I don’t know how many more times I can say what an intense two weeks it’s been since the last time I posted an Engadget review recap without sounding repetitive. Ever since we launched the first of these roundups last month, companies have relentlessly launched new hardware each week, contributing to a growing pile of products for our team to review. With all these announcements overlapping, it can be easy to miss a review that, say, was published at the start of the iPhone 16 event or another that went up at the same time as Meta’s Connect keynote this week.

That’s why I write these — it’s a good opportunity to catch up on reviews that we recently published and revisit some of the products now that we’ve had more time to spend with them. And looking at my list of items for this edition, there’s plenty to go over. From Apple’s iPhone 16 series, AirPods 4 and Google’s Pixel Buds Pro 2 to the PlayStation 5 Pro and some games and software, here’s a recap of things we’ve been testing lately.

Apple AirPods 4 with ANC review

by Billy Steele

Just a few days after Apple unveiled the AirPods 4, Billy had to file his draft for the review, which was slated to go up on Monday. Thankfully, these were a fairly straightforward update, with evaluating the new active noise cancellation (ANC) feature being the main task. Of course, Billy went further than that, gauging how much the device’s H2 chip and refined design impact the AirPods’ performance. He also went many extra miles, delivering report after report on topics like how the new hearing aid and hearing test features for the AirPods Pro work and a deep dive on how Apple designed ANC for an open-ear headset. Just head on over to Billy’s author page for a full list of the many articles he’s dutifully written up on the AirPods (and more).

Apple Watch Series 10 review

by Cherlynn Low

Words alone can’t express how grateful I am that Apple didn’t end up releasing three new models of the Apple Watch like was previously rumored. Considering the review of the Apple Watch Series 10 was published just one week and a day after the launch event in Cupertino, having to test more than one smartwatch was going to be a challenge. Heck, even reviewing a single new smartwatch was tricky, considering the other reviews we were preparing at the same time. That’s why when we first published our review on Tuesday, we did not feel ready to present a formal score, instead sharing just our evaluation of the Apple Watch Series 10 up till that point. We eventually updated our review after spending a few more days getting to know the watch better, adding a score and more findings later that week.

Here’s the summary. Though you might expect a lot more fanfare and features for the tenth Apple Watch simply because it’s the tenth generation model, there’s not a lot that’s changed. And the company arguably didn’t need to do much, since the Apple Watch is a fairly mature device. What it did manage to deliver — a bigger display in a thinner body — is impressive, and the Series 10 continues to deliver the best smartwatch experience that any iPhone owner can get.

Of course, there are questions around the blood oxygen detection feature that remains the subject of litigation between Apple and Masimo. But whether that (or the new sleep apnea feature) are available doesn’t actually impact my experience with the watch, and therefore had little bearing on our score. If you’re using an older Apple Watch that has the blood oxygen detection enabled and it’s something you use frequently, it might be better to hold on to your device for now.

iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max review

by Cherlynn Low

Those were just the major reviews that were published last Monday and Tuesday, and on Wednesday, we published my review of the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max.

The story of this year’s iPhones is also a pretty straightforward one: Cameras, buttons and a lack of Intelligence. Apple Intelligence, that is. But through my testing, I started to realize that a couple of features began to stand out. The most obvious is the new Photographic Styles, which put Instagram’s filters to shame.

On the iPhone 16s, you can swap these out both before and after shooting. You can also edit the amount of saturation, shadows and more within each Style. Most importantly, Apple has finetuned its processing and depth map so it’s better at keeping skin tones within the realm of reality even as you crank up the saturation or contrast. I’m a huge fan of these improved filters and in the week since my review went up, I’ve been tempted to post nothing but Photographic Style samples to all my social media. The only thing keeping me from actually doing that has been tedium and a complete lack of spare time. But maybe one day I will.

The other thing that I learned was a subtle shift in Apple’s overall approach was greater customizability. Old Apple was rigid and rejected the idea that its design might not be the best for all its users. These days, Apple is more than willing to let you set up your app grid however you like, and iOS 18 brings the ability to finetune your Control Center and lock screen shortcuts to your preferences (and needs) as well. I was surprised when I found out that not only could you tweak the sensitivity of the Camera Control’s touch and pressure sensor, but you can disable the feature altogether.

I prefer this approach as it puts the user’s needs and preferences first while still maintaining a secure and private environment. And while we still await the formal arrival of Apple Intelligence in October, it’s likely that many of the AI-based features, which will be available throughout the iPhone 16 lineup as well as the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, won’t hugely impact our experience and score. Still, like we mentioned in our reviews of this year’s flagship phones, we based our verdict on the devices we tested as they were, and might revisit our score when headline features like Intelligence roll out.

iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus review

by Billy Steele

I have to thank Billy for picking up the review of the base iPhone 16 models this year. Not only was he able to help with the workload, Billy also delivered a thorough and alternative perspective on Apple’s non-Pro iPhones. I was heartened to see that he agreed with me on several things, namely that Photographic Styles are awesome and Camera Control is kind of clunky. I do have to admit that I hated having to look at a frog in the sample photo he included in his piece — frogs are my mortal enemies.

I barely mentioned the Camera Control in my section about the iPhone 16 Pro above, but this new button is just awkwardly placed, and I was glad to see Billy’s experience was similar.

Both of us agree that it’s nice to see the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus get features that are on their Pro counterparts. Sadly, though these phones were designed for Apple Intelligence, that just wasn’t available to the public at the time of our review, which just makes it feel like they’re missing something. That’s not to say these aren’t excellent phones. They’re a nice step up from last year’s base iPhones and come in an aesthetically pleasing array of colors that I adore.

We also have a guide from senior reporter Jeff Dunn on how to choose the right iPhone, which might be particularly helpful since this year’s models all seem so similar. My main advice is: if you’re into multimedia creation on your iPhone, get one of the Pros. If you need your phone to last more than a day, definitely spring for the Pro Max, as the iPhone 16 Pro will absolutely conk out after about 20 hours.

macOS Sequoia review

by Devindra Hardawar

Apple season isn’t limited to new hardware. Last week, the company also released the latest updates to its software for its iPhones, Macs, watches, TVs and more. Our resident computing expert Devindra has been spending time with the new macOS since the beta was available, and was able to quickly put together his thoughts on Sequoia. His joy at being able to mirror his iPhone on his MacBook is evident in his review, and we were so convinced by his review that we also published a guide on how to mirror your iPhone in macOS Sequoia afterwards. To quote Devindra: “It sort of changed my life.”

Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 review

by Billy Steele

I’m sure by now you can appreciate how hard Billy has been working, particularly these last few weeks. On Wednesday, Billy published his review of the Pixel Buds Pro 2, which went up the same time as the start of Meta’s Connect keynote. This is the last of our reviews of Google’s new hardware this year, at least until it launches something else. Billy’s evaluation is that these buds are smaller than before, which is a double-edged sword. They could be a better fit for some people, but the fact that they have smaller touch-sensitive panels means they’re slightly harder to maneuver. Still, they produce decent sound and integrate with the company’s new Gemini assistant to make hands-free requests more convenient.

Now that the last of the Pixel reviews are finally out of the way, we can finally consider the company’s family of hardware as a whole and honestly, I’m impressed. I actually scored the Pixel 9 Pro higher than the iPhone 16 Pro, which is possibly the first time a Google flagship has been rated better than one from Apple. I think Google has proven with its 2024 devices that it has the chops to take on its gigantic rivals, and now just needs to continue its momentum if it wants to reach a larger audience.

PlayStation 5 Pro preview

by Jessica Conditt

After Sony announced the PlayStation 5 Pro the day after the Apple iPhone event, senior editor Jessica Conditt was able to spend some time with the console ahead of its November 7th release. In her preview, Jess says that for the right kind of gamer, the “audaciously priced” PlayStation 5 Pro is absolutely worth it.

Who’s the right kind of gamer here? According to Jess, “If you regularly play PS5 games and can afford to waste (at least) $700 on a more powerful console with extra gills, you absolutely should get a PS5 Pro.”

Of course, we’ll have to get a device in for testing before we can deliberate on a score and official verdict. But with faster memory, improved rendering as well as support for VRR, advanced ray-tracing and “8K gaming,” the PS5 Pro seems like a promising upgrade.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom review

by Nathan Ingraham

Speaking of gaming, deputy editor Nathan Ingraham published a review this week of the latest in the Legend of Zelda series: Echoes of Wisdom. Nate was a diehard Zelda fan growing up, and found himself taken right back to his youth with this latest instalment.

My gaming tastes begin at Solitaire and end at Animal Crossing or Just Dance, so something as involved as Echoes of Wisdom is not my cup of tea. But even just looking at the pictures in Nate’s review have me impressed at the dedication to detail and quality. As Nate puts it, the story involves “a series of otherworldly rifts that have opened up throughout Hyrule, swallowing up huge parts of the land and the people who reside there.” That’s absolutely the sort of plot that would draw me in, and when I read that this time around you’d play as Princess Zelda as she attempts to rescue Link, I was even more intrigued.

Perhaps that reversal of roles will also appeal to you, or maybe you’re drawn in by the idea of completing puzzles in an adorable 3D environment. I have to admit I’m looking at my Switch and considering playing this instead of getting ludicrously upset at Match Factory. If you’re a fan of the series, Nate thinks you should absolutely check out Echoes of Wisdom.

Fujifilm GFX100S II and Logitech MX Creator Console reviews

by Steve Dent

Our photography expert Steve Dent published a couple of reviews this week, showcasing his expert knowledge of cameras and the editing tools that accompany them. His analysis of the Logitech MX Creator Console, for instance, has me itching to get one so I can easily tweak and edit graphics in Adobe’s suite of apps. Meanwhile, his review of the Fujifilm GFX100S II left me wondering how many months I can go hungry so I can afford the $5,000 camera because I imagine it’ll make me as adept at taking photos as Steve. If you’re curious about the actual picture and video quality of Fujifilm’s camera, check out Steve’s video on our YouTube channel.

Up next: What’s on the horizon

Like I said, with all the events taking place these few weeks, there’s plenty of gadget reviews to come. For example, Samsung had a mini event this week where it unveiled the Galaxy Tab S10+ and Tab S10 Ultra, which are premium tablets that are regarded as the best in the Android space. The company also showed off the Galaxy S24 FE and Galaxy Watch FE LTE, which are lower cost variants of its flagship smartphone and smartwatch. All of these products are good candidates for us to test, since our audience (like yourself!) is likely to be wondering about whether they’re better than their premium counterparts.

This week, Meta also launched the Quest 3S, which is a budget-friendly VR headset that should take the place of the aging Quest 2. Few people are out there shopping for VR headsets, at least, when compared to iPhones or even midrange Android phones. But it’s still worth our time to test something like the Quest 3S, as it helps us learn about the technology that’s available, even in relatively small product categories.

Meta also showed off its Orion AR smart glasses, but as that’s more of a prototype right now, I don’t expect we’ll be properly reviewing it. Similarly, the fifth-gen Spectacles that Snap unveiled last week will only be available to approved developers who are willing to fork over $99 a month. That’s not something we’re likely to formally review, either.

