iPhone 16/Pro Impressions: The Great Separation!

all right I'm back I'm back from Australia all the way from Down Under And I did bring exactly one souvenir with me but I flew in this morning cuz Apple said they were going to announce some stuff and they did there was an event today so here's my first impressions so we got the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro today along with new airpods and Apple watch and I've got some handson and some first impressions for you of all that stuff right here so so let's just start with the new phones we knew this was coming right a very very minor incremental overall update but somehow Apple's still got to try to get people to buy it so what will they do so iPhone 16 looks very much like iPhone 15 but there's some new colors as you can pretty much always count on this year it's ultramarine which is kind of this Indigo pretty sick teal pink black and white and the cameras instead of being diagonally oriented are now lined up again next to each other like it was back in the iPhone 10 days but it's not just a retro touch that's also so it can shoot spatial videos and pictures now so the sensors are aligned with each other again but then everything else the rounded Corners the size of the regular phone and the plus phone the speakers the antenna lines everything just basically the same not much new going on here inside they bumped it up from the a16 bionic to a new a18 so there's some solid performance improvements in the 20 to 30% range better Ray tracing and a two times faster neural engine and 8 gigs of RAM for all that Apple intelligence stuff really the most underrated new hardware to me though that they talked about is Apple briefly mentioned that these new phones will all have larger batteries and so that seems to imply that it will actually have better battery life but also at no point did Apple ever say any numbers not a single number was uttered during the battery section no graphs or anything like that so we don't know exactly how much bigger this new battery actually is and the only numbers we've been able to find is if you look on Apple's compare page for the phones it said the iPhone 15 would get a battery life of 20 hours of video playback and this new 16 gets 22 so I'm going to be putting these through the paces you already know if you want to get subscribed to be among the first to see the full review that's when we'll be able to figure out if it's actually a significant Improvement in battery in other ways but as of right now better battery sure and then I never thought I'd say this sentence again but this new iPhone has two new buttons so first of all it gets the action button from last year's Pro so now you can do the exact same customized shortcuts from a flashlight or Shazam to a series shortcut or whatever you want and then there's also another new button called camera control and this second button it's kind of it's a touch sensitive cutout covered in Sapphire with a taptic engine behind it now it does actually move it is an actual button just to be clear but just like the trackpad on a lot of modern laptops the vibration motor clicks to also make a half press feel like you're clicking a two-stage button like a camera shutter button and it is also very convincing so the magic of this camera control area is what they're calling it is that it is pressure sensitive and it's basically a tiny trackpad on the corner of the phone it's it's capacitive sensitive so you can swipe and do gestures along the corner of the phone and so Apple's decided everything that this button will do will be camera related so if you press it from the lock screen it opens the camera app and then when you're in you can click it again to take a photo or long press to start taking a short video but then you can do a little half strength double tap to open up a menu for different camera options and then slide your finger along this camera control to change them so you know it takes some getting used to you got to get used to the placement of your hand and how fast you swipe but once you kind of know what you're doing it feels pretty smooth and it's pretty sensitive and intuitive so this is all a bunch of functionality that's being added basically into Apple's camera app but Apple's also said that thirdparty apps that use the camera will also be able to take advantage of the camera control so Snapchat Instagram highight Etc they'll be able to also use the slider so I think it's pretty cool I think it's technically very impressive I'm just trying to figure out kind of similar to the action button how useful it will actually be like it is kind of in this awkward spot on the bottom right of the phone it makes sense as a horizontal shutter button but they're kind of splitting the difference trying to also make it usable in a vertical Ori orientation I just I'm curious how many people actually use this regularly cuz again it is on all the phones but yeah that's about it for the 16 I mean the display also does now drop down to one nit minimum brightness so that's that's great at night it is also still a 60 HZ display on an $800 Flagship in 2024 so that's really disappointing for me personally but overall this phone is I'd say it's still pretty tempting to say that this base model is probably a better buy for most most people over the pro phones but let's just get into the pro phones shall we new colors this year desert titanium which goes alongside the classic natural titanium and then a slightly darker black and a slightly