Apple today unveiled iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, featuring Apple Intelligence, larger display sizes, new pro camera features.
With Apple Intelligence, powerful Apple-built generative models come to iPhone in the easy-to-use personal intelligence system that understands personal context to deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant while protecting user privacy.
Camera Control unlocks a fast, intuitive way to tap into visual intelligence and easily interact with the advanced camera system. Featuring a new 48MP Fusion camera with a faster quad-pixel sensor that enables 4K120 fps video recording in Dolby Vision, these new Pro models achieve the highest resolution and frame-rate combination ever available on iPhone.
Additional advancements include a new 48MP Ultra Wide camera for higher-resolution photography, including macro; a 5x Telephoto camera on both Pro models; and studio-quality mics to record more true-to-life audio.
The durable titanium design is strong yet lightweight, with larger display sizes, the thinnest borders on any Apple product, and a huge leap in battery life — with iPhone 16 Pro Max offering the best battery life on iPhone ever.
“Powered by the faster, more efficient A18 Pro chip and built for Apple Intelligence, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are the most advanced iPhone models we’ve ever made,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
“Customers who are looking for the best possible iPhone will be able to take advantage of this huge step forward, whether they’re applying edits to a photo without lifting a finger, rewriting meeting notes for a more professional tone, or using the advanced camera system to capture their next masterpiece in 4K120 fps in Dolby Vision — all while enjoying extraordinary battery life.”
Built for Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence on the iPhone 16 lineup harnesses the power of Apple silicon and Apple-built generative models to understand and create language and images, take action across apps, and draw from personal context to simplify and accelerate everyday tasks.
Apple Intelligence maintains the privacy and security of user data with Private Cloud Compute. This groundbreaking approach provides the ability to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated Apple silicon servers — an extraordinary step forward for privacy in artificial intelligence.
Apple Intelligence will be available as a free software update, with the first set of features rolling out next month in US English for most regions around the world.
With systemwide Writing Tools, users can adjust notes or emails to be more friendly, more concise, or add a more professional tone to their writing; check for grammar, word choice, and sentence structure; and summarise selected text to make it more digestible. In the Notes and Phone apps, users can also record, transcribe, and summarise audio.
When a recording is initiated while on a call in the Phone app, participants are automatically notified, and once the call ends, Apple Intelligence generates a summary to recall key points.
Apple Intelligence helps users prioritise with summarised notifications, along with Priority Messages in Mail, a feature that understands the content of emails and surfaces time-sensitive messages. Across a user’s inbox, summaries convey the most important information of each email instead of previewing the first few lines.
Siri becomes more deeply integrated into the system experience and gets a brand-new design with an elegant glowing light that wraps around the edge of the screen when active. With richer language-understanding capabilities, communicating with Siri is more natural and flexible.
Siri follows along when users stumble over their words, and maintains context from one request to the next. Users can type to Siri at any time, and switch fluidly between text and voice as they accelerate everyday tasks.
Siri also now has extensive product knowledge to answer thousands of questions about features on iPhone and other Apple devices.
Additional Apple Intelligence features will roll out later this year and in the months following, including Image Playground, which allows users to create playful images in moments. Emoji will be taken to an entirely new level with the ability to create original Genmoji by simply typing a description, or by selecting a photo of a friend or family member.
Siri will be able to draw on a user’s personal context to deliver intelligence that is tailored to them. It will also gain onscreen awareness to understand and take action with users’ content, as well as take hundreds of new actions in and across Apple and third-party apps.
And while using iOS 18 features like Siri and Writing Tools, users will be able to easily access ChatGPT from OpenAI.
Light and Durable Design with Larger Displays
The new Pro lineup features the thinnest borders of any Apple product and introduces larger display sizes: 6.3 inches on iPhone 16 Pro and 6.9 inches on iPhone 16 Pro Max — the largest iPhone display ever.
The Super Retina XDR displays with Always-On and ProMotion technologies help users accomplish more. Both models offer industry-leading durability with a strong, lightweight titanium design, as well as the latest-generation Ceramic Shield, which has an advanced formulation that is 2x tougher than glass on any other smartphone.
