(groovy hip-hop music) – So it's a bit of a tradition around here to unbox the newest iPhones
on the day they come out. And we're upholding
this tradition this year to find one single difference
versus last year's unboxings. So we've got four iPhones
here in new colors: iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, which the boxes show
the back of the phones. And then iPhone 16 Pro
and iPhone 16 Pro Max, which show the front. And I'm totally gonna
start with the base phones, the crowd favorites this year. Finally, some colors back
in the iPhone lineup. So, I'm gonna call this
one the flagship color. This is the Ultra Marine iPhone 16. And in the box, you get the USB-C cable, again, braided and high quality, and then a tiny little bit of
paperwork in this pill shape. And then you'll notice no SIM
card tool, same as last year, and no stickers this year. There are no stickers included in the iPhone 16 box at all. Truly the end of an era. They just can't stop removing things, they can't help themselves.
But let's get a look at the
pink plus-sized phone, too. These phones are the
same sizes as last year: 6.1 inches for the base,
6.7 inches for the Plus. But with the bigger batteries inside, that's something I'm
really happy to hear about and very curious about in my testing. But really, I'm just happy
we finally have colors back. So the back of the phone,
it's a little more pale, but the glass around the
camera is a bit darker, the rails of the phone are a
bit darker, so this is nice.
Same stuff in the box. Now, with these Pro phones, I think there's a reason they show the front of the phone on the box because, if they showed the back, you literally could
not tell the difference versus last year. But hey, at least this one has slightly thinner bezels they can show. And yeah, this year is gonna be the Natural Titanium iPhone 16 Pro. And aside from the lack
of stickers in the box, it's gonna look and feel
basically exactly like a titanium iPhone 15 Pro. Same USB-C cable as the
base phone, as well. Great. But then, this is the
new flagship Pro color. The renders we saw at
first were kind of weird, but this is the official
Desert Titanium color. And you know, all of Apple's phones are, again, a bit more pale on the back, but they have more color on these rails, and that's definitely true again here. It's kind of like a light sand color but also feels similar
to the gold of the past. But there you have it. That's the iPhone 16's
unboxing experience.
So, by the time you see this uploaded, that means I am deep
into my iPhone 16 testing and working on the full review. So, definitely, get subscribed
to see that when it drops. But if there are any things that you specifically
wanna see talked about more or that haven't been talked about enough for the review of the phones, let me know in the comment section below. But I can still give you now some quick things that I've
noticed in my first couple days, my first week of testing, some FAQs. So, first up, there is a size
difference versus last year. The base phones are the
same sizes, like I said, 6.1 and 6.7 inches in the same body sizes. But the Pro phones are both bigger. The iPhone 16 Pro goes
from 6.1 to 6.3 inches, and even though it has thinner bezels, yes, the phone is slightly
taller and slightly wider. And then, the iPhone 16 Pro Max goes from 6.7 inches to
6.9 inches diagonally, which is now just an
absolutely gigantic phone.
I mean, it was already huge, but it's now even taller and wider. Biggest phone they've ever made. If you look at it next
to the Galaxy S24 Ultra, that's another absolutely
huge phone for some context, and that phone has a stylus in it. So obviously, Apple's put
more battery in this phone, which is great to see. I'm glad they're not going
the opposite direction of, like, making it thinner
or shrinking the batteries. But yeah, just it's
definitely good to know if you're going with the
new Pro Max this year, you are getting a truly huge, like, borderline tablet-sized phone. Also, random tidbit: Thanks to these new
cameras up in the corners, these new iPhones are
big-time table rockers. Like, big-time uneven camera on the back. It's annoying to me 'cause I
type on the table sometimes. Anyway, I've also been
taking some pictures and videos with the new cameras.
I'll be taking and
posting many, many more. If you wanna follow me on Instagram, that's where you'll see some more in the next couple of days,
but I'll link that below. My first impression is
it's kind of remarkable how consistent Apple's
image processing pipeline is to get the same look every year.
Like a lot of times, we see
companies switch sensors. Even the Pixels switched sensors after using the same old one for a while, and the whole look kind of changed. But it really feels like year over year, no matter how many hardware changes, no matter how many sensor
changes these phones go through, they still just very much
have the iPhone look, which, I mean, makes sense. This just shallower depth of field from the larger physical sensor. I have also run some benchmarks. So these are the new Geekbench 6 scores for the new A18/A18 Pro in these phones, which are new versus last year. Really not noticing, like, a huge difference in performance
with these brand-new phones. Obviously, you're gonna feel
that more at the very high end and in the long term as these phones age. But what Geekbench also did reveal is all of these phones across the board have eight gigs of RAM now.
