Apple iPhone 16 Pro Preview: One Big Upgrade for the small iPhone Pro – Ultra-Sim

The iPhone 16 Pro is right around the corner and it is shaping up to be one of the biggest revamps to the compact Pro model in years.

Apple will officially unveil the iPhone 16 family in mere days, on Monday, September 9th, but even now we have plenty of leaks and rumors that paint a nearly complete picture.

iPhone 16 Pro Design and Display

New Capture button and slightly larger body

The iPhone 16 Pro mostly sticks with the familiar iPhone design language of the past few years with flat sides and a camera island in the upper left corner.

This makes sense as people are more dependent on their phones and a bigger screen translates to an improved experience.

This is possible thanks to slimmer borders around the screen.

In terms of materials, we expect the same titanium frame as last year with the Ceramic Shield on the front, and you still should have that IP68 water and dust protection rating, as well as a USB-C port for charging.

New is the Capture button which appears below the power key. It’s a capacitive button, so it won’t get triggered accidentally in your pocket, and it supports a half-pres and a full press, much like the shutter button on a real camera. Its super power, however, is that it acts like a mini trackpad of sorts, so you should be able to swipe it to zoom in and our, or control background blur for portraits, or other features. Its functions will be limited to camera apps only, but we love this addition, and keep in mind that it is coming not just to the 16 Pro, but to all iPhone 16 models.

• Graphite / Space Black
• Silver
• White
• Rose / Bronze

Unfortunately, we don’t expect to see the cool anti-reflective coating that really impressed us in the Galaxy S24 Ultra, so the iPhone 16 Pro will still be more reflective outdoors.

iPhone 16 Pro Camera

A brand new 48MP ultrawide snapper and a 5X zoom camera

The camera system is getting some major improvements in the 16 Pro, according to multiple leaks.

First, the main camera will mostly benefit from improved software processing, but the hardware should remain the same with a 48MP sensor that supports a 2X lossless zoom via sensor crop.

But the ultra-wide camera is getting the biggest upgrade in years with a new 48MP sensor, up from 12MP previously. This will allow for quad pixel binning for better low light shots, but also you would be able to capture more detail and shoot at the full 48 megapixels, if you prefer.

The telephoto camera is also getting upgraded from 3X zoom before to a 5X zoom tetraprism lens with more reach. We saw the same 5X camera on the 15 Pro Max last year, and now it’s arriving to the 16 Pro. And that’s great for shooting your kid at a concert or far away objects in general.

Apple is also rumored to introduce a new JPEG-XL format, which we imagine would deliver better quality, but we’re scant on details about this yet.

On the video side, we also have a major new feature coming: high quality slow motion! The 16 Pro is rumored to support 3K120 resolution, which will look much crispers than the current 1080p120. That is really impressive because even some professional cameras don’t support slow motion beyond 1080p and creators will be really happy with this addition.

We will go into a lot more detail with camera samples and comparisons soon, so check back here in a couple of weeks for that.

Last but not least, the photo editing experience will change with lots of new AI features. iOS 18.1 will bring us the new “Clean up” tool in Photos, which allows you to easily remove an object, much like Google’s Magic Eraser feature. Apple has added a few nice animations to this and while the results are not always perfect, it’s a really cool tool to have.

iPhone 16 Pro Performance & Benchmarks

A new chip with a focus on AI

The 16 Pro is also getting a new Apple A18 Pro chipset that is expected to be built on more advanced 3nm technology by leading manufacturer TSMC. And this is good news because the 15 Pro was built on the first generation of that tech, and did not quite reap the full benefits, so we hope for some meaningful gains in performance this year.

But the big story will be about AI.

We are yet to see how the 16 Pro performs for that and how will Apple measure this performance. We will be adding more details here right after the official announcement on September 9th, so check back then.

iPhone 16 Pro Battery

Bigger battery, faster charging

The bigger size of the 16 Pro has one big benefit – you can stick a bigger battery inside.

And that’s exactly what rumors say Apple has done.

The iPhone 16 Pro is rumored to have a 3,577mAh battery, a solid 9% bump over the 3,274mAh battery on the 15 Pro. If true, this bump would be the biggest among all iPhone 16 models, so great news for the Pro.

Apple officially rates the 15 Pro for 23 hours of video playback (the 14 Pro also has the same rating), so let’s see if the 16 Pro gets a higher number.

Apple is also the one company that has stubbornly stuck with slower charging for years, and our guess is that it has done this out of abundance of caution.

But the iPhone 16 Pro might finally change that as rumors say it will get 40W wired charging (up from 25W before) and 20W MagSafe wireless charging (up from 15W before). That would be awesome, but remember that you might need to buy new chargers to benefit from these faster speeds.

Summary

With its bigger size, slightly bigger battery, upgraded cameras, faster charging and, most importantly, new AI features, the iPhone 16 Pro shapes up like a big upgrade. Maybe even the biggest in the iPhone 16 family.