iPhone 16 Pro Max: One Addictive Feature That No One Talks About

So it’s been more than a month with the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and I thought I knew what to expect. But honestly, there are some surprising changes that actually make a difference.

And there is that ONE feature that I’m totally addicted to that I’ve been using way more than I thought I would, and it might be that one reason that you might want to upgrade.

 

 

Build Quality

So let’s talk about the build quality first because the Desert Titanium finish looked amazing the moment I saw it in Apple Park. But after using it, I actually missed the Natural Titanium color just a bit more. 

As a lover of a white-colored smartphone, the white variant just feels timeless on my iPhone 14 Pro Max. But honestly, the titanium sides are the biggest selling point both on the iPhone 15 Pro Max and this iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is a huge improvement over the stainless steel from the iPhone 14 series.

For the past month, I’ve been using the phone with Apple’s official clear phone case with MagSafe. But there were times when I bravely took it off just to appreciate the rear finish of the phone, and it really felt nice to hold without the case on. 

So my advice is to rock the phone without the case to really appreciate the finish more. But that is of course if you’re daring enough and if you’re not surrounded by people who talk with their hands waving all over like this who might knock the phone off your hands as though they were swatting a bunch of invisible flies.

 

Display

The display was one of those see-it-to-believe-it upgrades because these thinner bezels do make the phone feel like it has way much more screen real estate without being bulkier. 

At first, I thought that this seemed minor, but in day-to-day use, it does make the phone feel way much nicer to look at, whether or not I’m watching videos or just using the phone for my daily tasks. 

Then the 1-nit brightness level also surprisingly makes a huge difference, especially in low-light settings. This is because I dim my house lights at about 9:30 pm, and the lower brightness feels very easy on the eyes. Plus, the auto brightness adjustment is easily one of the smoothest that I’ve used.

Okay, remember the Dynamic Island? Yeah, it’s been around for a few years, but I still feel that the potential is still untapped. Some developers have used it very well with apps like Livescore, Grab, and the premium but very useful Flighty app. 

But I do think that this could be more useful with developers, so hopefully, developers do take advantage of this because it is something that I really appreciate daily, and it’s something that I feel has not been talked about enough ever since it was introduced in the 14 Pro series.

 

Battery

As for the battery life compared to the 15 Pro Max, I’m seeing a similar battery life. I set it to stop charging at 95% where you can think of it as leaving a little gas in the tank, just enough to make it back before filling it up again, where this could be adjusted under the battery charging settings. 

I’ve tried 90%, but on heavy usage days that wasn’t enough. And then on days where I’m traveling and I feel too lazy to carry a power bank, I just leave it at 100%, where I got an average of about 7 hours and 8 minutes of screen on time when I was about 9% battery. 

So battery life is great, probably not the best in the world, but for a Pro variant of the iPhone, I can live with that since I do go to bed early anyway.

 

Audio Mix

So the Audio Mix feature was a feature that I really use a lot. Now, I did a sound test for each of its features in my in-depth review of the iPhone 16 Plus, but if you miss that, in a nutshell, it gives you more directional sound for modes like In-Frame and Cinematic. 

But the mode that I use the most is the Studio, which turns the microphone quality to sort of a studio mic effect, killing out the background noise similar to a noise cancellation effect without sounding weird, like you’re in a void somewhere. So this was really useful in situations like this. 

Note: Check out my YouTube video for the sound test.

 

Customization

Before talking about the cameras, I’m going to go through some customizations that I made using this phone daily. 

First, if you notice that the default search icon on the home screen isn’t there, it’s because I removed it entirely, which does make the home screen look so much cleaner to the point that Marie Kondo will be very proud of me because it does spark joy! 

Plus, if you really need to use this search a lot, you can just swipe down at the middle of the screen to search anyway. If you want to remove that, just go to the settings, the Home Screen & App Library, then toggle off the Show on Home Screen over there.

Then, of course, I adjusted the icon tint easily with the new iOS 18 home screen customization, where I switched the icon to the large option to get rid of the app’s text. I still do wish that we could remove the text without making the icons large.

Okay, and then I turn off my Always-On display wallpaper because it does give me some paranoia that I didn’t lock my phone screen, and it also helps with battery. Not a lot, but it does make a slight difference. 

Then my lock screen is also set to show what’s next on my calendar, a shortcut to open a new task on Todoist, and a battery widget for WHOOP band. Then below that, there is the Calculator app and the ChatGPT voice.

Then finally, the Action Button opens for Todoist for me. And speaking of buttons (or not buttons), here’s my experience with the Camera Control. 

 

Camera Control

So I use the Camera Control about 60% of the time when I use the phone, and I went in depth about what it does overall in my iPhone 16 Plus review, so be sure to check it out here.

