CNBC reviews Apple’s flagship iPhone 16 Pro Max: ‘It’s a great phone with cool updates’

iPhone 16 Pro Max comes in four stunning finishes: black titanium, natural titanium, white titanium, and desert titanium.
Apple’s iPhone 16 family of phones launches in stores on Friday, September 20th. CNBC’s Todd Haselton been testing Apple’s flagship iPhone 16 Pro Max for the past five days. Apple Intelligence is launching in beta with some of Apple’s advertised features in October, Haselton notes while adding that “much more is expected to come later.”
Todd Haselton for CNBC:
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It’s a great phone with cool updates like a dedicated camera button, and it charges faster over MagSafe than earlier Pro models. The screens are also slightly larger than prior versions.
But this review is tricky, because one of the banner features Apple has been hyping — on stage and in its new ads — is Apple Intelligence. It’s Apple’s suite of AI features for the iPhone, and it’s not coming until later this year.
There are reasons to be excited. A few of the new AI features, like changes to Siri, photo editing, and the option to have AI rewrite text for you, will launch in beta in October. More additions, such as as Apple’s image and emoji generator, more personal Siri responses and integration with ChatGPT, will come later…
The iPhone 16 Pro Max is a solid upgrade, but you’ll probably find the biggest changes if you’re coming from an iPhone 14 Pro Max or earlier. The biggest improvements over last year’s phone are the added camera button, a faster chip, new cameras and a slightly larger display.
When it comes to Apple Intelligence, we’ll all have to wait for features like using Siri to ask about prior calendar events, questions that require personal context, using Siri to control your apps, or Apple’s integration with ChatGPT. So if you’re buying now, it’s for everything but the AI.

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MacDailyNews Take: iPhone’s upgrade supercycle is a multi-year endeavor due to the way the company will dribble out Apple Intelligence features as they get built.

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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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