It’s hard to keep up with all the stuff that big tech companies keep launching and want you to buy, but we do our best. We’re anticipating just a few more events coming this year, and are getting ready for the holiday shopping season, too. I’m sure people outside the tech industry are feeling a similar ramp up in work and life. Hopefully, we all get some time to rest and take care of ourselves soon. As always, we appreciate your time and wish you the best. Until the next Engadget Review Recap, good luck.

Our reviews of the iPhone 16 Pro and Apple Watch Series 10 are up, thanks to one very tired Cherlynn Low. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn discuss her final thoughts on Apple’s new hardware, including why the iPhone 16 Pro’s photo processing is particularly interesting. In other news, we also chat about Snap’s fifth-generation AR Spectacles, as well as HTC Vive’s new Focus Vision headset.

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Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve got suggestions or topics you’d like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

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Topics

• iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max reviews: great cameras, but incomplete without Apple Intelligence – 0:59

• Israel linked to coordinated pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon – 42:29

• Snap’s 5th generation glasses with AR look chunky in a bad way – 48:17

• HTC’s Vive Focus Vision: an intriguing VR headset at a price between the Quest 3 and Vision Pro – 51:35

• Lionsgate films made a deal with the AI devil – 52:40

• Pop culture picks – 55:48

Livestream

Credits

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

Transcript

(Note: This transcript was produced with help from Descript’s AI.)

Devindra: [00:00:00] What’s up, Internet? And welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I’m Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.

Cherlynn: I’m Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.

Devindra: This week we’ll be talking about the iPhone 16 Pro reviews from Cherlynn. And also, also the Apple Watch Series 10 review. And you’re just so busy, Cherlynn. I’m so sorry.

Cherlynn: Yeah.

Devindra: Cherlynn slowly dying. Also joining us is podcast producer Ben Ellman. Hey, Ben.

Ben: Good morning, everyone. Usually we’re trying to sell Cherlynn on video games. I think now you’re going to have to sell me on the iPhone 16.

Devindra: You know? We will, we will do that. As always, folks, if you’re enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice.

Leave us a review on iTunes. Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. Also, if you could join us Thursday mornings on our YouTube channel, typically around 10:45 AM Eastern for our live stream. You can see our, our faces. You can see us do some Q and a, and you know, we’ll show off some devices too.

So check that out. Cherlynn, I was really excited to see what you thought of the iPhone 16 pro [00:01:00]because based on our previous conversations.

Cherlynn: are you trying to upgrade?

Devindra: No, I’m not. I’m not actually, I am very firmly. I’m like, I actually don’t need to do this at all. It’s great. It’s a good year for anybody who has a 15 pro because just not much of a reason beyond the button.

But I also know. You had conflicting feelings about the camera button. And also, Hey, we can’t really judge. It’s we can’t fully judge this device because so much of it is going to depend on Apple intelligence, which will not start rolling out until next month. The new Siri won’t fully arrive until early next year.

So what do you think of it so far? This is just the pro and pro max.

Cherlynn: Yeah. I mean, we, I also, I personally also have been testing and spending time with the iPhone plus. I can talk about them. Our, our, our review may be coming later. Right. It’s coming. Nobody can blame you.

Devindra: You just shipped an Apple watch review and an iPhone review.

And last week you had the pixel watch review. So yes. To give everyone

Cherlynn: a sense of the cadence here. So Apple’s event was Monday. Tuesday I was there for meetings where I’ve then left with devices which [00:02:00]to disclosure, they’re all owners. We returned them at the end of the review period. Okay. And then there was, then we had Monday morning, the, at 8 AM Eastern, the AirPods for review.

Was published was the embargo and then Tuesday 8 a. m. Eastern was the Apple watch series 10 review embargo. And then Wednesday, yesterday 8 a. m. Eastern, the Apple iPhone 16, all of them, the review embargo lifted. So it’s been, it’s been wild because it involves a lot of weekend work for some of us.

And, so pardon me if in this episode, I get some names and words and numbers mixed up because it’s bound to happen. It happened in our video review a couple times, which sorry, but my brain is, is there. Anyway so I really adore the iPhone 16, the base iPhone 16, because we got the cutest colors. We got the pink and the teal the teal iPhone 16 plus and the pink one.

Now. The, the reason I was actually, I’m going to start with the iPhone 16 because we, we haven’t really put out our [00:03:00] formal thoughts out there yet, but I, I, I have spent some time thinking about them. This is the first time you’ve basically for a while now that you’ve got the iPhone 16s that are basically close to parody with the pros.

I mean, these are not, not pro phones by any means. But, you know, Apple didn’t skimp on like bringing the camera button over to the base iPhone 16 for once. Right. And they’re getting new chips, like

Devindra: all the fun stuff. Yeah, exactly.

Cherlynn: They’re getting 18, a 18 instead of the last year’s a 17, for example. And then, you know, yes, the pros get the 18 pro, but that makes sense.

You’re paying quite a lot more money. Those are more powerful phones. And then you’ve got also the camera button this time brought down to the. The action button might be brought down to the iPhone.

Devindra: The plain iPhone, the base iPhone. Yeah.

Cherlynn: Plus, yeah. So these names are not great. And then you’ve, one of the things holding back, I guess, the base iPhones is the screen, right?

I mean, okay. They don’t have the like same big 6. 3, 6. 9 inch screens as the pros do, but they also don’t have [00:04:00]promotion. You’re just getting like their retina XDR, I think super retina. So they’re good in terms of color and resolution, but you’re missing a high refresh rate, some differences in size.

And then of course the cameras aren’t as powerful, but you will get spatial audio recording, which means you will get access to features like audio mix in the video recording tool set. So, or the video editing tool set. So I

Devindra: just want to point out here, Sherilyn, as you were holding up those iPhones, it seems like the big difference is.

iPhone 16 pro party in the front, good screen, iPhone 16 party in the back. I

Cherlynn: quite like that. They’re so

Devindra: bright and the color is like everything

Cherlynn: you, when I talk about these at some point on our website later, but yes, this, the iPhone 16 keeps the party in the back while the iPhone 16 pro keeps the party up front.

I guess you know where the party isn’t

Devindra: the

Cherlynn: party isn’t on the sides. It’s so sad. I really liked the idea of camera control, which I think we’ll just dive right [00:05:00] into camera control. I mentioned already last week that it’s, you know, a real like button that you hopefully heard me clicking into the mic just now.

It is awkwardly positioned in my opinion. When I try to hold it up Depending on the size of the phone I mean, I think i’ve already learned how to grip this so that my thumb sits right on the camera control when i’m holding It up In portrait mode with one hand. In landscape mode, the way that I used to grip my camera to take photos or my phone to take photos is to place my index finger kind of lightly hugging the bottom corner.

And then my little finger at the bottom to kind of brace it. And in this way, You had to

Devindra: Relearn the way you were holding a phone, basically. Absolutely.

Cherlynn: You had to relearn that camera grip that everyone was talking about maybe three years ago. It’s Oh God, our camera grip. You know, that’s a, that’s a thing we learned to cope with this, Modern day technology things.

And now you kind of had to relearn it again. If you’re, if you have an iPhone 16, because now too, if you want to press the camera control and you want to swipe on the thing, you have to [00:06:00]hold the phone differently. Your thumb’s going to be on the bottom. If you’re holding in landscape mode, you have to have your three fingers on the right side to kind of like balance the thing to hold it stably.

And then put your index finger on the sensor to be able to move it without Completely dropping the phone. It is in my opinion, a little clunky. However, I do love that Apple’s finally brought Hardaware based shortcut access to the camera app. Let me fix my. Sure, let’s pour a microphone.

Devindra: It’s okay. I mean, I think the more I hear about the camera button and everything, it does seem compelling.

Like I do kind of feel Oh, that would be kind of nice to have that control, but also, yeah, yeah. I invested, I also invested in the 512 gigabyte 15 pro last year. So it’s it’s, it’s just not worth it. I am interested in what people think of the base model. And I guess once consumers like start getting their hands on it, because yeah, as you were saying, and as we talked about, like you’re missing [00:07:00]the zoom camera, you’re missing the, you know, faster promotion screen, but beyond that, like that’s a pretty capable, it’s a pretty good phone for 800 bucks.

I guess as it should be, but then compared to most Android ones, you know, you’ll get faster refresh rates on the Samsung’s and the pixels. So I don’t know how long Apple can justify that. Here’s my other thing. Mm hmm

Cherlynn: One of the biggest selling points that I guess Apple made about the iPhone 16 is that they’re purpose built for Apple Intelligence, and there’s none of that in here yet.

I mean, we could and can run a developer beta to get our A taste for Apple intelligence, but I I’m sorry to announce that we don’t review devices based on developer slash whatever beta shouldn’t.

Devindra: It’s not real. It’s not

Cherlynn: stable. It’s not the same. It could be very similar to the experience that finally ships.

But it’s just not, I’m not, I’m not testing a beta and telling you, yeah, buy this thing. No, I, there’s just, it’s not no, even [00:08:00] though I think that the line between beta and like public release is quite like gray right now, it’s just not very clear because sometimes they release so many software updates after the fact that the one that they released initially might as well be the beta.

But anyway I, I do think that for now there’s a lot but the base iPhone 16s are still, they still seem like really solid upgrades for anyone on the base iPhone 15. Now the pros are a different matter altogether. Okay, so I almost immediately switched over to the base iPhone. iPhone 16 pro as my main.

And the smaller,

Devindra: the smaller, the

Cherlynn: smaller one by base. I mean the smaller one, not the max. And before that I had been meaning the gray, the magnesium, the natural titanium, not magnesium, the titanium 15 pro max, and like my hand is a lot happier. For having switched over to the smaller one, even though I didn’t, I got like the white iPhone 16 pro and I have the desert iPhone 16 pro max.

[00:09:00] So honestly, the nicer color is in the bigger phone from, from me.

Devindra: I

Cherlynn: don’t mind it. And they gave me this like bright yellow case to use with it. I was just like, all right, I don’t want to look like. But the, the sad news is that like my main takeaway with the iPhone 16 pro, other than all that camera control stuff I talked about the battery life is quite disappointing.

Devindra: You’re going from the big, the big boy battery. Sure. Yeah.

Cherlynn: But when you consider that the pixel nine pro. Made like 25 hours on our battery test and basically generally last two days I would say in real more realistic use probably closer to one and a half days because two days with this thing was more like I Didn’t use it as much as my iPhone that I would use my phone.

It’s more of a secondary device I you can’t you just can’t Say, yeah, barely last a day and that’s fine. That looks bigger

Devindra: though. The Pixel put them side by side. The iPhone 16 Pro and the Pixel 9 Pro. Okay It’s a little bit

Cherlynn: [00:10:00] bigger. It’s a little thicker. I

Devindra: feel like they could fit in a bigger, a bigger battery in the Pixel.

Cherlynn: So the, the, the Pixel 9 Pro, to be clear, is only maybe less than an inch taller. Yeah, and then, a bit ever so, nope, ever so, look, it’s about, they’re really

Devindra: going the harder, the trying to replicate that. Yeah.

Cherlynn: So, yeah, no. So, so here’s the thing I, I wrote this in my review too, and I’ll mention it on this podcast, which is that I’ve been surrounded by phones these last few days on my couch And it has been very difficult to figure out to reach for the correct phone, I have to do a big like game of which phone am I holding up?

I, I sort of got, these are,

Devindra: I really do sometimes.

