The End of the iPhone Upgrade?

The largest Apple Store in Washington, D.C., occupies the neoclassical shell of the former Carnegie Library. Last Friday, it opened two hours early, at 8 A.M., for the launch of the new iPhone 16. Lines of buyers waiting for the doors to open stretched across the plaza, but by 9 A.M., the allotted time for my prearranged phone pickup, there was no queue to get into the building. All that remained outside were a few security guards and a handful of protesters shouting into megaphones and carrying signs about the war in Gaza and about Apple’s alleged role in mining-labor abuses in Congo, where the company sources materials including tin, tungsten, and gold. (Apple has said that it does not source from mines that commit abuses.) Entering the store’s white-cube interior, customers were neatly sorted into relatively short pickup lines and attended to by hovering staff, the company having long ago done away with checkout counters and the other traditional trappings of retail. Excitement was decidedly not in the air, which may have had something to do with the slow plateauing of iPhone models.

My new iPhone 16—a regular model, not a Pro or a Pro Max—replaced an iPhone 12 mini that I’d used since 2020. For years before that, perhaps beginning around the release of the X, in 2017, I’d stopped paying attention to the annual progression of iPhone releases. The screens were getting bigger. There were more body colors to choose from. The camera was improving with the help of protruding lenses on the backs of new models, which meant, annoyingly, that they could no longer lie flat without a case. But, fundamentally, the phones from one year to the next remained the same, undergoing linear rather than exponential evolution. At this point, seventeen years after the iPhone’s invention, we know what we can expect from the devices and how to use them. I wasn’t dissatisfied with my 12; in fact, I had remarkably few problems with it, even after four years. But I was bored with it, and I hoped my long wait between upgrades meant that the latest version would restore some sense of novelty. Maybe I wanted a new toy.

It took about an hour for me to transfer the contents of my old phone to the new one, photos and all. The process was as seamless as putting on a new pair of sneakers. The 12 model, my constant companion for so long, was soon dark and discarded. The new phone, the smallest size of iPhone 16 available, has a 6.1-inch screen, more than half an inch larger than the 12 mini, which I sometimes felt was too big. But its resolution and refresh rate are nearly the same as the 12’s, meaning that what appears on the screen doesn’t look particularly better. (The iPhone 16 Pro has double the refresh rate, making motions play more smoothly; it starts at nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars, two hundred dollars more than the standard model.) The new battery lasts longer and the speaker is a marked improvement, which is useful when deploying the phone as a mini stereo to play podcasts or videos out loud. Physically, the major additions to Apple’s standard model this time around are an “action button” above the volume controls, carried over from the 15 Pro, that can be programmed to a particular shortcut—opening an app, say—as well as a devoted Camera Control button on the lower right-hand side of the body.

The main reason to upgrade your phone on Apple’s annual schedule is typically the camera. The iPhone 16 can take photos of up to forty-eight megapixels and integrates a deep, elaborate camera customization system that resists some of the creeping homogenization and coldness of Apple photography, which I’ve lamented before. There’s an interactive grid within the camera app that allows you to intuitively change the Undertones and Mood of the images you’re taking. These are filters, not unlike the Fujifilm X100 camera’s popular digital film emulations, that tint and modulate the photos in real time, making the camera much better for skin tones and also for landscapes, which the iPhone’s default settings often wash out. Now more than ever, the iPhone resembles a full-featured digital camera. The new camera button actually contains three functions in one: clicking the button all the way down opens the camera app and immediately takes a photo or starts a video recording; pressing it lightly opens a tiny window on the screen to change settings like zoom, depth of field, and exposure; and swiping the surface of the button allows you to navigate these settings. Scrolling the Camera Control button is the most genuinely new function of the iPhone 16, and it feels almost as fresh as rotating the wheel on the original iPod. It is fun, in a toylike way, but it’s not yet a mature feature. You can just as easily swipe through the same options on the phone’s touch screen.

Ultimately, the iPhone 16 does little to meaningfully improve on the experience I had with the 12, besides, perhaps, charging with a USB-C, as my laptop does, cutting down on the number of cords I have to keep track of. Instead, the greatest leaps in Apple’s hardware are largely directed at those niche users who are already invested in using tools such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The company has announced that, within a month or so, the new phones will be able to operate its proprietary artificial-intelligence system, which means that users may soon be relying on A.I. to perform daily personal tasks, like navigating their calendars or responding to e-mails. The 15 and 16 Pros can take three-dimensional photos, designed for V.R., using the Apple Vision Pro. Thus far, I don’t use A.I. tools or V.R. with any frequency and have no intention of doing so on my iPhone.

The fact that I do not need an iPhone 16 is a testament not so much to the iPhone’s failure as to its resounding success. A lot of the digital software we rely on has grown worse for users in recent years; the iPhone, by contrast, has become so good that it’s hard to imagine anything but incremental improvements. Apple’s teleological phone-design strategy may have simply reached its end point, the same way evolution in nature has repeatedly resulted in an optimized species of crab. Other tech companies, meanwhile, are embracing radical departures in phone design. Samsung offers devices that fold in half, creating a smaller screen that’s useful for minor tasks, such as texting, and a larger one for watching videos; Huawei is upping the ante with three folds. The BOOX Palma has become a surprise hit as a smartphone-ish device with an e-ink screen, similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which uses physical pixels in its display. Dumbphones, too, are growing more popular by intentionally doing less. Apple devices, by contrast, remain effective enough that they can afford to be somewhat static.

On the way out of the Apple Store, I spoke with one of the protesters, M, a young D.C. resident who was there to speak out against the new phone launch, “because there are human-rights violations being committed in order to produce new Apple products.” She continued, “The product differences between the 15 and the 16, none of them at all justify these destructions that are occurring.” She personally used an iPhone 12 that she bought refurbished, to at least avoid contributing to the proliferation of new Apple products. There is a widening gulf between the kind of features that the company is adding to its phones and the mundane habits of most users. It reminds me of the runaway growth in size and weight of American pickup trucks: no one but the most heavy-lifting builders or farmers need an enormous Ford F-150 Raptor, yet the trucks are popular among lay citizens who just want to be seen cruising around cities or beach towns in a hulking machine. There will always be iPhone fetishists, counting screen inches and camera megapixels. But the rest of us don’t need our smartphones to be always better, stronger, faster. “Most of us are using this to watch YouTube videos,” M said. “We’re just using it to lose time in our lives.” ♦