Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max Follow-up Review

Saturday, we spent the day out in the world with our son, so it was a good time to test the iPhone 16 Pro Max cameras and see what’s changed.

As I noted earlier that day, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is exactly what you think it is: A minor upgrade over its predecessor with a new color, a new Camera control button, a slightly bigger display, and more RAM. But only Apple’s biggest fans, or reviewers like me, would ever make a year-over-year upgrade like this. For those with an iPhone 12 or 13 Pro Max, this is a major leap forward. One that will become even more profound if Apple can hit all its Apple Intelligence marks. We’ll see.

To me, the improvements over the iPhone 15 Pro Max I’ll soon ship back to Apple fall into one of two buckets, those that are immediately inconsequential and those that may–or may not–pan out to be meaningful.

Among the former, the display and form factor are slightly bigger, and there’s a new color, Dessert Titanium, that’s as different from Apple’s marketing images as was the Natural Titanium I got a year ago. That is, the new iPhone is a weird link pinkish gold and the previous one was a kind of Playdoh green-gray. I don’t know.

Many of the potentially meaningful upgrades are tied to the cameras. No surprise there: In the matrix of weighted choices that make up my phone-buying decisions, photography is right there at the top of the list. And there are several new features in the iPhone 16 Pro Max that bear examination.

From a hardware perspective, the biggest change is the move to a 48 MP ultra-wide camera. And on our day out yesterday, in Rochester, New York under cloudy skies, I had a few opportunities to see how well the new lens performed. For the most part, there were no surprises, though I was surprised to discover that this lens doesn’t support the nice “Goldilocks” 24 MP shots that are apparently reserved only for the main lens: You can shoot in full-resolution 48 MP or get binned 12 MP shots. That’s too bad, though the latter should still be of higher quality than before.

Ultra-wide shots will always have some form of image stretching at the edges, but I didn’t take any ultra-wide shots that offended me by exaggerating that effect. This inside shot of a laptop is probably the most obvious example, and I like how it looks.

The other big hardware change is the new Camera control button. This one is odd. It’s a new touch-sensitive button you can press (click), light press, double light press, and use gestures, and that’s a lot to learn. Granted, some is intuitive enough. You press it once to launch the Camera app, and then you can press it from within the Camera app to take a picture or start recording a video, depending on which mode you’re in. If you light press it while using the Camera app, zoom controls appear and you can slide your finger up and down on the button to zoom in and out.

What eluded me until I looked it up was how you could switch between the various camera controls that Apple shows off when it demos this feature. But that’s where the less obvious double press comes in, an interaction method that’s made more difficult when you use a case, as I am now: It’s almost impossible to engage accurately until you really get used to it. Which I have not. But once you’re in, you can gesture slide between Exposure, Depth, Zoom (the default), Cameras (.5x, 1x, 2x, and 5x), (Photographic) Styles, and Tone.

I need more time with it. But those last two controls concern an issue I have with the iPhone 16 Pro Max: Where my previous iPhone had a Rich contrast photographic style I configured as the default because it helped the device take Pixel-like photos, that’s gone now. Instead, the iPhone 16s have “the latest generation Photographic styles.” And they are garbage: Your only choices are Standard, Amber, Gold, Rose Gold, Neutral, and Cool Rose, none of which I want. And then there’s an associated Tone and Color control that lets you fine-tune one. It’s terrible. And it’s buggy, too: Each time I access the Camera settings interface, the Photographic Styles “wizard” (or whatever Apple calls it) launches as if this was the first time I’ve ever used it.

I hope this gets fixed. But I had to reference my son’s iPhone 15 Pro to see the old styles and how I might configure my phone with similar settings. Which I’ll lose if I ever go into settings again.

All that said, I’m happy with the picture quality for the most part. I don’t have much to say about charging speeds and battery life yet, and won’t for a while, but they are both allegedly noticeably better. I’ve been using a Nomad data eSIM around Rochester for the weekend, and that’s worked out fine. We’ve used it for navigating with Google Maps in the car, and since I don’t spend all that much time using a phone or texting, I sometimes forget it’s not just my day-to-day phone.

I still need to wrap up my time with the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL before that becomes real, of course. And when it came time to take in Niagara Falls, as we did today, it was the Pixel and not the iPhone that came along. First things first.