The new mechanical architecture improves heat dissipation and efficiency for up to 20 percent better sustained performance. Along with the new internal design and advanced power management of iOS 18, larger batteries are optimised to offer a huge leap in battery life.
Camera Control
Camera Control makes the pro camera system more versatile with an innovative new way to quickly launch the camera, take a photo, and start video recording. It has a tactile switch that powers the click experience, a high-precision force sensor that enables the light press gesture, and a capacitive sensor that allows for touch interactions.
A new camera preview helps users frame the shot and adjust other control options — such as zoom, exposure, or depth of field — to compose a stunning photo or video by sliding their finger on the Camera Control.
Later this fall, Camera Control will be updated with a two-stage shutter to automatically lock focus and exposure on a subject with a light press, letting users reframe the shot without losing focus.
Additionally, developers will be able to bring Camera Control to third-party apps such as Kino, which will offer users the ability to adjust white balance and set focus points, including at various levels of depth in their scene.
Later this year, Camera Control will unlock visual intelligence to help users learn about objects and places faster than ever before. Users can click and hold Camera Control to pull up the hours or ratings for a restaurant they pass, add an event from a flyer to their calendar, quickly identify a dog by breed, and more.
Camera Control will also serve as a gateway into third-party tools with specific domain expertise, like when users want to search on Google to find where they can buy an item, or to benefit from ChatGPT’s problem-solving skills. Users are in control of when third-party tools are used and what information is shared.
New Pro Creativity Across Photo, Video, and Audio
With iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, the camera gets even more powerful. Powered by A18 Pro, the upgraded camera system introduces a new 48MP Fusion camera with a faster, more efficient quad-pixel sensor and Apple Camera Interface, unlocking 4K120 fps video recording in Dolby Vision — the highest resolution and frame-rate combination ever available on iPhone, and a smartphone first.
The quad-pixel sensor can read data 2x faster, enabling zero shutter lag for 48MP ProRAW or HEIF photos. A new 48MP Ultra Wide camera also features a quad-pixel sensor with autofocus, so users can take higher-resolution 48MP ProRAW and HEIF images when capturing uniquely framed, wider-angle shots or getting close to their subjects with macro photography.
The powerful 5x Telephoto camera now comes on both iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, allowing users to catch the action from farther away, no matter which model they choose. iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max now take spatial photos in addition to videos to help users relive memories with remarkable depth on Apple Vision Pro.
Users can capture 4K120 fps in Slo-mo or Video mode, and adjust the playback speed after capture in the Photos app, including a quarter-speed playback, a new half-speed option for a dreamy effect, and a fifth-speed option that corresponds to 24 fps.
When coupled with the new image signal processor (ISP) of A18 Pro, users can do frame-by-frame cinema-quality colour grading for 4K120 fps in Dolby Vision. Users can also capture 4K120 fps ProRes and Log directly to an external storage device for efficient pro workflows.
Both Pro models feature four new studio-quality mics that preserve true-to-life recorded sounds, and video can now be captured in Spatial Audio for immersive listening with AirPods, Apple Vision Pro, or a surround sound system.
The iPhone 16 Pro lineup also introduces creative new ways to edit video sound with Audio Mix — allowing users to adjust their sound after capture to focus on the voice of the person on camera, make it sound like the video was recorded inside a professional studio, or position vocal tracks in the front and environmental noises in surround sound.
With wind noise reduction, powerful machine learning (ML) algorithms reduce unwanted noise for better audio quality.
Next-generation Photographic Styles help users express their creativity and customise their photos by locally adjusting colour, highlights, and shadows in real time. Styles also have a deeper understanding of skin undertones, so users can personalise how they appear in photos. Unlike filters, which often use a one-size-fits-all approach by adding a colour to an entire scene, adjustments are applied to specific colours of a selected style.
A wider set of styles offers more creative options for editing a photo’s aesthetic, and styles can be further personalised with an easy-to-use new control pad and intensity slider for simultaneous adjustments across tone and colour. These adjustments can be rendered during live preview, applied after a photo is taken, or even reversed later.
Apple Intelligence takes the pro camera system to a new level. Coming later, Siri will be able to complete in-app requests and take action across apps, like pulling up a specific shot from a user’s Photos library and then applying an edit to the image in Darkroom.