Cherlynn: And then hang on, hang on. That’s just one hand. So for the audio version of the podcast. These, these are all on my couch right now. There’s about, I don’t want to say, how many is that? Seven? Ten? I don’t know. [00:11:00] There’s a pixel fold here. That is a

Ben: lot of phones.

Devindra: This is the version of fanning you know, a big stack of bills. You’re fanning a stack of phones right now.

Cherlynn: So anyway,

Ben: I mean, and it is kind of a big stack of bills, monetary value.

Cherlynn: I will say instead of going to the gym, I’ve been just lifting these phones. No the, the, by feel, I cannot tell which one is which.

They all feel roughly the same to me, especially when I touch the Pixel 9 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro. They all feel the same. By touch. In fact, sometimes when I’m using the 16 pro, I start to try to use Android gestures because I’m like, Oh, I’m using the pixel nine pro. Aren’t I? So I swipe in from the side to go back and it’s ridiculous.

But yeah, it’s, they’re very similar in terms of build and it’s not a bad thing for anyone, but I do think that. Maybe now is the time to start pushing companies to do a bit more with design or their camera bumps. I think I saw somewhere that I think MKBHD did a bit of a wobble test, which is something that Sam Rutherford on our team has been pitching as a [00:12:00]series for like years, but I feel bad we never got around to doing it.

The Pixel 9 Pro, because of its camera bar, doesn’t wobble as much, but iPhone 16 Pro certainly does. It’s modules. We’re going to

Devindra: make an excuse to bring the wobble dance into an iPhone video. Now, is that, that’s what’s happening here, I guess. Yeah. So

Cherlynn: anyway, I’m sorry, iPhone 16 Pro held back a little bit by its battery life.

I will also point out that I’ve had some issues with some, what seems like buggy software. I wonder if that has to do with the, in the setup process when I ported my Phone from the 15 pro max over to the 16 pro that like I don’t know something is not complete in the setup just yet But I definitely noticed certain glitches here and there I’ve mentioned To someone that can do something about it that my lock screen just refuses to save the crop aspect ratio sometimes

Devindra: That’s interesting.

This is more of a

Cherlynn: [00:13:00] telegram app issue, but the telegram app, which yes, sadly, I still do use every now and then will still resurface the one notification badge on this icon. I’m just like, there’s no unreads. There are no unreads. And that’s apparently a known issue. You gotta,

Devindra: you gotta go Zen, Sherilyn. You gotta go just ignore all the badges.

Numbers, there will always be numbers.

Cherlynn: Well, yeah, so there’s, but there are other And you can

Devindra: just turn the badges off too,

Ben: right? You can turn

Devindra: the badge off completely. Yeah.

Cherlynn: There are other glitches like, When sometimes when I press the camera control and then I flip over to landscape, it just blinks and then just half the screen’s gone.

But I’ve, I’ve certainly had that with older iPhones before. So it’s not like unique to the iPhone 16 pro and which is why I didn’t make a big deal of it in my review.

Devindra: Yeah. How do you like the 5X zoom on the base? I love smaller 16 pro. Cause that is a nice upgrade. That’s why I went max last year too.

It was like. It’s nice to have a 5x zoom. Yeah.

Cherlynn: I love having the 5x zoom on the smaller phone. And that’s one of the things I’m like really happy about with the lineup this year, because yeah, that’s the reason I upgraded to the 15 [00:14:00] pro max upgraded, sacrifice my hands for the 15 pro max last year, because I wanted that 5x telephoto zoom.

This year I did most of my testing with the 16 pro and yeah, I mean, it compares pretty well with Google’s, but I did a lot of my photography comparison and again, it’s a pixel nine pro because. To me, that’s the gold standard. Google is really a lot better at cleaning up mess at the higher level zoom and also Google just gives you a little bit more digital zoom.

So you can go up to 30 X with a combined telephoto and digital. Whereas on iPhone 16 pro or pro max, you go up to only 25 X. Google’s image

Devindra: processing, I think it’s a little better. The computational image processing.

Cherlynn: Yeah. If you,

Devindra: okay.

Ben: But let’s talk about that for a second, because Devindra and I were talking like during the show planning meeting yesterday, that I’m looking at.

the side by side iPhone 16 and Pixel 9 Pro pictures in Cherlynn’s review. [00:15:00] It’s the image of the tree and the LED strip. It looks like it’s in some kind of transit hub. And I know everyone says the Pixel 9 photos are so much better all the time, but to me, the picture from the 16 Pro looks so much more vibrant.

Is that just A me thing? Is that how I perceive colors versus other people? What’s going on here?

Cherlynn: It could be. I will say that I did notice, in general, in general, right, and this has been for years now, I’ve noticed that pixel photography tends to be a little bit more muted compared to something from iPhone or Samsung phones.

Especially compared to Samsung phones. They tend to oversaturate a little bit. What Apple has tended to do in the past is I don’t, I think this is just their color preference, but they give what they call, but I don’t say they call it. It’s just warmer, right? It looks warmer sometimes to the point of looking almost yellowish.

But yeah, their colors are a bit warmer and I think you can compare this to this. [00:16:00] this to the difference between a Nikon and a camera, a Canon camera in terms of the processing. Just like a

Devindra: tasteful aesthetic difference. Exactly.

Cherlynn: I think that’s a preference or tasting, Ben. So I don’t know that you’re necessarily seeing it differently, but it could be a tasting, right?

The, the thing I do want to point out in that picture and also back to your point, Ben, one the picture on the left of the tree in, by the way, Moynihan train station, which is Penn station in Manhattan. Yeah. Okay. Is the, the one on the left, iPhone 16 pros picture is a little bit blurry. Right. And I think that’s because I have been so focused on testing camera control that every single photo I took with it was with the button push.

Whereas like on the pixel pro, sometimes I would use the volume key trigger. Sometimes I would use the onscreen button. That’s the way I normally use it in daily life anyway. So I think that some of that,

Ben: they would compensate for that. You would think,

Cherlynn: but I do, I don’t think they did. So I think that the button push.

Definitely introduce shake. Deepak Murthy in the chat also asked a really good question. Is the 48 [00:17:00]megapixel Ultra wide. A big upgrade from last year. I don’t know that I’ve been pixel peeping the ultra wide pictures, but I will say this reminds me of a fact that the 48 megapixel fusion camera on the iPhone 16 pro and pro max is wild.

Like I at first was like, they keep saying zero shutter lag, right? Apple has used this Phrase a lot. And this time it said zero shutter lag and said, it was like faster. So my dumb ass brain was like, Oh, does this mean I can take like photos of people, like moving around and then freeze motion and just take, right.

So I just doing that for a while. And I was like, none of them seem very like what I thought they were going to be. So I got our video producer for this review video, Brino. I was like, can you throw something at me? I’ll, you know, catch it in midair. And then. All the photos that I was trying to take with the zero shutter lag environment, it was a cushion, something’s off.

Devindra: That’s what zero shutter lag is supposed to be. So, so hang on. So then I was like, okay,

Cherlynn: let’s do that. And then I was like, why is it not working? So I, then I told Brian to do me throwing things around. So he took photos of me and [00:18:00]we were both like, All our pictures came out of us holding on to the thing and not of us throwing the things.

When I finally figured out what was happening, I was like, Oh, that’s how fast the fusion camera is now. It’s actually taking the photo when you press the camera on shutter button or trigger now, not, you know, a slight fraction of a second lag before the movement happens. So you actually don’t have to like, the reason we were so like, Like catching not the movement we want it and so confused is because as people who have a lot of experience with cameras, Brian and I have trained ourselves to become like sensitive with the camera trigger timing, right?

If I know if something I want to capture is going to happen in the split second after I press the button, that’s when I trigger it. That’s how I time myself to press the button. And that’s why our pictures were coming out a little too early. We were like, we were hitting the button, but instead we should have just waited till the thing was in midair to then press the button because that’s how fast the camera

Devindra: is now.

Cherlynn: I didn’t know, finally [00:19:00] figured it out. Felt really smart for a moment there.

Devindra: I think due to Deepak Murthy’s question, the big upgrade is that before it was a 12 megapixel ultrawide, now it’s a 48 megapixel ultrawide. So,

Cherlynn: and that enables. Yeah. Even more of that 2x zoom croppy situation that they talk about.

Devindra: It’s also the thing where if you lean too much into a subject, like last year, it would just like shift to the, to like almost macro mode. Right. Right. Lose so much detail. If you want a high resolution photo, like then you have to fight that automatic process. That was annoying last year or so.

Cherlynn: Yeah.

Devindra: Yeah, less of a problem this year.

Cherlynn: And then my final note about colors here is, oh my God, how awesome our photographic style, photographic styles, photographic, photographic styles. Photographic

Devindra: styles. So

Cherlynn: awesome. So those let

Devindra: you choose different like color profiles and give you more finely tuned.

Stuff like just more tweaking on your photos. I, I want to point out like a couple of reviews also noted that they like the image processing of the 16 pros compared to the 15 pros. And I think this is kind of a common [00:20:00] complaint that a lot of iPhone users have been having is just that pictures look kind of flat sometimes because Apple’s processing.

Tends to crush shadows and kind of like the depth of an image kind of goes away. So I noticed the Verge’s review, they pointed this out a lot and I, a couple other folks did too, like you get, you can get better shadow control, better skin tone control, and you can leave

Cherlynn: it there, right? Like you can leave it, set it to your preferred and leave it.

So every photo you take then doesn’t have to be edited. It comes out with your preferred shadow and contrast settings. Yeah. So here’s, here’s. To add my thoughts on that. When I discovered in my testing that photographic styles is freaking awesome. I was like, what happened? Your depth, your depth map just seems wildly improved.

And so what Apple does in general is every year. And I heard this last year too, actually, which is they, they, they work on their algorithm every year. They refine their depth map sensitivity, accuracy, this sort of stuff every year. This year, there seems to be a noted, marked. Improvement. And so in every single [00:21:00] photo even with last year with the 15 pros, when you take a photo that has a face inside Apple automatically takes like captures depth information.

So you might’ve seen that I’ve noticed this before when I’m like taking photos of myself and it suddenly switches to portrait mode. I’m like, I don’t need a portrait mode picture. I just wanted a flat one, but then they want to capture depth information. And in using, in doing that this year with photographic styles, they’re able to like, Maintain a person’s face, skin tone, whatever.

Keep that a natural looking, as natural looking as possible, and then apply color changes and contrast changes and whatnot to the background. And it is wildly effective this year. And then the fact that you can. Set it, leave it, every single one of your photos will turn out that way. Or you can go in and post process and post and change it up.

There’s just so many more controls and customizability options now that to me, that is actually the low key highlight this year. Things that like they’ve introduced, like photographic styles, you can leave alone and do nothing with, right? Action button, you can leave as your mute slider. The camera control.

If you don’t like it, turn it off. [00:22:00]You have all these controls. I Apple doesn’t make a big deal because I don’t think it wants to market that you can turn off camera controls. But the fact that you can, and the fact that you can tweak its sensitivity as part of accessibility controls, is it’s all adding to the idea that Apple is understanding that it needs to let users be able to change and choose what they want.