whiter white but otherwise same design again plus the new camera control and the main updates with the pro are the new screens and the new chip so the phones actually get slightly bigger this year so the screen sizes are up to 6.3 in on the pro and 6.9 in on the pro Max thanks to the thinner bezels which I didn't think I would notice but I'm actually looking at them and they are a little noticeably thinner so you can kind of tell and inside there is also a new chip as well it's the a18 pro so this is the new highest end chip in any iPhone and this again should have performance boost and efficiency boost over last year's Pro phone again in the 20 to 30% range so CPU and GPU improving better rate tracing should still have the faster USB 3 speeds that the pros get uh but again the efficiency improvements have them saying that the pro Max will now be the longest battery life ever in an iPhone by how much I don't really know but that's that's good to see but the camera is of course always the highlight of the pro phones and there are three new cameras on these Pros versus last year so a new 48 megapixel main camera then a higher resolution 48 megapixel ultrawide camera from the 12 from last year and then the smaller Pro also gets a 5x telephoto now so the smaller Pro used to have a 3X but now both Pros have matching all three cameras it's also wireless charging a little bit faster 25 watts so that'll get you 50% in 30 minutes of charging with the new mag safe charger nothing too crazy and also 4K 120 FPS slow motion straight out of the cameras now and that's that's pretty sick I'm sure the file sizes will be nuts from the prores version of this but it gives you really functional files that you can do a lot with it also totally proves to me that they could handle processing enough to shoot 8K 3030 but they're just choosing not to now there was a whole lot of talk a whole long section of the keynote where they constantly talked about Apple intelligence and I mean they have to because it's a really big deal for them but the thing is these phones will launch with iOS 18 18.0 and that means they will launch with no apple intelligence features at all no gen mooji no image playground no writing tools nothing that shiny brand new iPhone 16 that you take out the box in September 2024 and start using in a couple weeks will have the old Siri on it now they'll start to come out bit by bit with software updates so 18.1 has the new Siri and a bunch of writing tools and some other stuff but it's it's becoming harder and harder to pair that stuff directly to this new phone as a part of this upgrade I mean if you've watched my videos before you know about one of the golden rules which is to never buy something based on the promise of future software updates so this feels like a big separation moment for the iPhone at least to me where each year of the new physical phone that you buy is just a small Improvement it's just a little bit faster chip a little bit better screen slightly better cameras but on the other side is this rapidly improving ball of all this AI stuff that is not launching on the phone but that is the totally separate really big reason to get the phone so yeah it feels like I'm going to need to review all of that stuff separately in its entirety when it does finally come out because it it comes out so separately from the phone itself um anyway there were also some other Apple announcements today aside from just the iPhones and we got new airpods and new watches so there were lots of rumors about this huge redesign with the Apple watch for the 10th year but now that we actually see it Apple Watch series 10 is mostly slightly new again now okay it is 10% thinner and 10% lighter and that's nice and it has a slightly larger display again with thinner bezels and better viewing angles plus a new S10 sip inside that's it oh and of course you got to throw some new colors as well so the aluminum has silver or rose gold or this new jet black finish which is a bit of a shiny throwback and then they've dropped stainless steel for titanium which now comes in natural tit tanium gold colored or slate colored so that's the redesign again it is pretty minor uh I don't want to downplay the amount of technical engineering that goes into achieving these things like clearly you still have to combine the metal back plate and the charger into one piece with the antennas integrated to improve the thinness and they're using what they're calling the first wide angle OLED display to help you see the screen from more angles which actually does matter on a watch but yeah I think if you were expecting some crazy radical you know Square watch or something nuts then yeah this is very much still the classic Apple watch shape there are some new watch faces since the second hand now is always visible even when always on display is gone dark so that's cool there's also a new depth app and a new tie Z which I think looks really cool I don't even surf or have any use for this app but it's just kind of cool flipping through and seeing exactly when sunrise and Sundown are and high tide and low tide are every day if you're near a coastline they also introduced sleep apnea detection using only the gyroscope this is another coming soon feature it's like pending FDA approval and Regulatory bodies around the world to actually launch but the fact that it only needs a gyroscope to detect it I thought that was pretty cool so those series 10 watches are going to start at the same prices as last year's series 10 watches