For creators, the iPhone 16 Pro may be the first upgrade that makes sense in years
But only if you love cameras.
Finally, I can upgrade from my shattered iPhone 12 Pro Max. Apple has just announced the iPhone 16 series, including both sizes of the base model and both of the Pro models. Preorders for the phones begin Friday, September 13th, with the release date slated for a week later, on September 20th. I won’t jump into the specifics of all that’s new — you can get a deeper breakdown from my friends at The Verge — but I do want to opine why I think this may be the first iPhone upgrade that makes sense (for me and other serious creatives, anyway) in years.
The iPhone 12 Pro Max was my first reentrant into Apple’s mobile ecosystem since ditching the iPhone 8, which preceded a years-long situationship with Samsung’s flagship Galaxy smartphones. You can imagine how jarring the reunion was. The hardware was sleek and powerful, but more impressively, iOS has gradually grown on me as a dynamic and capable platform that handily supports my professional endeavors and creative pursuits. I still can’t do much to inject the suave software experience with relics of my personality, perhaps save for changing the wallpaper and a ringtone, but it’s such a joy to use now that I haven’t been compelled to jump ship.
I found also that there just wasn’t much incentive to. The iPhone 13 Pro was a relatively pedestrian upgrade. We got slight and marginal camera improvements to go along with a 120Hz refresh rate display, but neither impacted my experience enough to warrant another $1,000-plus purchase.
The list of meaningful improvements to the iPhone 14 was even shorter. It introduced the pill-shaped camera cutout that Apple smartly built new software features around, but I immediately sussed out the Dynamic Island as a gimmicky bandaid to cover what I considered a wart. After the fanfare and that “new feature smell” wore off, that’s exactly how it turned out.
Otherwise, there wasn’t a ton more to care about until the iPhone 15 launched. We finally got USB-C, Apple upgraded the camera system on the Pro variants with more substantive recording options (such as its impressive high-dynamic-range ProRes Log color profile), and we even got a multifunction button to replace the increasingly useless mute switch. To boot, we later learned that it’d be the oldest iPhone you can buy that’ll support Apple Intelligence.
Still, I waited. It turned out to be a win-win decision. If the iPhone 16 materialized as another routine update, I could save a bunch of money on a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro Max and call it a day. If Apple changed the world as we know it with the iPhone 16, I could happily expand my budget and join the preorder craze for the first time.
I don’t think it’s anywhere near world-changing, but the iPhone 16 Pros, specifically, are probably worth the added splurge for creatives. The camera system received an upgraded 48-megapixel “Fusion” camera (seemingly Apple’s unique label for its pixel binning technique) and a new 48MP ultrawide sensor to go along with the 5x telephoto. More substantially, the A18 Pro chipset bears a new image signal processor that’s pulling more weight. You can record 4K at up to 120 frames per second, complete with Dolby Vision and HDR throughout the range to help maximize the delightful color you can achieve with ProRes Log.
Apple even introduced a dedicated capacitive button that not only adds a physical and haptic mechanism for snapping photos but also allows sliding your finger to quickly swap between its three optical focal lengths. You’ll get half-press locking for focus and exposure after a post-launch software update. Apple is too cool to call it a shutter button like all the other drab cameras, of course, so it’s landing on Camera Control. There’s also a newly updated four-microphone system that supports spatial audio recording. I don’t know if it’ll work as well as it sounded during Apple’s demo, but I’m rather happy to have it at all.
As someone deeply interested in consolidating my content creation tools down to as few devices as possible, the iPhone 16 Pro reveal left me salivate and wanting. If you’re just recording trendy TikTok dances or snapping a shot of your dinner for the gram, feel free to stay where you are. But serious creators likely won’t find a better suite of recording options in a pocket-sized slab. I’ll update this space with further feelings in a few short weeks.