And to me, that’s the most important thing with the iPhone 16s or just iPhones in general. I

Devindra: kind of wish some of that came down to the earlier phones. Like I know part of that is the image processing pipeline that there’s a whole lot of new Hardaware in the 16s. scenes, but also you, you’ve got, you still got MPUs on these older phones.

Like there, there’s some stuff you could still do. It sort of reminds me of the way people complain about like the way MCU movies look, right? The Marvel movies tend to look flat, don’t really have much depth. You can almost feel the artificiality of like when they’re on the the giant led screens, you know, when something doesn’t feel real and then.

You shoot something in real life with real color depth and everything and shadow depth, and it [00:23:00]looks dramatically different. I guess that’s sort of what people are noticing. So any, anything else you want to shout out about the, the iPhone pros or, or the base ones, Rowan?

Cherlynn: I mean, I agree with you that especially on photographic styles, they introduced it on the thirteens, right?

That’s the first time it came out. And so it, it’s not. But then the idea back then, I don’t think was as fully fleshed out. So I don’t think that back then they were capturing as much information. And I also had to wonder about storage size, right? Which brings me to the 4k 120 support on these pros with shooting 4k 120 content, you can slow things down a lot more for like way more dramatically slowed down and cinematic loading content as well as like HDR support in those.

situations. Of course, if you keep recording in those sort of high quality situations, you’re going to run out of storage soon. And then speaking of video recording, I am, I was so excited for audio mix. I really was very excited for the ability to use that spatial [00:24:00]audio file that’s recorded in all your videos now, and then kind of like drown out environmental noise or isolate and highlight the.

Voices of people speaking in the scene and frame in my admittedly limited testing so far, like the switch between standard and studio is the best. So you really just kind of get rid of a lot of ambient noise and make your, you know, subjects sound like they’re talking in a podcast, like we are now.

Like my microphone is now Yeah,

Devindra: your microphone sounds great when trillin’s like you’re there in front of microphones turned on we’re all we’re all golden this week I do feel like um, yeah, you can certainly fill up even if you have a terabyte iphone I feel like If you’re shooting 4k 120, you’re going to be sucking up some space, but they are making it more so that you can record and shoot directly to storage devices.

So I can imagine I see so many of those like little rigs that people are putting together. Like you put your iPhone in there. It’s also stabilizing rig. You could attach a microphone up top. But you could put a small SSD [00:25:00] there too. Like it is making the sort of Hey, you can have a little production studio built entirely around your iPhone and it’ll cost a lot of money, but there are some users, certainly pro users that would be into that, you know?

So it’s kind of, it’s cool to have that. That’s how they shot this. That that weekend video, right? Like with a rig a whole special thing, making him sing the song extra fast to slow down. That was fun.

Cherlynn: I think the idea of the iPhone 16 pros as like a, yeah, portable creator rig is a good way to think about them because a lot of the upgrades that at least drew my attention were for multimedia content creation.

Another thing that I was intrigued by, but that isn’t available yet is the multi. Layer or multitrack recording on voice memos. And then speaking of features that are still not yet here that half step sort of lock focus feature on camera control isn’t available yet. And then, of course, everything with Apple intelligence isn’t fully available yet.

I think that. It is not the first time Apple’s held back some marquee features at launch, but it is like, [00:26:00]it, it makes reviewing these things right now, the week that they go on sale a little trickier than usual. You will see the note on our review cards with about the score that we had to review them as is, and as is they, They seem to score lower than last year which I think is very fair.

I think especially, I actually had to flip the position of the pro and the pro max this year, just because the battery life to me was that much significantly lower. I, I actually almost dinged it quite a few more points and then was convinced to be like, okay, A bit more, a bit less angry about battery life.

I mean, it’s a

Devindra: fair comparison, but I do, I do want to know, like people like me who used to hate the Pro Max phones, like the titanium change last year was a huge difference. Like 10 to 15 percent change is noticeable. And if you care that much about battery life, it is still probably worth going for the big phone.

I also find myself. I don’t know about you Cherlynn, but I also I’m watching stuff like often in picture in picture mode at night while I’m cleaning up the kitchen and stuff like, or [00:27:00]while I’m just like browsing Twitter at night to like the ability to multifunction more on a bigger screen phone.

I see it. I see the point of that. You can’t do that as much on the smaller 16 pro.

Cherlynn: Yeah, I, I like being able to reach across the screen and hit something all the way on the other side anyways, as a person cursed with smaller hands, I think the smaller one is the ideal size for me. However, I might, I, I, I have this odd luxury of being able to carry two phones, right?

So maybe I’ll just Carry both the Pixel 9 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro. Now, a lot of people have asked me this, actually. Am I tempted to go back to Pixel? I am. I am very tempted by the Pixel 9 Pro. We did score it as of right now, a little higher than the iPhone 16 Pro. And trust me that that factored into my scoring decision.

I think. The competition from Google is stiffer than ever, is extremely stiff this year. I am in love with pixel UI, I’ve been for a very long [00:28:00] time. Especially on the call screening, especially on some of the call assist features. For some reason Google really understands how to do that stuff. I think, like I wrote in my review, it’s not that Apple is not considering these things, it’s that Apple is extremely cautious.

Apple’s more sensitive to being caught with egg on its face, perhaps, whereas Google’s probably we can just say, sorry, and Apple’s more, let’s not. Nobody’s buying these

Devindra: phones anyway. Nobody will notice. That’s what Google’s thinking. Nobody’s buying these Pixel phones. I don’t

Cherlynn: know. I, I think it’s, I think Google is a bit more a bit less risk averse.

And I, I get that vibe from the like Silicon Valley area in general.

Devindra: It does, it does come down to there, there were reports people are pointing to the flight tracker. You know, site is now tracking like the, the planes filled with iPhones coming to employee to, to customers, those planes have billions of dollars worth a single plane has billions of dollars of phones worth on them.

And it’s that is the function. That’s why Apple has to be safe. Whereas [00:29:00] for Google. How much of a percentage of Google’s revenue are Pixel phones?

Cherlynn: I get that. I get, I get that like it’s not a huge part of their revenue. Yeah, it’s definitely not as significant. I will say to, to Apple’s credit though, that like I said in my review, it’s more careful.

And its approach tends to be more well rounded. So when it comes to things like call screening or call related, anything that’s a little bit to do with personal private context things, Apple is slow. And I think reasonably so I think it’s okay to like. Take your time before you sick your AI on restaurants, calling them about opening hours.

That sort of thing. Apple is not going to do that ever. I think it’s wild that Google is able to, and I think there is helpful executions there too, but I don’t know that every single person would be as happy to embrace that. So it’s fine that they have two very different approaches. I just think that And that’s why maybe I have to have two phones, right?

One company is

Devindra: afraid of actively [00:30:00] harming society with new features that call, that have robots calling, you know, restaurants and the others just taking it slow. But I

Cherlynn: will say that, I will say that my, my desire to carry both of them nowadays has less to do with camera. Because it used to be I carried a pixel phone around because it was just so much better for for my photos and now it’s It’s it’s actually battery life and a little bit on like pixel call UI.

Oh, yeah I chatted with a friend on RCS for the first time yesterday and that was cool. Shout out to my friend who knows who they are who was on Android and we were texting and it was, it said text message RCS. You know how if you send green bubble messages, it says text message SMS. And now it says, Text message RCS, and now it’s freaking out, and then we could have back messages.

Devindra: It should be a rainbow bubble, like RCS, the thing unifying all the, all the different platforms. I

Cherlynn: think that would be a bit too ally for Apple to do.

Devindra: Allyship?

Cherlynn: Yeah,

Devindra: [00:31:00] it would be, it would be nice

Cherlynn: if they did, but no, I don’t think they would, it would, the implication is kind of weird Also hate that, because of that, we

Devindra: can’t use rainbows anymore in certain things.

That’s dumb.

Cherlynn: You can still use rainbows. I don’t think it matters. It just, I’m glad,

Devindra: I’m glad you’re able to do an RCS chat because we have talked about that for years. There was also the news that the RCS the group is now considering a way to make encryption happening, so that’s cool. Can I,

Cherlynn: can I just explain this a little bit?

So, when we, when this came out and made the rounds this week that RCS the GSMA was working on our end to end encryption for RCS. the universal profile, which is what Apple said it would adopt for iOS 18. And to be clear, there’s different profiles of RCS. The base one was the one that like Apple resisted forever because it was just not very secure.

It allowed businesses to text you with no reason. And there’s just a lot of issues with it. Universal profile comes closer. When Apple announced it would support RCS, it did make a It’s very clear that like end to end [00:32:00] encryption, it would work with the GSMA to bring end to end encryption to RCSUP before it fully embraced iOS 18 RCS and iOS 18.

So it’s not completely new, like you said, Devindra, that like we knew end to end encryption was coming and that’s why we were Apple

Devindra: says that they were going to work on it and now, now they, GSMA had to put out an announcement. Hey, we’re doing it. We’re doing it, baby. I

Cherlynn: mean, they’re working on it, but is it news?

Not really. I mean, it’s, it’s, it has to come.

Devindra: They’re doing it also Google

Cherlynn: messages. Yeah. But also Google messages had already, like Google had already implemented E2EE in its own Google message version of RCS UP, which is like a UP with a number, I believe So anyway come at me with

all your RCS nerdery, because apparently this is how much I know about it.

Devindra: Yeah. RCS message Cherlynn if you can find her. How about that? Anything else you want to mention about the phones? Cause I do want to talk a little bit about the Apple Watch Series 10. Yeah. That is the thing. That got all the big changes this year. And we just spent half an hour talking about a fricking camera button.

So come on, I

Cherlynn: mean, I feel like there’s more on the phone that I’m forgetting. Just go read [00:33:00] my review. It’s like very

Devindra: long, very nice reviews.

Cherlynn: Yeah. And, and the video on our YouTube channel as well. What’s up? What’s about okay. When you say the watch got all the big changes this year, what are you referring?

It

Devindra: has a new, it has a new design. It is much bigger. Like it is fundamentally a bigger TV. different feeling device. You noted that in your review, you know,

Cherlynn: it does feel different. It feels thinner every time I pick it up when it’s not on my wrist, when I pick it up to enter the password or look at the charge level, I feel it in my, in between my fingers, it feels thinner and different.

But the, and especially compared to the series nine, which I’ve been using since it was launched last year, the screens a little bit wider angle viewing. wider viewing angle. And, and, and, and, and that’s about it, right? I mean, what else is like the, the, the battery life for being thinner is very similar still to the Series 9.

In fact, sometimes I actually got a lot more battery life out of the Series 10. It, [00:34:00] I still couldn’t replicate that on a consistent, in a consistent way. So I don’t know Absolutely true that the Apple Watch Series 10 lasts longer than the Series 9. But yeah, I think it’s impressive that the technology they were able to come up with to reach that thinner frame.

And the wider angle. I didn’t notice the huge Here’s the thing, right? When you’re testing two watches side by side, y’all come to the Engadget Podcast for this sort of great interview. You’re just deadened

Devindra: to all the changes moving forward, right? Well, a little bit,

Cherlynn: but here’s what I was trying to do, right?

I had both watches on each of my wrists, and I was putting them down sort of on my lap to kind of see whether that wider viewing angle makes that huge of a difference. And I’m like, yeah, the one on the left, which is the Series 10, certainly looks like I can see it. Like the clock digits are brighter from that angle and, and more easy to see, whereas the right hand, which was the Series 9 was harder to read.