and then we also got a new Apple watch Ultra 2 and by new Apple watch Ultra 2 I mean a satin black finish of the existing Apple watch Ultra 2 and I am so into it I have absolutely no real reason to upgrade but this is just one of those things that companies sometimes do they just make a matte black version of something that I totally don't need but suddenly they have my shipping address and credit card info and I just end up buying one I'm told this is a pretty robust coding process so hopefully it shouldn't chip or scratch too easily and then maybe show like light raw titanium underneath but also it's an ultra watch so I think someone's going to do it but then there are also the new airpods the airpods upgrades or upgrades one of them one of them's a fake upgrade so the new base airpods airpods 4 have been redesigned and there's actually two versions so for 129 there's the new airpods 4 with the new shape and then for 179 there's the same new airpods version but you also get active noise cancellation and a wireless charging case with a tiny speaker built in for find my so yeah this new shape it's a little different so it may fit a little better in some people's ears like mine like the old ones or terrible for me but these are a little better but that also means they may be a little bit worse in some people's ears but yeah to get I think for under 200 bucks active noise cancellation in airpods with a 4-Hour battery life I think there'll be a nice little Target demographic waiting for that and then airpods Pro 2 didn't really get a whole lot technically new here but they also did get certified as a clinical grade hearing aid which is pretty awesome plus some other hearing protection and testing features are added as well but the biggest upgrade of the day and by that I mean non upgrade fake upgrade of the day goes to airpods Max now keep in mind these headphones came out originally in 2020 like we reviewed these a long time ago these were $550 when they launched and they're still $550 in 2024 and they still have a lightning port and they still don't have an onoff button and they still have that dumb case that they came with so they finally get this update airpods Pro 2 and the update is five new colors and they have a USBC Port now which okay yeah they literally had a lightning port in 2024 so we're happy to see that but then that's it like there's not a single other change to these new airpods they still don't have an onoff button in 2024 they still have that stupid case they came with like they got the feedback we know this case isn't good they didn't improve that at all they still have the H1 chip even though all the other airpods are on on the H2 chip now what did the entire airpods Max team go into a coma for 4 years and then wake up a week before this announcement and scramble to put this together this is weird the sad part is I'm probably still going to upgrade to them anyway because I just I can't carry a lightning cable around anymore and I keep forgetting it and then they keep dying and I keep needing a lightning cable and it's just let me just stop having that headache but yeah weird non- upgrade very disappointing airpods Max but that's basically it those are my announcement thoughts and reactions and first impressions and generally yeah not a ton of major new stuff I think really the two big highlights are one this separation between the hardware upgrade and all the software that's coming to the hardware but not launching with it and honestly two is is this camera control thing this weird button that they've added it's fascinating the fact that they've added it to both the pro and non-pro phones when I didn't think they would that's interesting the fact that case manufacturers are going to have to deal with this now like some of them are going to have a little cutout for it but some of them may try to do the same thing Apple did with like a little capacitive glass thing over the top of it to keep it flush that's interesting the fact that it won't come out with the two-stage shutter press in the actual camera app until later this year via a software update that's just weird too there's just a lot of fun weird stuff going on with the shutter button but now that you've made it this far let me know in the comment section down below what you want to see in those full reviews as you get subscribed to see them and thanks to Anor for sponsoring this video their latest mag go lineup is out the six series and there's a couple changes there's a new Slimmer battery bank there's a battery bank with an Apple Watch charger a stand with a rotating click head and one of my favorite items a 3in1 foldable charging pad so the ankor Mago power bank is a 10,000 mAh battery that supports ch2 and it's mag safe compatible it supports 15 W wireless charging and temperature control so it keeps your device is protected by keeping charging under 40° C all in this slim 15 mm body and then the anchor Mago wireless charging station this thing charges three devices at once an iPhone airpods and your Apple watch all at the same time it supports ch25 wat fast charging and mag safe charging for iPhones and it just folds up into this compact little package fits in your pocket and it can even fold the other way to make it into a stand to activate Apple standby mode while you charge your phone so yeah check these out at the link below and start charging your devices faster but yeah that's been it thanks for watching this impress video and I'll catch you guys in the next one soon peace [Music]