iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max announced as Apple Intelligence powerhouses

The new Pros are here. Apple's iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max sport the A18 Pro chip, the Camera Control, and "a huge leap in battery life", Apple claims. There's a new main camera too, a new ultrawide, and a 5x telephoto on the 'vanilla' Pro. The titanium design remains, and Apple is advertising the thinnest bezels ever on any product it's ever made. This should be interesting.

The two Pro iPhone 16s will be available in black titanium, natural titanium, white titanium, and desert titanium. Pre-orders will start on September 13, and they will become available on September 20 for $999 and up for the Pro and $1,199 and up for the Pro Max.

Apple Intelligence is, just as the rumors anticipated, not going to be built-in from day one. Instead, it will arrive as a free software update next month with the first set of features in US English in "most regions around the world". This includes Writing Tools, recording, transcribing and summarizing audio, summarized notifications, Priority Messages in Mail, email summaries, redesigned Siri with richer understanding capabilities, and typing to Siri.

Then, "later this year" and "in the months following", a new batch of features will go out - including Image Playground, which lets you generate images and emoji. Siri will be able to use your personal context to deliver intelligence tailored to you and gain onscreen awareness to understand what you're looking at and take action based on that. ChatGPT is also coming at this unclear later point, by the way.

Now that we got all the Apple Intelligence out of the way, let's talk hardware - as much as Apple will let us. The iPhone 16 Pro has a 6.3" screen and the Pro Max goes to 6.9", breaking a record for world's biggest iPhone screen. The latest-generation Ceramic Shield on top (which is still not actually ceramic, mind you) has "an advanced formulation" that is claimed to be twice as tough as glass on any other smartphone, whatever that means.

Apple promises up to 20% better sustained performance on these phones compared to their predecessors thanks to improvements in heat dissipation and efficiency. The A18 Pro is built on a 3nm process and has a new 16-core Neural Engine. There's a 17% increase in total system memory bandwidth, which also benefits the 6-core GPU which is up to 20% faster than the previous generation.

The new 6-core CPU is "the fastest in a smartphone", boasting two performance cores and four efficiency cores that can run the same workload as the iPhone 15 Pro 15% faster while using 20% less power.

Like the other iPhone 16s, the Pros also have Camera Control - a button that isn't a button, or, as Apple likes to say, "a result of thoughtful hardware and software integration". It's got a tactile switch that powers the click experience, a high-precision force sensor that enables the light press gesture, and a capacitive sensor that allows for touch and slide interactions.

You can use it to adjust zoom, exposure, and depth of field in the camera app, and "later this fall" you'll also get a two-stage shutter function. Developers will be able to use this in their apps too.

"Later this year" it will "unlock visual intelligence" to let you learn about objects and places by clicking and holding Camera Control to pull up information about places you pass, add an event from a flyer to your calendar, or identify an animal's breed, that sort of thing. You'll also be able to search Google and use ChatGPT with the Camera Control for some reason.

Speaking of cameras, there's a new main 48 MP Fusion camera with a "faster, more efficient" quad-pixel sensor that supports 4K120fps video recording in Dolby Vision, a first on a smartphone. Apple also promises zero shutter lag for 48 MP ProRAW and HEIF images. Both iPhone 16 Pros can now take spatial photos in addition to videos. Four new "studio-quality" mics are in too.

The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max can connect to the nearest satellite to send and receive texts, emoji, and Tapbacks over iMessage and SMS while outside cellular and Wi-Fi coverage.

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