But you know what the difference was? Partly, yes, brightness. But the other part of it was the locks, the watch face. [00:35:00] Somehow when your AOD is dimmed in on both watches, you’re always on display is dimmed. The watch. digits on the Series 9, which to be clear was on watchOS 10, not 11 went into this outline instead of a solid font.

So the font was just, and of course that’s going to be harder to read, whereas like on the Series 10, which was running watchOS 11, when the AOD dimmed, the clock digits maintained their solid structure. So the font basically went from a fully filled solid digits situation to stroke only that sort of thing.

So if you know, graphic design, maybe you understand what I’m saying. And that contributes to it. Right. And then I’m not able to then confidently say that, you know, This is certainly a brighter screen at an off angle. I, I have to be like part of the visibility has to do with the fact that the font’s different.

So I don’t know. I, I, I didn’t get into the detail there. But you’re here, you’re, you’re here, you are privy to my inner most fonts. Okay. Okay. Podcast.

Devindra: Even, [00:36:00] even like the, the minimal design changes to the series 10 is more than the, than the phones got. Is the thing. Slightly thinner, slightly bigger.

I mean a whole

Cherlynn: new button. Look, the whole new button.

Devindra: Plus

Cherlynn: the fact that the screens are bigger, plus the fact that therefore the iPhone 15 Pros are just a little bit bigger than their predecessors means you have to get a whole new case, by the way. Yeah,

Devindra: it’s mainly the buttons. You have to get the whole new case.

Cherlynn: Well, no, the cases won’t fit. I asked and it was like, no, you need new cases even without the buttons. Of course.

Ben: Every year you need a new case. And that difference, the Oh, this is a little bit bigger so you need to get a whole new case and the fact that we spent so much time talking about a button is why all the other kids make fun of us.

Cherlynn: Who’s us and who’s the other kids? Sorry.

Ben: All of the Android people make fun of us. I consider

Cherlynn: myself an Android kid too,

Devindra: don’t us and them, me. I [00:37:00] am a bother. From one phone generation to the next like that is just like a given because things change button placements change camera Modules change, so I’m not gonna knock Apple too much on that.

But you know,

Ben: meanwhile What was Apple talking about so much during that event? We’re gonna be carbon neutral by this time. What is it? 2030 not that long. They are by not

Devindra: including the wired buds anymore

Cherlynn: Fiber Kate packaging

Devindra: fiber you can eat that box Yeah,

Cherlynn: if you’re having digestive issues if you

Devindra: want to, so it doesn’t sound like you’re super hot on the, the watch series.

It

Cherlynn: was hard for me to be excited because again, a lot of the marquee features are things you have to wait a little longer to figure out sleep, but we’re not waiting

Devindra: for apple intelligence on that. We’re not waiting for no, several months. Like we were watch. Yeah,

Cherlynn: we were during the review process waiting on the sleep apnea thing to be FDA green lit, but it did during the [00:38:00] review process.

And so it was like the day or two before that was like, Oh yeah, you can set up sleep apnea now. And to be clear, like we, we had more than a few days with sleep apnea, but, but it was like, Two days before the watch or the day before the watch review was supposed to go up, that sleep apnea came out with watchOS 11.

Did

Devindra: you, so did you do your sleep apnea test? No, because

Cherlynn: not only, I did, I did set it up. I set it up for the alerts. Right. And then, and I did that on the Monday that iOS 18 was pushed out because even though the FDA Greenlight announcement was on Friday. The iOS 18, watchOS 11, blah, blah, blah, update all came out to the public on Monday with the sleep apnea thing.

And then on watchOS 11, that’s when you can get it right. And you can get the sleep apnea tracking on watch series nine as well as watch ultra two. So even if I had tested was like a big deal, it was not going to super affect my score because you can get it on an older watch. Like it’s not, a huge part of the upgrade [00:39:00] equation, but also I had one night to put this thing on and you need to like sleep with it for

Devindra: 30 nights.

We’re gonna need an update on how much you snore and what your sleep breathing is like. Yeah.

Cherlynn: That’s what, that’s what has to

Devindra: happen. Yeah.

Cherlynn: So basically I think this sort of device and this sort of feature is something we want to spend more time with anyway. So yeah, just come back. Twingadget. com to see if I’m still alive and testing sleep apnea and breathing at night.

Devindra: It is hard to review something that is also meant to track data for several days, like to do that with under a week, you know, so you did, you did what you could. And also given the restrictions Apple placed on us by not having everything fully approved. So anyway, it sounds, it sounds cool. Go check out Shroen’s review.

Do you have a video of the Apple watch as well?

Cherlynn: We do not because that would have required shooting on Sunday when I was editing the AirPods review, so no. I mean,

Devindra: you’re, it never ends. It never ends. And we’re still waiting on the iPhone review. So, you know, that’s another thing. They’re coming!

Cherlynn: You can consider this my iPhone review, whatever the early [00:40:00]part of this episode was.

That was mine. There is a proper written version. So we know

Devindra: nobody reads anymore. Sherilyn like this is the future of all of our content. And anyway, folks, thank you so much, Sherilyn. If you got any thoughts or questions about the new iPhones and the new Apple watch, drop us an email at podcast and engadget.

com.

Let’s move on to some other news and sorry folks that we’re running through these stories kind of quickly. We’re just, we’re just so gadget heavy. We’ve got so many reviews to talk about. Is that time of

Cherlynn: year?

Devindra: Yeah. One thing I want to bring up is just a wild occurrence that happened on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I started seeing news reports Tuesday morning that pagers were exploding throughout Lebanon and that seemed weird. Like we saw the earlier reports were like, huh. That’s, that’s strange. Pagers are exploding. Then more reports, thousands of pagers are exploding. Then more and more reports. Basically I think by maybe not by the end of Tuesday, but there were [00:41:00] several waves of pager attacks, or at least one, that first major wave of pager attacks.

What we ended up learning is that likely it was Israel targeting members of the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon by their pagers. And I’m not going to get too deep into the politics of this all, but just that idea, I don’t know what you thought of the Sherwin, but I was thinking like, Oh my God, we’ve reached like enemy of the state level, weird attack vectors that would sound like science fiction just a couple of years ago.

So that is, that is where we’re at. This is like a live, ongoing story on Wednesday, another wave of attacks happened on walkie talkies. because I guess the plan was not to just hit pagers again because people stopped using their pagers. There are reports that solar panel you know, installations throughout Lebanon were attacked as well.

This is all in response to like other attacks that were happening from Hezbollah towards you know, people living in Israel and and like areas throughout that country too. So wild. I don’t [00:42:00]know. What did you think, Sherilyn, like when you heard of this?

Cherlynn: I mean, I’ll give you 10 to guess what my immediate thought was it was the same as what CF 542 is saying in our chat.

I was shocked that pagers were still being used. I think

Devindra: Listen, if you are if you are currently a member of a militant group and you know Your opponent is like highly technically capable. You’re like I can’t have a smartphone

Cherlynn: I can’t have things that they

Devindra: can hack, you know,

Cherlynn: right. So when you were recapping that, I, I, I, my brain made the connection.

Well, I mean, I kind of knew this, which is like you said. Yeah. A lot of people use lower technology devices to avoid surveillance or detection. Things like burner phones tend to be a little more simple pagers. And you mentioned walkie talkies and solar panels. It was interesting to me how it is. These would appear to be like less sophisticated, more analog devices that were being targeted.

And things not connected to the internet. Right, exactly. You would, right. It’s even harder. So it’s you would think that internet is the more hackable sort of technology because [00:43:00]it’s more communication availability. But no, it’s these things that are just chilling along on, I guess, radio waves for a lot of them especially walkie talkies and what, pagers.

Devindra: Yeah. And the, the actual we’re still like, this is an ongoing story. The full extent to like how the explosive devices got into the pagers and into the walkie talkies, Is the whole thing because the company behind the pagers is apparently a Taiwan based thing, but they were like, we did not manufacture those.

And then people tracked it to a company in in Turkey that was building devices. And they were like, Oh, we didn’t build those either. So it’s like, where did these come from? How did these get into the supply chain? But also I think it was also like subcontractors

Ben: on subcontractors

Devindra: upon. So, so, but how do you, how do you get to people outside of hacking a good internet connected device?

We have heard stories like I am. I. Like to read the stories about like how real life spies do their work. And there’s a lot of stories about what Russia has done and what Russian spies have done, like the poisoning of people in broad daylight throughout throughout England. That’s something Russia is known for.

This is just like wild and I [00:44:00]guess there are two arguments. It’s, it’s a little more targeted than like missile attacks, but also these things were exploding in public spaces. Children were killed. Thousands of people were injured. The latest total I saw is 25 people were killed, 600 injured. This is just like one of those things where it’s I don’t.

You don’t know what’s safe anymore when these devices, these devices that you think are just dumb and silly can just explode at any moment. So, terrifying.

Ben: Yeah, and the politics of this situation is really difficult to get into, so we’ll mostly try to sidestep that. I’m feeling for the Lebanese population right now.

This is like pure stochastic

Devindra: terrorism, basically, but yeah.

Ben: From the perspective of gadget people, we love our devices. We use our devices to relax. The idea that you are afraid to touch your device now, because you don’t know what’s been tampered with and what hasn’t been tampered with. The idea that there are families who are completely unaffected and, you know, not Affiliated with Hezbollah at all are maybe putting all of their [00:45:00]devices out in the yard a good distance away from the house because they’re afraid of them now, that

Devindra: sucks.

People are afraid to use their computers, any of their other devices, like it’s just, this is a weird situation.

Cherlynn: Do y’all see how many phones I held up just now?

Devindra: Yeah, you are, you are quite the, the attack vector right now, Cherlynn. I mean, listen, I have like right behind me, people who can see me on camera.

Like I have a lot of old devices that I need to certainly electronically recycle because I’m worried about what happens to old lithium batteries. And so that’s not even worrying about an attack like this. We will be keeping an eye on the story. This is like all ongoing stuff, but I wanted to mention it because this is directly.

I’ve never seen a military or I’ve never seen like a specific attack against a military opponents like this. And philosophically, like as somebody who thinks about like how we wage war and how innocents are touched and all this stuff, it is deeply, deeply troubling. We’re going to move on to just some strange, like straight up gadget [00:46:00]stuff.

So let’s just laugh at snaps. Fifth generation spectacles. How about that? Look at poor Chrisabelle, who did this coverage for us, has had to take pictures of herself wearing these God awful looking augmented reality glasses. These are standalone AR glasses. They’re going to be sold to developers who commit to a yearlong 99 a month subscription to start working on AR apps, I guess, similar to what Apple did with Vision Pro, except it’s not being sold to normal people at all.

Because I think if people saw the real cost of these things if you had to put a dollar to it, you would probably laugh Snapchat off the face of the planet. Like these would probably cost four to 5, 000 a pair, given the level of technology in them. Thoughts on these Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: I mean, I think they looked weird AF until I watched the Emmys last night.

And I was like, wow, I guess Eugene Levy is wearing the same sort of glasses. The same style glasses, right? They were these very thick black frames that are extremely boxy, especially [00:47:00]near the temples. And I think Carissa got a little roasted on the threads.

Ben: But those actually

Cherlynn: looked good. What?

