Ars Technica reviews iPhone 16 and 16 Pro: ‘A worthy upgrade after three years’

Available in 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch display sizes, iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus feature a gorgeous, durable design and offer a big boost in battery life.
Ars Technica‘s Samuel Axon has reviewed Apple’s iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max and found them to be “a worthy upgrade after three years.”
Samuel Axon for Ars Technica:
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With the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro, it has never been clearer that the cycle of radical invention has given way to iterative updates—not just on an annual basis, but a monthly one, due to delayed features coming in later software updates during the iOS 18 cycle.
The final form of the smartphone as we know it has been reached and nearly perfected. Nothing fundamental is changing anymore. But if you take the long view of just a few years, you can still see some impressive progress.
Year after year, the iPhone 16 is Apple’s most lightly iterative flagship phone release ever. But if you’re upgrading from an iPhone 13 or earlier, you’ll still feel like you’re graduating to a whole new experience.
Much of Apple’s marketing messaging going into this launch has focused on Apple Intelligence, a suite of generative AI features that will work only on the new iPhone 16 line and last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. However, none of those features is available yet.
We’re not in the habit of reviewing phones for what they could do rather than what they currently do, so I won’t be talking about Apple Intelligence in this review…
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Apple’s iPhone updates are more iterative. The chaotic changes of the early years happened because the smartphone was an immature product. But even though its fundamental form isn’t being reinvented anymore, things are progressing. Every three years still feels right for me, but I could see some folks opting to do it every four years.

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MacDailyNews Take: We all know, whether some will admit it or not, that Apple Intelligence is vaporware. Apple is writing code and building out infrastructure to fulfill the marketing promises they made at WWDC. It’s fair to leave it out of reviews until it really ships.
It’s also fair to disabuse people of the idea that you need a new iPhone every year. This isn’t 2014. A three-year-old iPhone is perfectly fine, if you don’t want the latest and greatest.
However, it won’t be so fine when Apple Intelligence finally fully exists – which is why we believe a multi-year iPhone upgrade supercycle has just begun with the launch of the iPhone 16 family.

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