Name: iPhone 16 Pro review: only one reason to upgrade
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T07:43:12.000Z
Duration: 22 min 40 s
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There isn't really that much else to talk about with the new iPhone 16 Pro right now.

It is maybe one of the most unfinished iPhones Apple has ever released.

Almost all of its highlight features are waiting on software updates that will likely stretch well into next year before they're here.

That's big stuff like the new Apple Intelligence AI features which the company says will start slowly arriving in October and little stuff like the complete functionality of the camera control button on the side.

Even really minor things like that new Siri animation that inspired the name It's Glow Time for the iPhone's Logimed.

Now, the hard rule of reviews at The Verge is that we always review what's in the box, the thing that you can buy right now.

Never the potential or promise of software updates to come.

And that means the iPhone 16 Pro today is one of the most incremental updates to the iPhone in a long time.

It's a set of very nice but ultimately minor changes to the iPhone 15 Pro.

And the most notable change is to the camera.

There are two big changes to the iPhone 16 Pro camera system.

There's the new camera button on the side and a new set of controls and software for how images are processed.

You can press it all the way down to take a photo or you can give it a light press to trigger a haptic click and bring up a setting like zoom or exposure which you can adjust with a swipe.

A double light press lets you switch between all these settings.

By default, a single click opens the camera when the phone is unlocked and another press takes a photo.

A few Verge staffers found themselves moving the phone slightly when pushing all the way down to take a photo, but I thought it was fine.

You can click away pretty fast before you outrun the camera sensor in normal mode but you can definitely outpace it if you're shooting in raw.

I clocked it around four frames per second which is respectable.

That's not anywhere close to what a modern mirrorless camera with an electronic shutter can do.

I was really hoping I'd find myself using the capacitive control on the button to adjust things like exposure and focal length.

It's all a little bit fiddly switching between everything with the light presses and I just left it set on tone.

Like almost everything on the iPhone 16 Pro at launch, the camera control button is shipping in an apparently unfinished state.

A future software update will let it emulate a traditional two-stage shutter button where a half press focuses and a full press takes the shot.

I asked Apple, but there's no date for this, just later this year.

I've had a lot of complaints about iPhone cameras over the years but setting focus has never actually been one of them.

I know a lot of folks are excited about a two-stage shutter but I'm not convinced it's gonna be all that big of a deal.

Out of the box, I did find myself accidentally clicking the camera control way too often.

I'm left-handed and the button is just where my fingers land when I go to adjust the volume with my thumb.

You can adjust the settings to require a double click to open the camera and that solved the problem for me right away.

You can set the button to open third-party camera apps.

I have a preview version of Halide that was updated to support it and it worked great.

Overall, the button is really nice to have but that's about it right now.

As it exists today, it's not a huge improvement over shooting photos with any other iPhone.

The actual photos on the other hand, yeah, that's complicated.

It is safe to say that people did not love the cameras on the various iPhone 15s.

Apple has gotten increasingly aggressive with its approach to computational photography over the past few years and various forums and social media platforms have been filled with complaints about it for a while now.

My husband just got the new iPhone 15 and the camera is so bad.

I had no idea there was this problem with the selfie camera.

Craziest hack I learned to fix your crappy iPhone 15 camera.

The New Yorker published a piece about iPhone photos looking unrealistic two years ago.

I've been reviewing phones and cameras for a long time but no review I ever publish will ever have the same devastating impact as Alex Earle asking her 7 million followers why her iPhone 15 camera sucks.

Actually, what is wrong with the iPhone 15 camera and how do I change it?

Every time I take photos, I look like a gray ghost.

If I had to sum up what's going on with all these complaints, it's just that Apple won't leave shadows and highlights alone.

It uses its photonic engine image pipeline to boost the dark parts of an image and bring down the bright parts so you can see detail everywhere.

But the side effect is that images seem flat because they lack contrast between light and dark.

I always think about this like dynamics in music.