Ben: But they actually looked good.

The older ones look better. These just look chunky.

Cherlynn: So, okay. To be clear though, the new, the ones now are AR glasses. They have a display in them. I believe the older Snap Spectacles are just camera toting glasses. No, the ones so the

Ben: last picture And I’m also talking about Eugene Levy’s glasses.

Eugene Levy’s

Cherlynn: ones are great. They’re the Prada or Dior ones, so

Ben: Yeah, they were fashion glasses. I was thinking, okay, these look very chunky. Fashion glasses tend to look chunky. I literally just looked up. Glasses designed by like Terry Mugler or, you know, house of Mugler, like very high fashion sort of stuff.

Mugler is known specifically for kind of sci fi looking outfits. Zendaya actually wore a like whole suit of armor designed by Mugler. This is a really

Cherlynn: strange tangent. We’re going down. Like I am here for it,

Devindra: but

Ben: these glasses, yeah. [00:48:00] These. The Mugler glasses actually look good. They are chunky.

They take up so much of your face. Go look them up on your own. These just look bad. I mean,

Devindra: I’m specifically comparing them to the last pair Carissa tested Trillin. So I think that was the fourth one. And those did have AR display. She did do a test of that. So this is not just the camera ones that they were selling.

But,

Cherlynn: yeah.

Devindra: My point was

Cherlynn: just going to be that like, we’re not going to review this thing obviously. They’re not selling it. But I can’t wait for us to take a look. A deeper dive into them. We will be doing that. We just won’t be reviewing, reviewing. We will be reviewing it. I

Devindra: think we are fully well within our rights to point and laugh at how silly this all looks.

And next week we’re going to hear about Meta’s you know, concept AR glasses. So that’s Orion and the sort of like tease photo. We saw those things, which was in the background of one of Zuckerberg’s photos earlier this year. Those just look like chunky hipster frames. And maybe those aren’t like fully the things, but at least those look more like glasses than whatever the [00:49:00] hell is happening here.

Like I couldn’t, I couldn’t help it laugh, but Chris has done some great coverage for us to go check out her story on this stuff briefly. I also want to point out, I wrote about the Vive Focus Vision. HTC Vive is still making VR headsets and this is their latest standalone headset. It’s 9. 99. It’s interesting because they’re, they have better cameras for mixed reality.

And also they have a cool. An accessory, a display port accessory that you can buy. It’s like 150. It gives you a direct connection to your computer for connected wired VR. And that is different compared to what Oculus link did or the metal link does on Meta’s headsets. When you plug into a PC, you’re basically seeing a video feed of what a VR window is seeing on your computer.

By going directly to the graphics card, you’re not getting any of that distortion or anything. So this functions more like a traditional VR headset. It looks cool, feels cool. Hope to do a fuller review of this thing, but I also don’t, no one’s going to buy this. This is 9. is selling these headsets [00:50:00] to businesses and they are doing a good job of that.

But, you know, they’re not competing with the meta quest at, you know, 400 and 500. These things are just so much more expensive. We also saw the news that Lionsgate, the movie studio has signed a deal with runway, the AI startup. So that the, let me see here. It will allow runway access to Lionsgate content their library in exchange for a fresh custom AI model that the studio can use in production and editing.

That can mean all sorts of things, but I know among Hollywood, among artists, actors, and directors, like this is the AI encroachment in movie making. is something that people are afraid of. Maybe there’s a way that they could use it. That is like a non harmful way, like a simpler way. Hey, listen, I’ve used AI to plug in one word into a podcast episode where it’s I don’t, I can’t match the voice to retake it.

But if I type the word here and I train this thing on my voice, and it’s a local model that I fully control it can replicate a word for me. That makes my life a little easier. Maybe they can [00:51:00]do that, but it’s tough for artists. Tough to manage that.

Cherlynn: Yeah. I will say that as of six or seven years ago at 1MWC, there was a tool like that online somewhere that allowed you to create like voice models for of people.

And so me, Matt Smith, and I think Aaron Supor is playing with this. We created voice models of each other. And so I made Matt Smith’s fake voice say, Japan, Japan, Japan. And I really recall this very strongly. Here’s the thing, though. I will also mention that it’s not specific or unique to AI, right? To be able to do this, because I will give you another behind the scenes tidbit that our iPhone 16 review video, there was a moment where I made the mistake and said, the iPhone 15 pros battery life sucks or something along those lines.

And I was like, crap, I meant the iPhone 16 pro and our video editor, Ryan Oh, was able to cook up some magic and find a bit where I said the word. Yeah. And just replace it correctly. So that’s

Devindra: normal editing using your normal [00:52:00] voice. It’s normal

Cherlynn: editing. Editing, but you’re also able to like, you know, being able to get a model of my voice to say the correct words Seems useful to me in in situations like that for post processing, but I can see how it raises concerns of who has control Like you said over who has control i’m

Devindra: sure actors are worried writers are worried about what words they can inject in things we will be keeping an eye on the story for sure.

Ben: I have one kind of easy prediction to make about this. That Runway will develop some kind of internal tool for Lionsgate. Lionsgate will push this very much on their editors and all of their workers. They’ll be like, use the internal tool, use the internal tool. They will make a big deal about how one movie used the internal tool and then we’ll never hear about it again.

Devindra: I hope so. I hope, I hope that’s what it is. But I also know like executives and a lot of basically studio executives cannot wait to stop paying money to actors and writers. Like they just want to like, get [00:53:00]stuff out there to start selling movie tickets or whatever. So yeah, we will see the, the, all these tools can be useful in the right hands.

We are worried about the right hands. Let’s Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: I, this weekend. So, and I was very excited to share this on this podcast. I was like telling the team, I have to be here for this. Have you heard of the film Speak No Evil?

Devindra: Yes. Oh, you saw the new one.

Cherlynn: I saw the new one. The, the one with James McAvoy, who is just so menacing in it.

The reviews. said that he’s perfected the art of being menacing and they are so right. He is horrifying and such a scary and like the, the way, okay, so this film is about this family meeting or running into another family consisting of James McAvoy, his parents. wife and their child in italy somewhere and then that they hit it off the james mcavoy invites them over to stay at their countryside place For a weekend [00:54:00]and again some of their you know, better instincts They they do do it and then it turns out this is the like strangest family ever No spoilers, but I think you can see where it’s headed.

I think Though that the entire experience was really illuminating for me because some of the, the altercations they get into are so reminiscent of like my real life where you do interact with people who just say shit for no reason sometimes, right? on the internet, in the real world. Like people sometimes say shit and then they go, Oh, sorry.

Sorry that you misunderstood what I said, or, Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. Oh, PC. Oh, woke. Like people who use that sort of like labels to defend bad behavior. And you have a lot of that. And so I spent a lot of the movie because I didn’t guess the ending. I spent a lot of the movie wondering if.

They were actually like bad, bad, or if they were just unintentional bad, right? And that’s me because I’m, I’m the sort of person that gaslights myself. But that’s, that’s what happens. I think that the [00:55:00] way the actors played it was really nuanced and that’s why I was led to that belief. But also the, the, just the whole telling of the story was so like masterful.

The tension never lets up. It’s just, it’s great. It’s really cool. I’m glad I really enjoyed it.

Devindra: I would recommend Trillin. That you watch the original movie, which is mostly in English too, but it’s more about the difference. I believe it’s like the difference between like Danish culture and Finnish culture and how they can be like slightly different, but also that original movie.

is horrifying. It is so bleak. It is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen. And what I’ve heard is that the American version, this one’s

Cherlynn: pretty bleak too, but yeah, I’ve

Devindra: heard it doesn’t go as far as the original does. And I don’t, I don’t like the ending of the original. I think it’s a deeply disturbing movie, but that was a movie about.

our society of politeness, right? Where somebody says something weird and you’re like, Oh, okay. Well, I’m a guest. So I’m just gonna roll with it. Right. It’s the same thing. It’s the same [00:56:00]story. Yeah. It’s also about like how hard it is to make friends as adults because that original movie was just like this like yuppie couple with the kid is I, how do we, how do we hang out with people?

Oh, this, this couple seems nice. I think both these movies sound like the in why you do not make friends on vacation. You meet somebody you meet a couple you meet you meet people on vacation. They’re not last let it go. Yeah Yeah, they’re temporary friends. Yeah, let it go. Do not visit their houses. Do not do anything I’m looking forward to seeing this movie Cherlynn.

I can’t

Cherlynn: wait till you see it. Tell me how you think it

Devindra: is It is fun to see Scoot McNary and Mackenzie Davis. Yes, like normal couple. This is a this is a halting catchfire reunion A show I’ve told all of you who’ve been listening to watch forever. They both co star in that show. That’s an amazing show for techies.

It’s about the sort of like PC building world in Texas in the eighties. It’s a lot of fun. It’s like mad men, but also far, far geekier. So check that out. Well, I’m glad you like anything else you want to try out Cherlynn.

Cherlynn: I cancelled my Hulu subscription, [00:57:00] so, there you go. They, they, I, I thought I was being scammed when I got an email from Hulu at HuluMail.

com, which just sounded like the worst email in the world. But they were like, price is increasing soon, like 20 basically for a no ad subscription. I was like, what the hell, I’m not doing that. Plus, I also have Disney Plus. So I’m like, I get quite a lot of the same library with that.

Devindra: Yeah, it’s, it’s so very confusing, what is, is, It is still very

Cherlynn: confusing, yeah.

So for me, I’m like, let’s cancel it and see what’s gonna happen. But yeah, I mean, I, I, my, my Disney Plus subscription is annual, and my Hulu one is monthly. So I just canceled the monthly one first and see how that goes. All right. Since I can’t cancel Disney Plus. Good luck. And then, well, yeah my, my recommendation is if it works out, I’ll tell you that to go with Disney Plus instead of Hulu and Disney.

Devindra: Gotcha. Have you checked out Agatha all along yet? I feel like that’s in your I have not. I

Cherlynn: saw it on yeah, I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s on my list.

Devindra: I saw the first few episodes. It’s, it’s fun. It’s fun more mostly because Aubrey Plaza gets to be fun. Oh, yeah! I saw that. Give me a witchy Aubrey Plaza, please.

She is [00:58:00] fantastic in that show. And

Cherlynn: the gay splosion I heard,

Devindra: I want to recommend you folks, I’ve talked about Pachinko before, which is the Apple TV plus show based on the novel about this sort of sweeping tale of a Korean family from leaving Korea to immigrating to Japan throughout the 1900s.

And also it occurs across different time periods. I started watching season two. This show is still incredible. It looks fantastic. Just incredibly well written. It’s just like deeply emotional. I love seeing very, very complex, very far reaching immigrant tales. And this is one of those, Sherilyn, I think you really got to watch this show because it will destroy you.

It is just so fascinating. So yeah. Loving Pachinko Season 2. Also Season 2 has a new opening dance sequence, which became a big hit. with the first season. Still good. I don’t think it hits the same highs for me as the Pachinko season one opening, but still very good. Also quickly want to shout out Lego Star Wars Rebuild the Galaxy, which is a Lego Star Wars thing.

My daughter saw a picture of this and she was like, we got to watch this. I don’t know what’s happening [00:59:00]here. I have not fully gotten her into any Star Wars stuff. We’ve tried the Clone Wars cartoons and They’re really slow. Like it’s really tough for her to get into. I’m not going to do the movies.

