Apple iPhone 16 Plus Preview: Is the Plus model still needed?

Apple have been reluctant to make big design changes ever since the iPhone 12 series, and the first substantial such change is coming with the iPhone 16 devices, and the non-Pro models, to be precise.

The square-ish camera bump is now gone, and in its place we find a vertical arrangement of the dual camera system, reminiscent of the iPhone X design, but of course with much larger lenses. Other than that, the overall design and feel remain the same, and the formula remains unchanged as well. The iPhone 16 Plus is a glass sandwich made of aluminum frame and tempered glass sheets.

However, there's another small nuance that we shouldn't miss. There's a new button on the block, and it will take cameraman duties. The Camera Control button is a capacitive, pressure sensitive button that acts as a dual action shutter button, and you can also use swipe gestures to control different settings inside your camera app, such as zoom or exposure.

The size and weight remain almost the same as what we had last year, it's a big and hefty phone at 200+ grams, but it's expected, and it goes with the big 6.7-inch display.

Speaking of which, the display of the iPhone 16 Plus is one of the biggest disappointments in the whole lineup. The screen is a 60Hz panel. That's right, even phones such as the Galaxy A55 midranger, or the Pixel 8a, which costs $499, have higher refresh rates. We can't fathom why, but it seems that Apple thinks it can get away with 60Hz for one final time (let's hope it's THE final time). For what it's worth, the brightness is now on par with the figures for the Pro models, up to 2000 nits HDR, and 1 nit minimum brightness.

Further down the display specs sheet we find a very similar panel to the last generation, an OLED panel with 1284 x 2800 pixels resolution and a 20:9 aspect ratio with the familiar Dynamic Island camera cutout in the front.

If you wonder how bright this thing can get or how's the color accuracy, hold your horses just a little while longer, as we're doing the display tests as we type this and will include some hard numbers here soon.

In terms of biometrics, there are no surprises. Apple still uses its FaceID tech, and why shouldn't it? In terms of facial recognition, this is the best on the commercial smartphone market.

Finally, let's talk colors. The iPhone 16 Plus comes in: 

The camera situation is a copy-paste affair, more or less. The iPhone 16 Plus carries over the same camera hardware from its predecessor. The main camera is a 48MP, 1/1.56" sensor under a f/1.6 aperture lens with a focal length of 26mm (wide), and a 1.0µm pixel size.

The ultrawide camera also uses the same 12MP sensor as the previous model, but this time around the aperture is a faster f/2.2, which should help with low-light images.

Finally, the selfie camera is also unchanged, it's a 12 MP, f/1.9, 23mm one, located next to the 3D SL face recognition depth sensor.

Stay tuned for samples and a detailed breakdown of the different aspects of the iPhone 16 Plus camera, including everything you can do with the biggest innovation for the whole iPhone 16 lineup, the Camera Control button.

The iPhone 16 Plus uses a brand-new Apple A18 chipset, and even though we haven't run our benchmarks yet, Apple cites 15% improvement in single and multicore performance compared to the A17, and also up to 20% improvement in GPU performance, with 20% less energy used.

Apple also briefly mentioned the 16-core neural engine, optimized for large language models, 2x faster for machine learning and a foundation for Apple Intelligence, and also the 17% more memory bandwidth.

The base storage starts at 128GB, and goes up to 512GB, and all three configurations use 8GB of RAM. We can't judge the performance as this review is still in a preliminary phase, but we will include all the relevant benchmark scores once we finish testing the phone.

During the Apple “It’s Glowtime” event we caught some talk about the battery being bigger but, as always, we didn't get any numbers, so we'll have to wait for a teardown to learn the exact capacity of the iPhone 16 Plus battery.

The good news is that the previous generation of Plus iPhones performed really well in our battery tests, and the iPhone 15 Plus currently ranks 11 for phones tested in the past 2 years. We expect the same solid result from the iPhone 16 Plus and will embed some benchmarks here soon.

The charging situation sadly remains on the slower side. Apple didn't mentioned an upgrade to charging speeds during the event, which means that we're getting the same 25W wired charging. Apple says the iPhone 16 Plus can get up to 50% charge in 35 minutes and we're going to be testing this shortly.

This section will be filled with some real-life impressions. What we can say now is that the Taptic engine has remained unchanged, and that's not a bad thing. The past couple of years, all iPhone models have performed really well in that regard, offering tight, strong, and precise vibration.

The audio situation is the same, the dual stereo setup on the iPhone 16 provides good quality audio output with good loudness and not much harmonic distortion. There's no 3.5mm audio jack, just bear this in mind.

The iPhone 16 Plus starts at $899 for the base 8/128GB model. You'll need to wait a bit longer for the full review and final verdict, but what we can say now is that if you own a previous generation such as the iPhone 15 Plus or even the iPhone 14 Plus, there's little to no reason to upgrade and get the new one.

Now, if you want to get a taste of iOS or looking to switch from Android, but don't want to pay the Pro Max premium price, the iPhone 16 Plus could be a nice alternative and a gateway to the Apple ecosystem. That being said, the gap to the Pro devices has grown larger with these new models, and we're not sure the bigger 6.7-inch screen justifies going for the Plus instead of the vanilla iPhone 16, which is $200 cheaper.