Apple released the all-new iPhone 16 lineup this week, with bigger batteries, a new camera capture button, and more. The company calls them its first iPhones built for Apple Intelligence. People are holding on to their current iPhones longer than ever, simply because smartphones are getting better. Today, I’ll highlight five major features you’ll get if you finally decide to upgrade.
A better display: Super Retina XDR
Apple introduced OLED displays on non-Pro iPhones in 2020, but if you’re using an iPhone 11 or higher, you’ll still be using an older LCD display. With OLED, you’ll have a much higher resolution display, better colors, deeper blacks, and support for high dynamic range content.
In short, everything you see will look a lot better with Apple’s Super Retina XDR display. It’s also much brighter, with the iPhone 16 supporting up to 2000 nits outdoors, versus the iPhone 11’s brightness of 625 nits.
Get Your Own Personalized AI on iPhone
Apple Intelligence was unveiled at WWDC in June, offering a new Siri experience with personalized context, writing tools to improve your writing, Genmoji to let you create your own emojis. To allow, a new ‘Cleanup’ feature to remove your unwanted content. Photos, and more.
Not all of these features are there at launch, but regardless, you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 to use any of them. The all-new Siri experience is expected to arrive in the spring, while everything else is rolling out before the end of the year, split between iOS 18.1 in October and iOS 18.2 in December.
Enhanced Battery Performance
The iPhone 16 has a lot more going on in the battery and charging department than the iPhone 11. Apple switched from Lightning to USB-C with the iPhone 15 lineup, allowing for a unified charging experience. Now you can use the same cable on your phone, laptop, and many other devices.
Batteries have also taken a big leap forward this year, with the iPhone 16 testing for an extra 5 hours of video playback over the iPhone 11, a nearly 30 percent increase. With better battery life, you don’t have to worry about recharging your iPhone as often.
With iPhone 16 45W wired charging and 25W wireless charging (with MagSafe), charging is also faster than ever, while iPhone 11 can only support 20W wired charging and 7.5W wireless charging.
Interactive Island Feature
Apple introduced the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro to replace the traditional iPhone “notch”. It’s a mesh of hardware and software, allowing users to interact with alerts, apps, and other types of apps from the top of their iPhone. You can use it to control your music, answer phone calls and all kinds of other interactions.
Dynamic Island also interacts with Live Activities, so apps like Flighty can display your flight details in a bullet cutout at the top of your iPhone.
Extra Buttons
The iPhone has gotten two new buttons since the iPhone 11, both the action button (replacing the mute switch) and the camera control “button.” Apple refuses to call the camera control a button, but that’s what it is.
The action button still works as a silent toggle by default, but if you don’t want to change it often, you can set it to a number of other things, including your focus mode, opening the camera app, turning on the flashlight. Toggling, recording voice memos, and more. Also, in iOS 18, apps will be able to create their own controls for both the action button and Control Center, so that should be a go.
As for the camera controls, this is a new toggle on iPhone 16, giving users simple and versatile new ways to use their iPhone camera. Pressing the button will open the camera app from anywhere, and pressing the button from within the camera app will capture a photo, while holding it will start video recording.
By default, swiping on the button will zoom. However, you can double-click the button by half-pressing it, and that will bring up a menu to configure what you want the swipe action to do. You can configure it between exposure, depth, zoom, cameras, style and tone.
Other Useful Features
48MP Camera with 2x Optical Zoom
Updated Ultra Wide Camera for Macro Photography
Improved Water Resistance
Sensor Shift Optical Image Stabilization Technology
Cinematic Video Mode
Action Video Mode
Spatial Photos and Videos
5G Connectivity
Wi-Fi 7 Support
MagSafe Wireless Charging Capability