If every part of a song is loud, then nothing actually seems loud.

That's what's been going on with the iPhone camera over time.

Everything's getting so bright that nothing is bright and the photos are starting to look flat.

So, I regret to inform you that by default, the iPhone 16 Pro camera is even more aggressive about evening out shadows and highlights than the iPhone 15 Pro.

You can see it with basic photos of plants, with pictures of people, with street scenes.

It's all just a little bit brighter, a little bit flatter.

It's even brighter compared to the regular iPhone 16 in almost every case.

That's not to say that the regular 16 camera is better or even the same.

The 16 Pro offers a much nicer depth of field, does less sharpening, and performs better in low light.

I actually found it hard to make the 16 Pro go into night mode, while the regular 16 drops to night mode pretty easily.

It seems like the 16 Pro can just capture more light.

In Apple's default settings, use all that extra light to wage war on shadows in a way that the regular 16 can't seem to do.

Comparing the iPhone 16 Pro to the Galaxy S24 Ultra and the Pixel 9 Pro XL requires intense pixel peeping.

The Pixel has the best zoom, while Samsung's color handling remains aggressively chaotic.

But time and time again, all three cameras produced photos that looked essentially the same.

All these phones are delivering small variations on the same ultra-processed look, and they have been for a while now.

The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro allow you to exclude yourself from this narrative entirely with a radically upgraded photographic styles feature that allows you to directly adjust how the camera processes colors, skin tones, and shadows, even after you've shot a photo.

You can pick between five undertone settings that are meant to adjust skin tones and nine mood settings that feel a lot like high quality Instagram filters.

You can shoot with a live preview of any of the styles, and then you can tweak the settings or even switch styles entirely later on.

And all of these styles, including standard and even in portrait mode, offer a new control called Tone that lets you add shadows back to your photos.

Apple tells me that Tone is short for tone mapping, and it really does mean you can bring the iPhone's photonic engine HDR processing back to reality by turning it down.

It adjusts things like faces in the sky differently, so it's still doing some intense computational photography, but the goal is for you to be able to take photos that look a lot more like a traditional camera if you bring the slider all the way down.

You can also go all the way up for some of the most intense smartphone process photos possible, but, you know, don't do that.

You can even adjust the tone setting using the new camera control button.

You just give it a little double squeeze, slide over to the right, and you can adjust how shadows look with a live preview.

I will just come straight out and say that dialing back the iPhone 16 Pro's tone mapping makes me prefer these photos way more than the default settings and the photos produced by the iPhone 15 Pro.

It is such an improvement that it's possible to make the argument that this one single camera adjustment makes upgrading to the iPhone 16 Pro worth it.

I don't think that argument is 100% convincing, but it's possible to make it, which is wild.

Apple's complex photonic engine computational photography pipeline is basically the same on the iPhone 16 Pro as it is on the 15 Pro, but the order of operations has been changed to allow for photographic styles to be edited after the fact.

In particular, the tone mapping step that boosts shadows has been moved to the end of the process.

Apple's goal here is for the edits to be perceptually lossless.

When you take a photo in a style, that's how the photo is saved, but the iPhone adds a little chunk of data to the image file that allows it to undo the style and revert the image to standard before applying another style.

That bit of extra data results in files that are about 25% bigger than before, and the whole thing means that styles only work if you shoot in heath, which is going to break a lot of hearts out there.

Styles overall aren't really made for professional workflows.

The only way to adjust them is with this fiddly D-pad control.

You can't apply a style to a bunch of photos at once, and trying to keep track of which photos have which styles applied requires staring into the absolute abyss of iOS file management.

The Photos app in Mac OS Sequoia will be able to adjust styles when it ships, but Apple won't say if third-party apps will be able to support styles in the future.

The more you play with styles, the more it seems like Apple has simply given up on having a point of view for what this camera should look like.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

iPhone 16 Pro review: only one reason to upgrade

intense

process

subtle

aggressive