But in a nutshell, I use it for shooting vertical videos quickly for Instagram Stories, taking rear camera selfie pictures in both landscape and vertical orientation, and switching lenses when I take photos when viewing the camera app. 

And I also use the Camera Control for overhead shots. But there’s a rumor about a possible half-press to focus and lock exposure that might be coming up, so if that is true, that will make this feature even better.

 

Cameras

Next, let’s talk about the camera improvements because the ultrawide lens now has a higher 48MP count compared to last year’s 12MP, and yes, the quality has improved, especially at night. 

As for the main lens, you can expect excellent quality even up to 10x zoom, even if it’s a digital zoom. The natural bokeh on the 5x zoom lens is still one of the best in the smartphone world.

One major upgrade for video is 4K at 120 fps, which means that when I’m traveling, I can officially leave my Sony A7S III in the studio when I record my videos when I’m going overseas. 

So this 4K 120 fps recording is only available for the 1x mode and the 2x zoom mode, so you can’t use it for the 5x zoom. But there is a very interesting hack that I found where if you zoom in video at 30 fps to 5x and then if you change it to 120 fps, it switches to 3x mode. Neat trick, right?

What’s great is that even if you record video at 120 fps, it plays back in real-time compared to recording on a mirrorless camera, which will play back in a slower motion. 

Then in the Photos app gallery, you can choose when to slow it down or set the percentage for slow motion in the clip too.

Now, I’ve been using the ORICO A20PLUS 2TB External SSD with MagSafe to record video files and ProRes Log recording, and this has been great because I’ve been always using the Apple ProRes Log recording ever since it was announced in the iPhone 15 Pro Series. And even this particular A-Roll video and even some of the B-Roll videos when I was at Apple Park.

The reason why I’ve been using this more on the Blackmagic camera app or even the Final Cut camera app is because I do notice some drop of frames, and there were some error messages that came up occasionally. 

So, since I am a Blackmagic camera user, this was like a second home to me, and I personally felt that even if you’re a beginner, you learn to use these two apps so much easier, and it’s free.

Speaking of this ORICO A20PLUS, it also comes with a custom USB-C to USB-C cable, other than this 2TB option, there’s also an option for 512GB and a 1TB option where they also offer a 3-year warranty. 

So this means that technically, the amount of storage that I have on the iPhone 16 Pro Max is up to 3TB of storage space! 

If you’re interested in this ORICO A20PLUS SSD, you can get it here: https://bit.ly/4h3E5DQ

 

Photographic Styles

Lastly, the feature that I’m totally addicted to, which is exclusive to only the iPhone 16 models, is the Photographic Styles. Now, I’ve never used filters like this before on any phone before this, and I only usually do some minor tweaks in Lightroom or Snapseed, and that is about it, right? So yeah, this feels like it’s a one-man filter factory with this.

Now, when I tried the Xiaomi 14T Pro, I did play around with the Leica filters, but I just love the flexibility that the Photographic Styles on the iPhone 16 series offers because you can choose the Styles before taking the picture and even edit after the fact. 

You can also copy the edits and paste them on another picture or revert to the original picture without any edits. As you can see in these sample photos, the pictures were taken and used with the Photographic Styles super effortlessly. 

If you want to know which styles I use in these particular photos, I posted them on my Instagram where I break down each and every photo on which Photographic Styles I’ve used.

 

Apple Intelligence

Throughout my use, only towards the end of this review when the iOS version 18.1.1 came out, which means that Apple Intelligence is finally available to use. 

But among all, what I used the most was the Clean Up, and I am very surprised to see how well it did, especially when removing objects that had reflections too. 

Then the new Ask Siri by double tapping at the bottom of the screen was also really great and helpful when you don’t want to use your voice to ask something. 

And this is super helpful when you’re asking something that is way ahead of time, for example, asking when is my next car payment, and he searches my calendar to do so.

I also really appreciated the Notification Summary, in which a lot of people have been coming out with different memes about how it does not work well for them. But honestly, for me, it was really great where if I got a bunch of notifications on Todoist, it would lump up together to come up with a summary of what the notifications were about, and it also works very well for smart home notifications.

Other than that, I didn’t find myself using the other tools as much on iOS 18.1.1. So hopefully, the next version I will be using that more, especially when I use this phone daily.

 

Conclusion

So in conclusion, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is an incredible device. Yes, it’s not much different from the iPhone 15 Pro or the Pro Max, but here’s the thing, it’s not supposed to be. Because if you’re using an older iPhone 14 or even older than that, then yes, this is definitely an upgrade. 

If you’d like to see my review of the iPhone 16 Plus, check out that video here.