iPhone 16 vs iPhone 11: 5 reasons to upgrade after half a decade

Oct 1, 2024 Apple Camera

Apple released the brand new iPhone 16 lineup this month, with bigger batteries, the new Camera Capture button, and more. The company calls them their first iPhones built for Apple Intelligence. People are holding onto their current iPhones for longer than ever, just because smartphones are getting so good. Today, I’ll be highlighting five big features you’d be gaining if you finally decided to upgrade.

A far better display: Super Retina XDR

Apple introduced OLED displays to the non-pro iPhone back in 2020, but if you’re using an iPhone 11 or older, you’ll still be using an older LCD display. With OLED, you’ll have a far higher resolution display, better colors, deeper blacks, and support for high dynamic range content. In short, everything you look at will look a lot better with Apple’s Super Retina XDR display. It’s also a lot brighter, with the iPhone 16 having support for up to 2000 nits while outdoors, versus the iPhone 11 which has a peak brightness of 625 nits.

Personalized AI on your iPhone

Apple Intelligence was unveiled at WWDC back in June, offering an all new Siri experience with personal context, Writing Tools to improve your writing, Genmoji to allow you to create your own emojis, a new ‘Clean Up’ feature to remove unwanted content from your photos, and more. Not all of these features are out at launch, but regardless, you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 to use any of them. The all new Siri experience is expected to come in the Spring, whereas everything else is coming out before the end of this year, split across iOS 18.1 in October and iOS 18.2 in December.

Better battery experience

iPhone 16 has a lot going on in the battery & charging department compared to iPhone 11. Apple transitioned from Lightning to USB-C with the iPhone 15 lineup, providing a unified charging experience. You can now use the same cable across your phone, laptop, and tons of other devices. Batteries have also taken a massive leap this year, with iPhone 16 being tested for an additional 5 hours of video playback than iPhone 11, a roughly 30% increase. With better battery life, you shouldn’t have to worry about recharging your iPhone as often. Charging is also faster than ever, with the iPhone 16 supporting up to 45W wired charging and 25W wireless charging (with MagSafe), whereas the iPhone 11 can only support up to 20W wired charging and 7.5W wireless charging.

Dynamic Island

Apple introduced the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro, replacing the traditional iPhone “notch.” It’s a mesh of hardware and software, allowing users to interact with alerts, apps, and other forms of apps, right from the top of their iPhone. You can use it to control your music, answer phone calls, and all sorts of other interactions. Dynamic Island also interacts with Live Activities, so apps like Flighty can show your flight details right in the pill cutout at the top of your iPhone.

Additional buttons

The iPhone has gained two new buttons since the iPhone 11, both the Action Button (replacing the mute switch), and the Camera Control “button.” Apple refuses to call Camera Control a button, but that’s what it is. Action Button by default still functions as a mute toggle, but if you find yourself not wanting to change that often, you can set it to a number of other things, including your Focus Mode, opening the Camera app, toggling the Flashlight, recording a Voice Memo, and a lot more. Plus, in iOS 18, apps will be able to create their own controls for both the Action Button and Control Center, so it should be taking a big leap forward.

As for Camera Control, this is a new toggle on iPhone 16, giving users convenient and versatile new ways to use their iPhone camera. Pressing the button will open up the camera app from anywhere, and pressing the button from within the camera app will capture a photo, whereas holding it will start recording a video. By default, swiping on the button will zoom. However, you can double half press the button, and that’ll bring up a menu to configure what you’d like a swipe action to do. You can configure it between Exposure, Depth, Zoom, Cameras, Style, and Tone.

Other smaller features

  • 48MP camera with 2x optical zoom option
  • Newer ultra wide camera with support for macro photography
  • Better water resistance
  • Sensor shift optical image stabilization
  • Cinematic mode video
  • Action mode video
  • Spatial photos and videos
  • 5G support
  • Wi-Fi 7
  • MagSafe wireless charging

There are a number of great reasons to finally upgrade your iPhone 11 this year, especially if you find yourself running out of storage, not having enough battery life, or find yourself otherwise unsatisfied. If you’re fine waiting another year though, there are a number of fun upgrades coming next year with Apple’s next big iPhone refresh: the iPhone 17 Air.

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