iPhone 16 Pro Max

The iPhone 16 has been one of the weirder smartphone launches I’ve seen from Apple in the nine years I’ve been covering tech. Much of the product’s new capabilities are wrapped around Apple Intelligence—a suite of smart features powered by artificial intelligence—which isn’t available at launch. Apple will roll out a software update in October to deliver these promised perks.

But my entire testing period with the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max has been on a developer beta of iOS 18.1, which has many (not all) of these Apple Intelligence features already running. I feel like I have a good handle on what the experience will be like for iPhone owners in October, though this early version of the software also had a few bugs. While doing some performance testing, for example, Resident Evil Village crashed a few times no matter whether I had maxed out the graphics settings or not. Apple couldn’t replicate the issue but suggested I roll back to the stable version of iOS 18 to fix the problem.

Broadly, there are some nice improvements with the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. They deliver some of the best performance on a phone, have solid battery life, and have excellent camera systems. When you throw in Apple Intelligence, there are moments when the new capabilities are helpful day to day, but there is no must-have software perk (yet) that makes Apple’s AI features leaps ahead of the smartphone pack, nor worthy of an upgrade alone.