So, there's typically been
different amounts of RAM in the Pro phone versus the regular phone. Now, there's not. Now, they all have eight gigs of RAM. So Apple was giving us a
lot of talk in that keynote about how these are the first phones built from the ground up
for Apple Intelligence. Is that what this means? I mean, you clearly need a lot of memory to run these AI models, and there's also a more
powerful neural engine on all the phones versus last year. So maybe that's a part of it, too. But all that talk and these
phones all launch with iOS 18.0, which has exactly zero Apple
Intelligence features on them at launch out the box.
But that's a rant for another day. But clearly, the biggest
physical new change on these new phones is
this added button here. And Apple refused to call
it a button in the keynote and then doubled down. They also did a bunch of,
like, executive interviews on various YouTube channels that you can go watch from that day, and even in those interviews, they continue to refuse
to call it a button.
It's so weird. – To just put out the
biggest burning fire, right up front, in the discourse. It is a real button, right? – Ah!
(group laughing) – It's a physical thing
that depresses, right? – I think it's a first of its kind. There is a tactile switch, that
gives you that final click. – So, just to clear it up, it is an actual moving
clicking physical button that is called Camera Control. (laughs) But it's more than a button. It's also made it to all these
phones, not just the Pros. So, let me jump into that. This Camera Control button,
as the name implies, only controls camera-related things. So it's not like another Action button, it's a Camera Control button. You can hit it once it
opens up the camera, you can hit it again to take a photo, and then you can hold it down to start recording a quick video. But it's also a large capacitive touch-sensitive surface with
a vibration motor underneath.
So it doesn't actually half-press, but with that vibration motor, it can mimic the feeling of a half-press, like a real camera would have. And you can double-tap to flip through various
camera controls like zoom or photographic styles, or tone. It takes some getting used to. I mean, these swipes, they also you can see
have momentum physics too, so you can swipe too fast or too far and go past what you were aiming for or zoom past where you thought you would. So it can feel a bit finicky and silly as you start using it, especially since you can
literally do all this stuff with the buttons already on the screen. But when you use Camera Control, all of the rest of those
buttons just fade away and disappear, kind of
encouraging you to continue using the Camera Control to find
what you're trying to do. It's really interesting. The placement feels like it was
made with landscape in mind, but landscape ideally
would've been at the corner. But they also know a lot
of people take photos and videos like this, so it can't be all the way at the bottom.
So they moved it up. So, it's kind of splitting
the difference here. And also, third-party apps
will be able to plug into it if they use the camera. So this is already working with Kino, and it's supposed to start working with Snapchat pretty soon as well. And you can imagine other
apps that use the camera will just decide what
they wanna do with it. I was also curious, though, and I said this in that
original impressions video, how cases would deal with
this new button surface thing. So it turns out there's
basically two options. Option number one is just a
cutout in the side of the case. Just cut it out, expose it to the finger. So it's fine. That's probably what
most cheap cases will do, but that also means it's
no longer gonna be flush with the side of the case. But then there's option number two, which is what Apple's
first-party cases do, which is putting in this
little insert, which has glass and transfers the capacitance from the button outside of the case to the Camera Control of the phone itself and maintaining that flush feel.
And it feels like it works pretty well. The half press still works fine, the swiping still works fine, the vibration motor transfers through. And the Beats by Dre cases
also already have this. Yeah, I'm just gonna say
that again real quick in case you were just
phasing out for a second. There's Beats by Dre iPhone
cases now. (chuckles) Like, since when does Beats make cases? Like, why does Beats make cases? I thought, I don't know,
there was a theme of, like, Beats being audio products, but there's something new going on here. Maybe now they're just iPhone accessories? I don't know. But yeah, they've got a nice little Camera Control button thing
on their new iPhone cases, which is nice. I kind of wish, and I'm not alone, that this was also Touch ID, but then they couldn't call
it Camera Control, I guess.
I wonder if that's in the
future of this button. But anyway, speaking of
third-party accessories, that's where dbrand stepped
in to sponsor this video. So, for this sponsor segment,
we're gonna be doing something a little bit different. See, screen protectors,
not my favorite thing. They're kind of a chore to install, between the dust and the
alignment and getting it perfect. That's a big part of why I
don't use them all the time. But that's where channel
sponsor dbrand comes in. They seem to believe that I can install their Prism 2.0 screen
protector blindfolded.
So that's what I'm gonna try to do. Instructions that I've been
told are pretty simple. To just get the screen protector, get the phone, and then line it up. Which is like that. (fingers tapping) And then pull the tab like that. (plastic tab rustling) And then just swipe down
the middle to press it down. Give it a couple seconds. And then that should be it. Let's see. Take this off. (installation frame clunking) And that doesn't even
look like it's installed. But it is. It totally is. And it's perfect. Nice. Okay. Yeah, every Prism comes with two of these, so if you get the first one
wrong, you can get a second try. But if you wanna check
these out for the iPhone or any number of phones
that they make for it, I'll have a link below. All right. That's been it. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace. (groovy hip-hop music).
