, the S24 is still a great phone, offering – in particular – a superior camera lineup to the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, with a 10MP 3x telephoto, a 12MP ultrawide and a 50MP main camera.

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Apple iPhone 16 Plus review: Design and key features

Aside from the colours, the new camera design and the camera button, there’s nothing all that new to discuss on the design front. The dimensions of 78 x 7.8 x 161 (WDH) for the iPhone 16 Plus and 72 x 7.8 x 148 are exactly the same as last year and there’s only a gramme or so of difference in the weight. That’s 170g for the 16 and 199g for the 16 Plus.

If you aren’t planning on using a case, the new camera housing makes the phone an awful lot more wobbly than it used to be when placed on a flat surface. Annoying? It could be, I suppose, but since most smart people will put their iPhones in a case, it won’t be a deal breaker for many.

Apple has made more significant changes to repairability, though, so it’s now possible to fix an iPhone using OEM parts sourced from other phones instead of being forced to buy them new. There’s also an easier method for releasing the battery, which is genuinely clever: once you’ve managed to pry off the rear glass, just disconnect the ribbon cable and apply a small amount of electric current to a tab on the rear for a short period. This weakens the glue, allowing the battery to simply drop out. It’s magical.

And that new camera button is definitely a more significant change than you might at first assume – it’s no ordinary button. Set slightly into the surface of the right edge of the phone, a couple of centimetres away from the power button, it falls within reach of your right index finger when the phone is held in landscape orientation or the right thumb in portrait. You can click it at any time to launch the camera app, then click it again to capture a photo, or click and hold to record a video.

That’s the camera button at its most basic, but it has hidden depths. Give it a light squeeze and a small tab appears on the screen right next to it, showing an icon representing the currently selected setting; this can be exposure, zoom, depth, camera selection, styles and tone. From this point, you can slide your finger along the button to tweak that selected setting or give it a light double-squeeze to choose a different setting.

It all works brilliantly, as you might expect. You can adjust the sensitivity down and up if you find it too sensitive (or vice versa) via the accessibility settings menu, and Apple will be adding a half-press function to let you lock focus soon, aping the controls on a traditional DSLR or mirrorless camera.

I do have a couple of complaints about it, though. First is that the button is a little too far inboard for my liking, making reaching it more of a stretch than it should be. The second problem I have is that I’ve pressed the camera button by accident on more than one occasion through the simple action of picking up the phone. That seems a small thing right now but I can envisage it becoming increasingly annoying over time.

Apple iPhone 16 Plus review: Display

The rest of the user-facing phone is identical to the iPhone 15  and iPhone 15 Plus, and that includes the display. On my test iPhone 16 Plus, this is a 6.7in expanse of OLED display with a resolution of 2,796 x 1,290 (2,556 x 1,179 across 6.1in for the 16) and a 60Hz screen.

I’ll make no bones about it, on a phone costing at the very least £799, the fact that this is still 60Hz is a major letdown. No other phone costing this much is stuck at 60Hz and you can really tell when you come back to a regular iPhone from another handset with a higher refresh rate display. It just feels sluggish, which is a shame when the chipset is so fast and powerful.

Aside from that, there’s nothing to complain about on the image quality front, as usual. Brightness reaches 845cd/m2 with auto brightness disabled and I measured 1,554cd/m2 in HDR playback with a 10% window displayed on a black background.

In SDR, colour accuracy was as you’d expect an iPhone to be, with a Delta E of 0.52 – as good as it gets, in other words. And the great news is that in media playback, you’ll not notice the issues with the refresh rate. It’s only when you’re opening apps, scrolling through social media and web pages and flicking quickly between tasks that you’ll experience that. Basically, everything else a smartphone does.

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Apple iPhone 16 Plus review: Cameras

The camera lineup looks the same as last year, but there is a subtle difference. The main camera is identical, hardware-wise, so image quality will be largely similar, but there’s a new sensor for the ultrawide, which does seem to make a difference to detail capture.

Just to recap, the main camera here is a 48MP 26mm f/1.6 camera with sensor-shift image stabilisation, while the ultrawide is a 12MP f/2.2 camera, where last year’s was a 12MP f/2.4 unit – those are the same specifications as the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The main camera shoots 24MP images by default and it’s very, very good, the highlight being for me – as it always has been – Dolby Vision 4K video recording.

You can get a better smartphone camera for similar money if you go with an Android phone such as the Google Pixel 9, but you won’t be disappointed with the images the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus’ camera is capable of churning out.

Meanwhile, it’s great to see that the other cameras are actually getting some attention for once. I don’t have an iPhone 15 to hand for comparison but I captured a few comparison images with the iPhone 15 Pro Max, whose ultrawide camera has the same core specifications and the two were virtually inseparable.

The new hardware also unlocks the ability to shoot macro images with autofocus, with which you can capture some stunning close-ups, which is nice.

In general, though, the more significant improvements this year surround the camera button and a small handful of minor software tweaks, such as the new tone control feature, which gives you instant in-viewfinder control over the mood of your images. If you were hoping for something more dramatic, then you might want to maybe wait for the next iPhone, look to move up to an iPhone Pro model or just switch to Android.

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Apple iPhone 16 Plus review: Performance

When it comes to performance, the iPhone 16, somewhat surprisingly, moves to a new chipset: the Apple A18. This has six CPU cores (two performance and four efficiency cores), five GPU cores and a 16-core “Neural Engine”, the latter enabling all the local AI processing that will be required when Apple Intelligence eventually appears.

More significantly, perhaps, this represents a leap forward of not one generation but two from its predecessor, which employed the A16 Bionic chipset. The A18 used here isn’t quite on parity with the A18 Pro used in the Pro and Pro Max chipsets – it employs a cut-down GPU – but mostly it’s the same, with what looks like the same CPU and neural engine.

You can see below what this means for performance: I haven’t received an iPhone 16 Pro Max yet for testing but you can see a significant advancement on CPU performance over the iPhone 15 Plus. The GPU is also a chunk more powerful than its predecessor, but bear in mind that real-world games performance will be capped by that 60Hz display.

Cast your eye over the charts below and you’ll also see the iPhone 16 Plus is quicker than the iPhone 15 Pro Max and all its near rivals for CPU performance. Impressive stuff – let’s hope Apple maintains its stance on keeping its phones on the same generation of chipset across both standard and Pro models.

As for battery life, well that’s also seen a notable increase, rising from the 23hrs 41mins the iPhone 15 Plus achieved last year to 27hrs 3mins for the iPhone 16 Plus this year. I’ll add results from the iPhone 16 when I get that phone in for testing – it’ll be shorter but this result indicates the result should still come in at longer than 20 hours.

Apple iPhone 16 Plus review: Verdict

The iPhone 16 Plus and iPhone 16 don’t do anything particularly special this year. In fact, it’s determinedly mixed in many areas. The design of the camera housing has changed, which I don’t think does it any favours, and while the camera button is great in the way it works, I think its positioning could be improved. The display, meanwhile, really needs to move away from 60Hz because currently, Apple is shortchanging its customers.

However, the faster chipset and better battery life are significant steps forward, and Apple Intelligence (when it arrives) may well prove another reason to upgrade from the iPhone 15 and earlier models, since those won’t support it. It’s also good to see the price stay stable year on year.

Ultimately, though, it’s another year, another iPhone. It’s better – yes, not significantly so – but just enough to keep customers buying.