The original movies just take forever to get started. Maybe when she was like eight or 10, she can survive those things, but she loved Lego Star Wars, rebuilt the galaxy. It’s a funny, you know, Lego variant of this thing, but also does something that I don’t think Star Wars will ever be able to do, which is completely break and rebuild the entire mythology.

Like at the, you know, In the first episode, they just completely rework it’s sort of like a what if thing. They just rework who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? What happened here? How did key events happen? It’s just completely different and they’re going to run with this timeline. A lot of good guys become bad.

You may see this in the poster, but a Darth Jar Jar Binks. Is a thing and he is hilarious. Like he’s not, he’s, he’s a dark, he’s a sip. But he’s also silly and bumbling. And my daughter thinks he’s hilarious every time he falls on his face. So it’s just, it has a lot of fun with star Wars mythology, a lot of deep cuts in there.

And I think it’s fun if you’ve got [01:00:00]kids who cannot. really pay attention to the little, the, the Star Wars stuff that takes a little, you know, more to get into. I think this is like perfect. Okay. So check it out. Lego Star Wars rebuild the galaxy.

Cherlynn: Well, that’s it for the episode this week, everyone.

Thank you as always for listening. Our theme music is by game composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O’Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find the Vindro. At

Devindra: Davindra on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky, all over the place. And I podcast about movies and TV at The Filmcast, thefilmcast.

com. Oh, also I did a Twit. I did This Week in Tech this week. So go check out the latest episode at twit. tv.

Cherlynn: If you want to tell me what your favorite photographic style is. So I can use it on more selfies of me send them to me. I am at Cherlynn low on X or at Cherlynn, Instagram, C H E R L Y N N S T A G R A M on threads, email us your thoughts at podcast at engadget.

com. Leave us a [01:01:00]review, please, on whatever podcast platform you’re listening on and subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

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I’ve been waiting for years to tackle a Pro iPhone review, and I couldn’t have gotten the opportunity at a better time. All of this year’s iPhone 16 models have a ton of camera enhancements under the surface, and as MobileSyrup’s resident photographer, I’ve been having a blast testing out these new phones.

The all-new Camera Control button champions these photo upgrades, and while it’s so much more than a button, the new Photonic Engine has been my favourite new feature. It offers a lot of versatility when you’re editing photos and works harder to give users more control over skin tones. There are even a bunch of bespoke new image presets that are super fun to use, and this year, they aren’t baked into your pictures forever. Combining this with last year’s automatic Portrait mode feature gives you more flexibility to stylize your photos after taking them and allows you to change them in days, or even years after you’ve shot them.

Alongside the camera upgrades, there are some really nice quality-of-life improvements too. Each iPhone 16 Pro has a bigger battery than the previous generation, a stronger screen, and enough horsepower to support the upcoming Apple Intelligence features and the company’s AAA gaming ambitions. That means 8GB of RAM and the new A18 chipset that benchmarks surprisingly close to the M1 desktop chip from a few years ago.

Numerous upgrades are also available for video shooters, including a few new software audio enhancements paired with studio-quality microphones on the phones themselves. This ensures that whether you’re filming a selfie video on a windy beach or a short film, the iPhone 16 Pro is versatile enough for both situations and quite a few in between.

That all being said, the MobileSyrup iPhone reviews will be a bit different this year as I add to it over the next few weeks once I get to test every aspect of the phones thoroughly, ending with the suite of Apple Intelligence features that are set to arrive over the next few months and into next year. iOS 18.1 will come in October with AI writing tools, Notifications/Mail summaries, and the ability to edit people out of photos. Rumours suggest that another wave will come in December with Genmoji and ChatGPT’s integration into Siri. And the new AI-capable Siri will likely arrive sometime after that.

After my 16 Pro review units arrived, I spent my first days with the 16 Pro Max while my girlfriend Alex hoisted the 16 Pro. We tested some general features and the cameras by touring around Toronto. We walked almost 100km last week on these adventures, shooting around 3,000 photos across the iPhone 16 Pro series and the regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. You can find my iPhone 16 review in progress on our website later this week, and it’s safe to say both of us love Camera control and the new photography enhancements on both phones. We’ve shot a ton of videos too, but I haven’t had time to edit them into a YouTube review just yet. Keep your eyes peeled for the first update to these reviews coming later this week (or early next week), when I put together my video, fully shot on an iPhone to test all the new video features.

For now, let’s jump into the new photography enhancements.

Camera control makes you the fastest photographer in the west

First and foremost, you can’t pick up a new iPhone this year without touching the new Camera Control area. It’s a combination of a button and a narrow trackpad on the right side of the phone that’s placed to be easily hit with your thumb or index finger, depending on how you’re holding the phone. There are three ways to interact with the button – ‘swiping,’ ‘clicking’ it down, and ‘pressing’ on the sensor with a bit of pressure, but not enough to make it click.

If your phone is asleep, a single press simply awakens your device like the power/Siri button, a quick double press launches the camera, like the shortcut built into the power button on most Android devices. Honestly, it’s not something I thought would happen, but since phones are so large now, being able to unlock my phone with the lower placement of the Camera control has been the main way I unlock the iPhone 16 Pro Max. This has been great for being able to trigger the camera before I even get the phone in front of my eyes, and once open, a soft press pulls up the new Camera control menu, letting you then swipe through a variety of options depending on what app you’re using. In the iOS camera app, you can choose between Zoom, Exposure, Depth blur, Cameras, Styles and Tones.

Any photographer can agree that the faster you can get your camera out, the less likely you are to miss shots. In a photojournalism workshop in college, the teacher walked in one day with a sick orange hat in hand said, “The first person to take a photo of me wins this hat,” and before they could finish, I had snapped a picture because I knew how to use the lock screen camera shortcut on my (then new) iPhone 7 Plus. I’ve been thinking about that a lot with this new Camera Control scheme, and I’m happy to know that in a quick draw against an Android phone, the iPhone can compete, and it will all come down to the user holding the camera and not the platform they use.

Having said that, there is a decent learning curve with the new button/touchpad-area, and it takes some practice to get used to all its nuances. Clicking to open the camera and then clicking again to take a photo is easy, but getting used to the more subtle presses and swipes to open and navigate the sub-menu takes a bit more time. It’s been definitely interesting to fight against my own muscle memory this past week to adjust the exposure, or zoom through the button instead of the screen, however, the more Alex and I use the camera system, the more natural and intuitive it feels. The beauty of it is that you can use it however you want: by taking advantage of all its functionality, or by using a few features. Alex, for example, has loved using the quick video recording, while I’ve found myself mainly using the Zoom and Styles functionality.

Styles have been the star of the show for me, with six ‘undertones’ to help you dial in the perfect skin tones without adjusting the overall look of the photo substantially, and nine ‘moods’ which are more stylized looks like ‘Vivid,’ two Black and White filters, a warm ‘Cozy’ look and more. The real jaw-dropper so far is the Ansel Adams-inspired ‘Stark Black & White’ for its sharp contrast with deep blacks and crisp white highlights. While I’ve shot Black & White film a few times, growing up in a digital world with increasingly rich and colourful screens, I’ve never found myself drawn to it, but the new iPhone 16 photonic engine has finally unlocked its potential for me since I don’t have to be afraid of wanting a colourful shot later. If I do, I can edit the picture again to bring it back to whatever I want.

When Photographic styles launched on the iPhone 13 series, I was always a little hesitant to stray from Apple’s baseline processing because I often compare phone cameras to each other for work, and it felt like the default camera in the past gave me the most flexibility when editing. That’s all changed with the new Styles that can be edited and swapped out in the Photos app on iPhone, so my old worries are gone, and it’s incredibly freeing. If I want to shoot an event in black and white or with a film-inspired mood, I can, and I don’t have to worry about someone asking me for a colourful edit later down the line. The iPhone 16 series covers all my bases right out of the box.

Beyond that, by day two with the iPhones, the ‘Amber’ Undertone became my new default shooting mode for pictures outside and ‘Rose gold’ worked the best for pictures of me since it kept a little magenta in my skin tone. Amber has some warmth pumped in, and I’ve found it really brings beautiful subtle warm tones in browns, greens and reds without looking too yellow. It’s been perfect for making these hot early September days feel like a summer memory. If you dive into the iOS Settings app and navigate to the camera section, you can set your default style and the intensity you want it to be.

The Tone slider within styles also does a lot to help you get more shadows in your image for photos with more contrast and less of a flat HDR effect. If you used the ‘Rich Contrast’ Photographic style on the iPhone 13/14/15 series, this little control lets you dial in that look with a lot more precision and power. Before the iPhone 16 series came out, I was shooting a lot with the Halide camera app to use its fun ‘Process Zero’ mode to help me get images with more contrast and less HDR flatness. The new Tone control doesn’t do exactly the same thing as Process Zero, but it does finally let me move away from that default iPhone computational photography look, which makes me super happy.

It would have been great for Apple to apply some haptics to the Camera Contol’l zoom features, especially since it can move at varying speeds and with momentum. Having fine-grained vibrations to let you know your zooming would probably be helpful since the icons are pretty small. I also wish the zoom icon in the camera control menu was a telescope or binoculars instead of the current design, which is a crosshair. It just doesn’t scream “Zoom controls” to me. There are some options to customize the button in the Camera settings. All you can do right now is switch the quick launch action from a single to a double press or set it to open a third-party camera like Halide.

My only real problem with Camera Control is that I wish there were a way to reverse the scrolling direction. The way it works now is the opposite of my actual camera zoom lens. Therefore, my brain always wants to push my finger along the button to zoom out and pull it to zoom in, but in the current iteration, it’s the opposite. It’s a small thing, and I’ve already gotten more comfortable with it over the past week, but the option would be nice and I expect all photographers would be thankful for the added personalization.

When you’re re-editing your photos (or right in the camera viewfinder), you can pull up a new grid matrix styles editor to dial in your look. This lets you very quickly and intuitively control saturation, tone, and the colour palette. Moving the control dot left and right sways the colours. Up and down does the Tone, and a slider below the grid does the Palette, which applies how strongly the style is on your photo. Not only does this grid method work really well, but it’s also quite simple to use and has subtle haptic feedback to help you control your image exactly as you want. When doing this, you’ll notice a bubble at the top of the screen showing you exactly what you’re changing, making it easy to apply similar effects to your other images or reset it back to the default it was shot at.

 

 

Since iOS 17.5, you’ve been able to copy and paste edits made in the photos app. You can do the same with the new Photographic Styles, making them more like traditional filters. However, they’re a lot more robust than something you’d typically call a filter and line up more with the camera image profiles you might find baked into a pro camera like the Fujifilm X-H2S I use for work or Adobe’s Lightroom camera profiles for RAW images. If you’re a fan of Apple’s existing photo filters, don’t worry; those are still here, but the Photographic Styles from the iPhone 13/14/15 have been scrapped and re-done. Even though there is a ‘Vivid’ style on both the new and old iPhones, the new one is much more stylized, whereas the old one is closer to one of the new undertones.

