The iPhone 16 generation is four new phones — iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro (starts at $999), and iPhone 16 Pro Max (starts at 1,199) — soaked in artificial intelligence and coated in new colors like pink and green. You can pre-order them starting on Friday, September 13th and they’ll land on your doorstep (and on Apple Store shelves) right after September 20th (the day they start shipping).
Before you grab your credit card, Apple die-hards should know that this year’s phones are a little pricier than in years past. The iPhone 16 starts at $100 more than last year’s models at $799 for the standard and $899 for the Pro Plus. You get increased storage at these new higher price points, but it still begs the question: Do you really need a new iPhone?
It all depends on how much you want your smartphone to work for you, rather than the other way around.
IT’S GLOWTIME!
With the entirety of the tech world laser-focused on AI, Apple hopes you’ll start thinking of it as “Apple Intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence. The company is making its case to its vast customer base that AI on the iPhone isn’t just cool, but a bonafide reason to buy into a new generation of its iconic smartphone.
If you’ve ever used ChatGPT or a similar AI writing platform, you know you can ask it to do things like changing the tone of your writing or summarizing a long story into a few bullet points. With ChatGPT integration, Apple Intelligence holds the same handy power.
Apple Intelligence provides shortcuts to those capabilities within apps like email and notes. That lets you highlight text, have the AI rewrite it, make it sound more professional, summarize it, or even proofread it. So, if you’re typing an email to your boss and realize you’re using a way-too-relaxed tone, you can quickly highlight it and select a “professional” tone and your writing will evolve right before your eyes.
IS SIRI AI? IT IS NOW.
Meanwhile, Siri – which has never worked as well as Apple said it should – gets a new AI brain that finally makes it feel a bit more like a living, breathing… um, “person.”
Learning from your habits and the information it gleans from your everyday activities, it will pop up in new areas. If you’re wrapping up an evening at a new restaurant, for example, Siri may pop up and offer directions home via Apple Maps. Or, if you ask when a friend is coming to visit, Siri will find the info in a text message or email and tell you.
When you activate it, the edges of the screen glow in a rainbow of colors – hence the “glowtime” theme of this particular Apple event – indicating that it’s time for you to talk.
With AI integration, you get more intelligent answers from Siri, but the biggest upgrade is Siri’s ability to understand natural language. That is, you can rephrase something on the fly and Siri still understands what you’re trying to say, like a real person. You can also ask questions in series, and Siri remembers the context of the conversation from one query to the next. That’s super cool and way less awkward.
AI IS FOR FUN, TOO.
On the lighter side, image-creation tools Genmoji and Image Playground ask you what you want to see and then create it right before your eyes. As the name suggests, Genmoji creates custom emoji from whatever prompt you provide — like a dog wearing a tuxedo, or a broken dinner plate — while Image Playground generates larger images based on words you add, changing the image to suit your string of prompts and adjusting it based on whatever style you choose, like a pencil sketch or 3D render.
New Priority Notifications use Apple Intelligence to decide what alerts you need to see right now, and which you can wait to see later. This is one that I’m not so sure about. Sure, my iPhone should know that a package arrival is important to me, but what if it accidentally thinks an urgent email is a joke or decides that a motion detection alert on my home alarm can wait?
Apple Intelligence is just in beta right now, meaning that it’s being tested out right now by all of us in the real world. Put simply: Don’t place your unfailing trust in it just yet.
Still, with the relentless march of AI, you can’t help but feel like everyone will be using these features on day one, and since the only iPhones that get full Apple Intelligence support are the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, anyone with an older-generation iPhone will most certainly need to upgrade.
IPHONE 16 PRO IS BIGGER IN EVERY WAY.
If you’re a “Pro” user, this year’s phones are bigger in every way – including physical dimensions. By cutting back on the size of the bezel around the screen, the screen sizes of the iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max grow from 6.1 inches and 6.7 inches to 6.3 inches and 6.9 inches, respectively.
The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max also upped their photography chops, with the new lineup of iPhones sporting larger image sensors that should boost low-light performance. It’s worth noting that Apple’s low-light camera mode is already quite good, so any improvements in this area are icing on the cake.
A physical camera button also appeared on the side of all the new iPhones. The button fast-launches the camera and also allows for quick zooming. Apple demonstrated it, but we’ll have to get our hands on it to get a better idea of how much of an improvement it is over the touchscreen method.
Additionally, the smaller iPhone 16 Pro (non-Max) receives the boosted 5X zoom feature reserved for the Max in the iPhone 15 generation, while both the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max benefit from a huge resolution upgrade for the paltry 12-megapixel ultrawide lenses on previous generations. The rumors of a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera are true, and it turned out to be a massive improvement.
The standard iPhone 16 models (including the Plus) get some slightly less exciting updates, including a lens redesign that makes it easier to shoot “spatial video” for viewing on Apple’s Vision Pro Headset.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an all-new iPhone without an all-new digital brain buried deep inside. The iPhone 16 generation includes the A18 chipset, the next generation of Apple’s mobile silicon. As always, Apple touted its improved speeds and processing capabilities.
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Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech columnist and on-air correspondent. Read Jennifer’s latest columns at USAToday.com/tech or follow her @JennJolly on Instagram.
Contact her at JJ@Techish.com.