it's been a month since I reviewed the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max and I've had even more time with them to test the batteries the A7 Pro chip that camera control button and apple intelligence just kidding about that last one it's still not out yet so let's get into it let me start by saying that even without Apple intelligence I really like the iPhone 16 Pro which has been my daily driver for the past month Apple intelligence which is in beta currently as part of iOS 18.1 is rumored to drop at the end
of October we'll definitely have a lot more to say about it then but I've been running an early preview version of Apple intelligence and wanted to shout out one of my favorite features summarize this shows up in a few different ways on the iPhone 16 Pro if you're running the beta I can summarize text threads email threads but my favorite use is to summarize online stories so if you see a click batty headline in your newsfeed that promises to tell you the meaning of life or how to cook the best chicken you can just hit
the summarize button to avoid all the ads the popups the newsletter invites the bulked up introduction with Amazon links and get right to the point now is it worth buying an iPhone 16 Pro for Apple intelligence is summarized tool no but I like the direction apple is headed I want to start by shouting out a couple underrated features on the 16 Pro and the first is the new lower brightness screen this screen can get down to 1 Herz and how how dim is that well the 15 Pro went down to two and that difference doesn't
seem huge but in real life it really is especially for someone who reads in bed or in a dark environment there's a lot less glare coming off your phone and I really appreciate that the next underr feature I want to mention is the speakers the speakers on these phones whether it's the pro or the pro Max are not only loud but have a beautiful sound quality and even a little bit of bass I don't know if these are the best speakers ever on any phone but it's definitely the best speakers ever on an iPhone so
there's a new camera control button on these phones and I like the idea of the button but I don't think the execution is perfect I think the placement is a little odd uh I think for opening the camera it's a great shortcut but I could do that with other buttons on the phone but an actual use for pulling up menus or doing minute stuff if you're running gun photography this is not the button to use the onscreen stuff still faster it does feel to me like apple wanted this to be the visual intelligence button but
that wasn't ready at launch and it would be really odd if Apple had launched a phone with a new button that didn't do anything and it really seems like these camera stuff was meant to be a nice add-on so I don't think it's great if you're looking to buy this phone just for that button don't during my time with the phones a question I get frequently from a lot of photographer friends and creative types is are the cameras new on the phones and it really depends on the model for the 16 Pro all three cameras
in the back were not on the 15 Pro you got all three are brand new on the 16 Pro Max it's just the ultra wide camera that's brand new and the sensor on the main camera that's new the telephoto is exactly the same as the one on the 15 Pro [Music] Max with all the focus on Apple intelligence one of the things I feel that's gotten overshadowed on the phones is IOS 18 which is outstanding and there's so many great features being able to add new tapbacks that are emojis to a conversation but one of
my favorite things goes back to online articles uh so let's say you didn't have that summarized tool in apple intelligence there's now a way to go onto a website and remove distractions as what it's called so I can remove ads I can remove popups I can remove uh videos if I want from a page that I'm reading and not only can you remove them there's this really satisfying animation that makes you feel like you're doing thanos's snap and that ad is gone snap that video is gone I really like that in my original film for
the iPhone 16 Pro I shouted out how much I like the new slow-mo feature the 4K 120 Fram per second video recording and I still think it is one of the best new iPhone features in years even after a month I use it quite a bit but I've dabbled more with the prores version so you're able to actually save even bigger files with more detail and I want to play more with that but for everyday stuff I love using slow-mo it looks great I love posting these to Instagram and sharing them with friends my favorite
feature on the iPhone 16 Pro and please do not make fun of me is the battery the battery life is outstanding is it dramatically better than the 15 Pro no but it's one of the best and longest lasting batteries we've tested on any phone this year let me explain not only has the battery been solid at getting me through a day the iPhone 16 Pro was aces in our CET battery tests in a 45 minute battery drain test where I play games stream videos scroll social media and take a video call the iPhone 16 Pro
and the entire 16 series did fantastic I mean look at the iPhone 16 Plus's score and here's how the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max stack up against previous iPhone Pro Models in the same test the difference between the 16 pro and pro Max and the 14 pro and pro Max is wild so much improvement in our 3-hour streaming video test the phones did equally as well with modest improvements over last year's iPhone 15 pro and pro Max and here's how the iPhone 16 pro and pro Max did against other phones and it's right
alongside the likes of the Galaxy s24 Ultra and xiaomi 14 Ultra now of course the outlier here is the OnePlus 12 which only dropped 5% over 3 hours in terms of charging we ran a 30 minute wi charging test on the iPhones now Apple doesn't say what the Mac supported charging speed is and pushes their 20 W wall charger but some Publications and Tech YouTubers say that the phones can support 45 wat wire charging so for the Pro Models I used a 67 W charger which recharge an empty battery to 56 and 57% for the
16 Pro and 16 Pro Max respectively but one of the nice surprises is that these phones support 25 wat mag safe wireless charging you do need to buy a 30 W charger for your mag safe charger but in our 30-minute wireless charging test the phone's charge between 25 and 50% wirelessly that 50% charge by the iPhone 16 Pro is simply outstanding okay so after using these phones for a month specifically the iPhone 16 Pro is the one I've been using my recommendations for this have not changed for my original view if you have an iPhone
12 Pro or older upgrade if you can if you can afford it it's going to be a huge upgrade in every way if you have a 13 Pro I'm kind of on the fence if you have a decent battery capacity still left of that phone there's no reason to upgrade and if you have a 14 pro or 15 Pro unless you really want to there's not a big reason to upgrade I could see from the 14 pro to get apple intelligence but I don't know if it would be worth it at this point so those
are my thoughts on the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max after a month the next big shoe to drop with these phones will be the public release of Apple intelligence it won't be the whole shebang like the chat GPT integration gen mooji and image playgrounds won't be available but it should help make these iPhones feel more complete but now I want to hear from you if you have an iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max what are your favorite features let me know in the comments lastly if you've enjoyed this video please give it a
thumbs up and thank you for watching
