iPhone 16 gets two new buttons and a new camera layout

Apple’s new iPhone 16 isn’t a revolution by any means, but it’s a solid upgrade with a handful of new features (including two new physical buttons), plus better performance and Apple Intelligence support.

The design is similar to the iPhone 15 but with a vertical camera arrangement on the back, which helps take more efficient spatial photos and videos. A new camera control button can be clicked to take a photo, and also is touch-sensitive, allowing you to slide your finger across it to tweak the settings for the images, like zoom. It can tell the difference between a full click and a lighter press, which allows you to access customization features instead of taking a picture right away.

That’s not the only new button; the configurable Action button has arrived on the iPhone 16. It was introduced in the Pro models last year and can be used for various predetermined purposes or assigned to work with Shortcuts.

There’s a new chip, too: the A18. It has a new 16-core Neural Engine, which is up to two times faster than what we saw in the iPhone 15. The memory subsystem has 17 percent more memory bandwidth. These features allow it to support Apple’s generative models and Apple Intelligence, which was exclusive to the Pro phones last year. The 3 nm chip has a 6-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores. It’s up to 30 percent faster than the CPU iPhone 15, Apple claims.

There’s a new, ray-tracing-enabled, 5-core GPU that Apple says is is up to 40 percent faster; Apple says a new thermal design allows up to 30 percent higher sustained performance for gaming, and that the iPhone 16 can run AAA games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage that only worked on the 15 Pro last year.

Thanks to this chip, Apple says the iPhone 16 is the first non-Pro iPhone to support the upcoming suite of generative AI features the company calls Apple Intelligence. This will allow features like taking pictures of restaurants to pull up a menu or identifying dog breeds on the street by pointing the camera their way. Apple is calling those two examples “Visual Intelligence,” and it leans on the camera control feature of the iPhone 16, so that’s unique to this new model.

Speaking of the camera, there aren’t a ton of significant improvements on the hardware side over the iPhone 15. Apple talked up the 48-megapixel wide-angle camera, but most of the features applied to the previous model. There’s a new ultra-wide camera that has a larger aperture, with up to 2.6 times more light capture. It also includes macro photography and spatial video capture support, which was previously limited to the Pro phones.

The screen comes in the same sizes as before (6.1 inches for the regular iPhone 15, 6.7 for the Plus), but it can reach 2,000 nits of brightness in a sunny environment and as low as 1 nit in the dark. There’s a 50 percent tougher ceramic shield on the screen, too.

The iPhone 16 starts at $799 (128GB), and the Plus model starts at $899 (also 128GB). They are available for pre-order this coming Friday, and it ships September 20.

Listing image by Apple