Siri can also help users fully utilise the wide range of photo and editing capabilities, such as asking how to adjust the blur in the background of a photo.
A18 Pro Chip
The new A18 Pro chip is designed with industry-leading compute power to propel Apple Intelligence, ushering in a new era of pro performance. Built with second-generation 3-nanometer technology and featuring a new architecture with smaller, faster transistors, A18 Pro delivers unprecedented efficiency.
The new 16-core Neural Engine is faster and more efficient than the previous generation, powering remarkable on-device performance for Apple Intelligence. A 17 percent increase in total system memory bandwidth — the highest ever in iPhone — enables faster experiences when using Writing Tools and Image Playground, and helps deliver astounding graphics.
The bandwidth increase also benefits the 6-core GPU, which is up to 20 percent faster than the previous generation, driving graphics rendering for Apple Intelligence and stunning visuals for gaming. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing gets up to 2x faster for even more realistic light sources and reflections, and Game Mode in iOS 18 unlocks more consistent frame rates while making AirPods, game controllers, and other wireless accessories incredibly responsive.
A new 6-core CPU is the fastest in a smartphone, with two performance cores and four efficiency cores that can run the same workload as the previous generation 15 percent faster while using 20 percent less power.
Next-generation ML accelerators are optimised for Apple Intelligence, and save power by handling high-efficiency, high-throughput, and low-latency computations on the CPU without engaging the Neural Engine.
A18 Pro enables Always-On and ProMotion technologies for an exceptional viewing experience on iPhone, as well as faster USB 3 speeds and ProRes video recording. A new ISP and video encoder process 2x the amount of data for faster video encoding and pro workflows.
Expanded Safety and Communication Capabilities
The iPhone 16 Pro lineup features innovative ways to stay connected and provides enhanced safety capabilities for peace of mind. Powered by the same groundbreaking technology as Emergency SOS via satellite, users are able to connect to the nearest satellite to send and receive texts, emoji, and Tapbacks over iMessage and SMS while outside cellular and Wi-Fi coverage.
Messages via satellite in iOS 18 are end-to-end encrypted. Also new with iOS 18, Emergency SOS Live Video allows users to share a live video feed or photos with participating emergency dispatchers during an emergency call.
Later this fall, Roadside Assistance via satellite — which connects users to a roadside assistance provider if they have car trouble while off the grid — expands beyond the US to the UK.
Pricing and Availability
iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will be available in black titanium, natural titanium, white titanium, and desert titanium, in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB storage capacities. iPhone 16 Pro starts at £999 or £41.62 per month, and iPhone 16 Pro Max starts at £1199 or £49.95 per month.
Customers can get £130 to £630 in credit when they trade in iPhone 11 or higher. Customers can take advantage of these offers by visiting the Apple Store online or an Apple Store location.
Customers in more than 58 countries and regions, including Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, South Korea, Türkiye, the UAE, the UK, and the US, will be able to pre-order iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max beginning at1pm BST this Friday, September 13, with availability beginning Friday, September 20.
iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will be available in Macao, Vietnam, and 19 other countries and regions beginning Friday, September 27.
iOS 18 will be available as a free software update on Monday, September 16.
Apple Intelligence will be available as a free software update. The first set of Apple Intelligence features will be available in beta next month as part of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, with more features rolling out in the months to come. It will be available on iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later, with device and Siri language set to U.S. English. Apple Intelligence is not currently available on iPhone in the EU.
Additional languages and platforms are coming over the course of the next year. Later this year, Apple Intelligence will add support for localised English in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK.
In the coming year, Apple Intelligence will expand to more languages, including Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish.
In addition to an iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max Clear Case, available for £49, a Silicone Case with MagSafe will be available for £49 in black, denim, fuchsia, lake green, plum, star fruit, stone grey, and ultramarine.
Apple cases for the iPhone 16 lineup work seamlessly with Camera Control, featuring a sapphire crystal coupled to a conductive layer that communicates finger movements to the Camera Control. FineWoven Wallet with MagSafe will be available for £59 in black, blackberry, dark green, and deep blue.
A new MagSafe Charger enables faster wireless charging up to 25W, is Qi2 certified, and is available in a 1-metre length for £39 or a 2-metre length for £49.
