iPhone 16 Pro Worst thing about 16 series iPhones, 1 year later

[1096bimu]

For me it's got to be the 5x telephoto lens, it SUCKS so much.
The focal length is too long, this indirectly means it has a tiny sensor due to volume constraints, but also it has terrible stabilization. Then these two factors combined give you the issue of hand shake when taking photos, especially with the camera button, it's almost impossible to take a clear photo with the button because of the shaking, unless you're in a perfectly sunny day.

I just got a Chinese phone which has a very common telephoto choice, 3x telephoto with macro. This is a much more useful focal length, and because it's not too long, there is still space for a reasonably sized sensor, as well as room for the lens to focus much closer. You can even fit a high resolution sensor in it to enable more digital zoom and reach out to something like 6x

From my own testing, even under ideal lighting conditions the iPhone only has slight detail advantage for 5x and longer zoom. For everything else, that means 2x to 4.9999x, from close to far, indoor to night, the Android 3X camera choice is significantly better.

You would think Apple would not join the highest zoom X number race but instead use a more generally useful telephoto camera but it really seems like they chose bigger spec numbers instead. To some extend I also don't like the ultra wide choice of 12mm, that's so EXTREMELY wide. If you know anything about photography you know the most commonly used zooms only go as wide as 16mm, 12mm lenses are specialty lenses that are much less commonly used. So why not stop at 16mm for the ultra wide so you can improve the image quality? Instead we get this ridiculously wide lens with again, poor image quality. You also have to consider all the features where the ultra wide must work along with the main camera like spacial photo/video and portrait mode, a less wide but higher quality ultra wide lens would make those better as well.

 

[Shirasaki]

I don’t even mean 5x but even just 1x these sensors are VERY SENSITIVE to hand shakes and I simply can NEVER take a clear photo of texts on any form of paper in any lighting conditions. It all goes into a blurry mess. On the contrary iPhone XS Max, with admittedly very old sensor, takes clear photos of texts every single time. It’s so frustrating the “latest tech” can’t tolerate shaking. Like at all, as if image stabilisation doesn’t exist. I can’t imagine how shaky action shots gonna be and those promo videos definitely are NOT taken with iPhone.

 

[Homme]

The worst thing about the 16 series iPhones especially the /Pro/Pro Max ones (to a lesser extent the 16 plus and to a much lesser extent the 16e) is the fact that they weren’t huge upgrades compared to most other iPhone generations.

The 16 plus despite it being the last plus phone and the Air replacing it is a much better deal than the 15 plus and non pro ones especially with A18 and 8GB Of RAM but the back of the phone is also redesigned too.

The 16e is mostly less affected in this because it replaced the SE Model and it was sorely needed ( the 16e is one of the top 10 iPhones which is important to the history of the iPhone because of the C1 Modem in the iPhone and it being the first iDevice to have it).

And besides C1 it has 8GB of RAM which the RAM was the best thing about the 16 lineup in which all iPhone 16s have 8GB of RAM ( as well as the non pro iPhone 17 and the 17e) which reminds me of the 6S/OG SE Era which all of those A9 iPhones have 2GB ( and the 7/8 as well afterwards).

But yeah the 17 Pro and Pro Max as well as the 17 Air ( besides battery life) are much bigger upgrades though