Regardless of which undertone you choose, it should help you dial in a look that compliments your skin. This has been something Google has used to market Pixel phones for years, and the Pixel camera is really good, but I appreciate how Apple has given more control and choice to iPhone users. I can dial my photos in and ensure my subjects look their best regardless of the lighting and skin tones and I don’t have to rely on an algorithm like I don with a Pixel. In practice, these undertones do slightly change the colour science of each frame, and not just the skin tones, but the skin tones are the focus, and as I mentioned above, I’ve been using the Amber undertone as a subtle filter for all my photos to add a bit of warmth to them, but Rose Gold also pushes the magenta values which my pale skin from looking waxy, and depending on your skin and your preferences you could use two completely different options and be just as satisfied as I am.

Other hardware improvements on the iPhone 16 Pro include adding the 5x zoom lens (120mm equivalent) that was exclusive to the 15 Pro Max last year. This is my first iPhone with 5x since I used a regular 15 Pro last year, and it’s been a treat to get crispy zoom shots over great distances this year. The lens compression of 5x really helps the small camera punch above its weight class since you can get a little more natural blur in the background and foreground with this focal length. I also like it better when both pro iPhones are aligned since it’s annoying having to get the large phone for a better camera. This lens only clocks in at 12 megapixels, but it’s tuned extraordinarily well, and it absolutely surprised me with how outstanding images can be out of it. Shooting in RAW Max takes this up another level, even in low light, which blew my mind.

All the Photos samples in my review have been edited using the iOS Photos app this year. That said, I used Lightroom mobile for a few key edits, such as dust removal in the first picture above. 

This might be the lowest resolution of the trio of lenses on the back of the iPhone 16 Pro series, but you’d never know it. Even foliage isn’t oversharpened and holds up to more cropping than you’d expect. The good thing about Apple not changing this lens’s sensor this year is that it’s had more time to refine it, and in my testing, that’s paid off considerably.

This year, the Ultrawide sensor was upgraded to a new 48-megapixel sensor, which has been a delight to use and works much better in low light than previous iPhones. The focal length on this one is equivalent to a 13mm full-frame lens, and Apple’s implementation is way more pro than it needs to be. There’s minimal barrel distortion and really sharp details, even in dim settings. In the dark, it does struggle a bit more than the other lenses, but I’m going to keep testing it and see what I can get out of it over the next few weeks. I always struggle to find good compositions for Ultrawides, and because I find the default 24mm normal to be plenty wide, I haven’t switched to it as much as I should have.

That said, there is one Ultrawide feature I got a ton of use this year: the upgraded macro mode. The new 48-megapixel Ultrawide unlocks fantastic macro photography on iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. It’s seriously impressive, and I’ve been hunting bugs all weekend to try and test the mode with cool subjects. After coming off the impressive 48-megapixel Macro on the Pixel 9 (not the Pro), I was super eager to test out Apple’s version, and my first attempt fell flat… But that was from user error. I was used to holding other phones with macro mode around 30-40mm from a subject, and the iPhone shines super close up as low as 15mm, which might not sound like a lot of difference, but at this scale, it was a huge leap for me, and my photography.

Because the focus plane of the macro mode is so shallow, you need to make sure your camera is insanely close to your subject, and you’re tapping to get the focus you want. It can be difficult to do when your camera is shoved in a bee’s face on a flower blowing in the wind, but once I figured it out, no bug was safe from my giant camera giving them their covergirl moments. This also highlighted how fast the iPhone 16 Pro camera can be. I noticed barely any shutter lag as I was jamming the camera control ten times in a row and praying the wind would die down.

Since you can get so close, it almost feels like you’re looking at plants and bugs at their level. It’s just cool to see these tiny things blown up through the power of your iPhone. As you can see on the bee above, there is an incredible amount of detail on its face, and you can even see flecks of pollen in its hair and on its legs. The crisp detail on the wings is also mind-boggling, but as you can see from the left legs being blurry, the focus plane is incredibly shallow, so I’d recommend just going wild and shooting a ton of shots, especially if the subject is moving. Thankfully, the iPhone camera is backed by the extraordinarily powerful A18 chip, so as long as you keep pushing down on the Camera Control button, the phone will keep up.

The main lens is pretty similar to the iPhone 15 and 14 Pros, but Apple has updated the sensor this year to work better with its new chip for zero shutter lag even when taking ProRaw images, which is the biggest form of camera capture on the Pro iPhones. Overall, this camera is still great, and my favourite feature is actually the Fusion Camera system for simply allowing me to dive into the camera settings and set my default photo lens to be equivalent to a 35mm lens on a full-frame camera. This feature is already on the iPhone 15 Pro, but it’s really nice, and as I mentioned above, I find the default 24mm option pretty wide. It’s a good social focal length, but I like the tighter focus 35mm offers for my shooting style. You can also set the Fusion camera to 28mm, but I haven’t spent much time with that one because I’m just so satisfied with 35mm.

Video features

This year, all the iPhone 16 series phones include new studio-quality spatial audio microphones, and they have some cool voice isolation tech that’s on by default that helps your video sound better if you’re recording in a loud space. There’s also a new feature called Audio Mix that lets you manually apply audio processing to your videos in three different ways. I’ve only run one test with this, and so far, it’s pretty cool and seems to work as advertised, but I’ll have more thoughts in my first review update once I’m done editing my #shotoniPhone16 video review.

One thing that’s been incredibly handy for shooting the content we’ve gotten so far is the ability to shoot 4K HDR and 4K Apple LOG in 4K 120 frames per second. If you want to shoot LOG at this high frame rate, you must have an external SSD attached. But even the standard 120 fps video in Dolby Vision HDR is incredible and lets you get amazing slow-motion footage. You can even adjust the playback frames per second in the iPhone camera app, giving you a lot of control over the footage without exporting it to Final Cut Pro on Mac or Capcut on mobile. The sample below is 4K slowed down to various speeds, but because editing HDR footage is tough to match with my mirrorless camera, so I always turn HDR video off on my iPhones, so this sample isn’t in Dolby Vision and is instead in rec.709 SDR.

Regardless, being able to shoot actual 120 and 60fps video natively in the camera app without switching to a dedicated slow-motion mode is a blessing for content creators. For instance, whenever I cover an event like the iPhone launch, I just run around with my camera on a gimbal running at 4K 60fps so that I can slow each shot down by 50 percent to make sure that I can stretch my b-roll as long as possible, even if I’m only able to grab short clips. This also allows me to pull screenshots from the footage that usually looks pretty decent. You may not have realized it yet, but all the two shots of me walking around holding the iPhone in the collages above are screenshots pulled from 60fps iPhone 16 Pro footage Alex shot for this review’s upcoming video portion.

Ok, we get it. The cameras are great; what about the rest of the damn phone?

Good news! This year’s package is fantastic overall, even if the most enticing upgrades for me are in the camera department.

The first thing you’ll notice when picking up the iPhone 16 Pro or 16 Pro Max is the impressive screen with its silky smooth 120fps refresh rate and super minimal screen borders. While I’m not on team “every device needs a 120hz screen,” I appreciate it when I have it, and the iPhone screen is tuned to perfection. Scrolling around the operating system feels great, and watching movies with 120fps action scenes (pretty much only Avatar 2, lol. James Cameron is crazy for that one) is great. Combined with the excellent HDR enabled by the phone’s 2,000 nits of maximum brightness, the colour and light reproduction is fabulous. Obviously, I’m not advocating for watching Avatar 2 on your iPhone, but it’s a great test for both the screen and the built-in speakers, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max, especially with its larger display, passed with perfectly saturated colours.

The speakers themselves are super loud this year and offer a robust sound stage with spatial audio. You’ll want the phone centred in front of you to get the most out of that 3D audio effect, but for music and podcasts, I’d call it room-filling for maybe the first time ever. Not that the 15 Pro was bad. I used the phone as a speaker hundreds of times, but there’s a little more bass in the new device that really helps it feel more robust and balanced compared to last year’s Pro iPhone. I’ve been using phone speakers more and more over the past few years, and I never really expected my phone to Sherlock my Bluetooth speakers, but it’s happening, and this year continues to push that needle forward.

While Alex and I have only lived with these iPhones for a short time, during that time, we pushed the batteries to their absolute limits, shooting a ton of photos and videos. I’ll have more to share after a few more weeks with the phones, but compared to my 15 Pro (92% battery capacity left) and the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, the Pros are great, especially the Pro Max. On our first five-hour photo adventure, both phones lasted the whole time, and we didn’t even need to charge when we got home. It was really impressive compared to the next day of testing the 16 and 16 Plus which needed a portable battery to top up mid day. It made me confident that if I were buying an iPhone for content creation, not only would the cameras be better on the Pros, but the battery could get you through long shoot days more effectively.

Other improvements I haven’t gotten time to test yet are the upgraded AAA gaming capabilities, which, in my brief test of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, seemed smoother than my 15 Pro, but I’ll need to dive deeper into that one before I say anything definitive there. The new screens are supposed to be more scratch and crack-resistant this year, but I’m not willing to take a hardness pick to my phone or drop it, so you’re better off waiting for a review from Consumer Reports or JerryRigEverything if you want to see someone pull a knife on the new screens. What I was able to test was the waterproofing. I’ve made it a habit of dunking my phones into the koi pond near my house to take underwater pictures of the fish for my camera samples, and the Pro Max is still kicking. There was some water in the top speaker that took a bit to dry out, but a quick speed run through the Avatar 2 fight scenes at max volume helped shake the water loose, and it’s been normal since then.

I’ve heard about AI updates are they good?

The iPhone 16 series (and the 15 Pro) are Apple’s only phones that will get support for Apple Intelligence so far, but they ship with iOS 18, which is AI-free at the time of writing. While I have played around with a few of the available features on the beta track on my old iPhone, I’ll wait until they’re officially released before sharing anything in a review capacity.

My experience

As a content creator and a photographer, I feel these new iPhones are tailor-made for me. I’ve seen people online saying that it’s not a huge upgrade from the 14 Pro, which sure, the 14 Pro is an amazing phone and offered a nice jump up in camera quality at the time and still has very capable photography optics. However, it’s still missing many of the pro software and video support that Apple has added over the past two generations. Things like LOG, Audio Mix, the Fusion camera and Camera Controls are game chargers for creators. I never want to use an iPhone without dedicated camera buttons again. Even for capturing behind-the-scenes footage, the iPhone 16 proves to be worth the upgrade. The fact that I can take it out of my pocket and have the camera not only open, but shooting video without having to move my hand from how I’d naturally hold the phone is a literal godsend that Alex and I can’t stop gushing to each other about.

If you don’t shoot a lot of content, improvements like the long battery life and more durable construction are still enticing if it’s time for you to upgrade. But really, I’d expect most people getting this phone to come from older Pro iPhones from the 11/12 series and maybe even the 13, although the 13 Pro still holds up pretty well.

Stay tuned for more from me on all things iPhones 16 Pro over the next little bit as I use them to make more content, play some games and who knows what else the AI upgrades will bring to the device once it launches in a few stages later this year.

The iPhone 16 Pro costs $1,449 and comes with 128GB of storage. The 16 Pro Max starts at $1,749, but its base model comes with 256GB of storage. The devices are all made of Titanium and come in White, Black, Natural, and Desert. The large phone in my photos is the Derst model, and the smaller one is Natural.

See you next week, same time, same place for all the video samples!

– Additional photography by Alex Arellano