iPhone 16 Pro review: Apple levels up its smaller ‘pro’ phone

Apple has upgraded the iPhone 16 Pro by adding the 5x zoom camera from the big Pro Max line, making size its main differentiator and turning the smaller “pro” into an instant candidate for the best small smartphone going.

The 16 Pro costs the same – £999 (€1,199/$999/A$1,799) – as last year’s model, and sits between the £1,199 16 Pro Max and the vanilla iPhone 16, which starts at £799. That also puts it in direct competition with Google’s £999 Pixel 9 Pro, which has the same-size screen.

At first glance, the 16 Pro looks just like last year’s 15 Pro, but the screen is 0.2in larger, measuring 6.3in on the diagonal. The slimmer bezels around the display have absorbed some of that growth, but the phone is still a little bigger and 12g heavier, making it roughly the same size as its predecessor in a thin case.

The slick and crisp display is one of the best on the market, looking particularly good for photos and video, though it doesn’t quite hit the highest peak brightnesses offered by rivals when outdoors. The glass covering it is 50% tougher than previous iPhones, according to Apple, but the 16 Pro will still likely need a case to protect it from drops.

A new camera control button has been added to the side, which you press, swipe and click to do different things such as quickly opening the camera. That brings the total number of buttons to five, including the action button added last year.

The 16 Pro runs iOS 18, which adds a lot of customisation features for the home screen, control centre, updates to the Photos, Notes and Maps apps, a new password manager and RCS support for the messages app.

But the much-advertised Apple Intelligence features, such as a smarter Siri, notification summaries, various AI writing tools, emoji and image generators are not yet available. They will start rolling out in beta with an iOS 18.1 update in October in the US and December for the UK, Australia and other non-US English countries, while the rest of Europe is out of luck for the foreseeable future.

Specifications

• Screen: 6.3in Super Retina XDR (120Hz OLED) (460ppi)

• Processor: Apple A18 Pro

• RAM: 8GB

• Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB

• Operating system: iOS 17

• Camera: 48MP main, 48MP UW and 12MP 5x zoom, 12MP front-facing camera

• Connectivity: 5G, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3, Thread, USB-C, Satellite, UWB and GNSS

• Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)

• Dimensions: 149.6 x 71.5 x 8.25mm

• Weight: 199g

New A18 Pro chip is faster and more efficient

The 16 Pro has a new chip that is about 10-15% quicker with 20% faster graphics. It feels rapid in use and will stay fast for years to come. It is also about 20% more efficient staying cooler when playing high-end games.

Battery life is solid for this size of phone and lasts about 38 to 40 hours between charges on mix of 5G and wifi, and actively using the screen for more than five hours. That is about the same as its predecessor and means charging it every other day or overnight for heavy use days.

Sustainability

Apple says the battery should last in excess of 1,000 full-charge cycles, with at least 80% of its original capacity, and can be replaced for £109. Out-of-warranty screen repairs cost £349. The 16 Pro has repair guides available and was awarded seven out of 10 for repairability by the specialists iFixit.

The 16 Pro contains more than 25% recycled material including aluminium, cobalt, copper, gold, lithium, plastic, rare earth elements, steel, tin and tungsten. The company breaks down the phone’s environmental impact in its report. Apple offers trade-in and free recycling schemes, including for non-Apple products.

Camera

The camera gets a big upgrade for the 16 Pro gaining parity with the Pro Max line, including the 5x optical zoom camera added to the 15 Pro Max last year and the new dedicated camera control button.

The button quickly opens the camera when the phone’s screen is on. A double light-press brings up a menu to switch between adjusting the exposure, depth, zoom, cameras, styles or tone with swipes, before sliding your finger across the button to make the adjustments. Clicking fully down on the button takes a photo. It is really handy for quickly launching the camera and shooting photos, but using the more advanced tools felt slow and took practice to get right.

The main 48-megapixel camera captures great images and now shoots at full resolution without any delay. The ultrawide camera has been upgraded from 12MP to 48MP this year, which generally improves wide angle images but provides a bigger boost to macrophotography for larger and more detailed close up images.

The extended optical zoom from the 5x telephoto camera is the biggest upgrade, however, significantly closing the distance to objects with meaningful magnification. Digital zoom on top stretches to 25x magnification, with still good results up to around 10-15x.

Apple has also upgraded its photographic styles feature to adjust the colour, tone and palette of photos as you capture them. Various presets are available to change the mood, such as vintage or vibrant, or adjust the undertones to make things look warmer or cooler, increase contrast and depth to shadows, or make other tweaks.

Any of the styles can be modified using a virtual D-pad and an intensity slider. It is hard to be precise, but you can get really creative, such as replicating the look of particular film cameras or creating very dramatic looks. You can set a new one as default using a short guided tutorial and change the one that’s used for each photo after the fact in the photos app.

Other new fun features include spatial or 3D photos, which can be viewed on headsets such as the Vision Pro. Video shot at 120 frames a second in 4K can be turned into cinematic slow motion after the fact. The new audio mix feature for video can cut out background noise or make it sound like each person in front of the camera has an individual mic, which is thoroughly impressive.

Overall, the camera shoots predictably good images in a range of conditions. The photographic styles feature is great for those who want to get creative without having to develop images on a computer after the fact. The added 5x telephoto camera on the 16 Pro is a killer feature that keeps it up to par with Google’s Pixel 9 Pro. But a complete lack of AI features is noticeable, particularly compared with Google’s extremely useful “best take” and similar tools.

Price

The iPhone 16 Pro costs from £999 (€1,199/$999/A$1,799) with 128GB of storage.

For comparison, the iPhone 16 costs £799, the iPhone 16 Pro Max costs £1,199, the Google Pixel 9 Pro costs £999, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra costs £1,249 and the Fairphone 5 costs £499.

Verdict

The iPhone 16 Pro strikes the best balance of size and capability with a big-enough screen and all the high-end trimmings squeezed into a relatively small frame.

The addition of the 5x optical zoom brings Apple’s smaller Pro up to parity with its monster 16 Pro Max, so the choice for iPhone buyers is now simply about size and price, not capability. The faster chip and camera upgrades, such as the fun photographic styles, are welcome.

The new camera control button is a mixed bag: very handy for quickly launching the camera but fiddly to use to adjust settings and difficult to press hard enough to capture an image without shaking the phone. It needs some work to be great and is not ideally placed for the left-handed.

Apple’s much-advertised AI features are not available yet, and for the first time in a long while Apple has real competition from Google’s excellent Pixel 9 Pro for the best smaller phone available.

It doesn’t come cheap at £200 more than the regular iPhone 16, but the 16 Pro is Apple’s best phone and at least it costs £200 less than the 16 Pro Max.

Pros: relatively small and easy to hold, great cameras including 5x optical zoom, great screen, USB-C, action and camera control buttons, good battery life, top performance, long software support, Face ID.

Cons: expensive, camera control a bit tricky, getting bigger and heavier, samey design as predecessors.