Apple really puts the "Pro" in the iPhone Pro (With the iPhone 16 Pro)

A few days ago Apple held its annual iPhone event where they launched the iPhone 16 and 16 pro line, and after trying not to fall asleep after they rehashed the Apple Intelligence stuff from WWDC, I was pleasantly surprised by the new iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. Strangely though, after the event people on social media were complaining that there wasn’t a real difference between the pro and the normal models. To which I thought: “Were they even watching the same keynote I was?” Because when I watched that segment I thought to myself, this is the most “pro” pro phone Apple has ever released. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, it’s only really now the Pro iPhone has fully earned the “Pro” name.

The focus of the iPhone 16 Pro segment was undoubtedly the camera and photography features. The big improvement over the previous model is that the iPhone’s ultra-wide camera now gets the a 42mp sensor, the same resolution as the main camera (I’m not sure if it’s the same sensor or not) and the main camera also gets an improvement.

Almost everyone I know who has the 15 pro, myself included, has wanted a better ultrawide camera. I love the ultrawide focal length on my iPhone but the quality is noticeably poorer than the main camera. But it’s not just for ultra wide shots. A big advantages of the iPhone 16 Pro getting a 48mp sensor on the ultra wide isn’t just for the Ultra Wide shots, but also for Macro shots, as macro on the iPhone uses the Ultra Wide camera. While I like using the Macro feature on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, the quality isn’t great. Having this capability with the far superior 48mp sensor should offer a significant quality improvement for macro shots.

The other impressive feature is that the iPhone can now record 4K 120. In Pro Res. In Log or HDR. This is wild. You normally need a fairly high end camera to shoot 4k120 in ProRes and even then most require an external recorder. So for Pros that want to shoot this, this is kind of impressive.

Then there is the new camera control button here which is shared with the non-pro phones. Even though this was rumoured, I think the actual functionality of it surprised a lot of people. I think most were expecting just a shutter button, but the touch control adds a whole new level of control, something that maybe the manufacturers of actual cameras might consider (In fairness canon did sort of with the Eos R but everyone hated it.) My only wish for the new phones, or I suppose for iOS in general is that Apple would allow third party software to get access to the full 48 megapixels of the camera for proper RAW capture (as opposed to Apple’s hybrid ProRaw). Unfortunately at the moment, third party apps can only capture 12mp downsampled RAW files for whatever reason).

All that was good enough, but for me it was the audio features that really convinced me that this is a proper “pro” device. The iPhone 16 Pro now includes 4 “studio quality” microphones and can record spacial audio directly without any additional hardware. But it was the way the audio can be processed that was really impressive. They were basically performing a multi channel audio mix by AI in realtime on the phone. The demo they gave of this segment was really impressive. Not only was it able to isolate audio based on who was in the scene, but it did intelligence based EQ automatically without any user intervention, and was also able to effectively do a dolby atmos mix by itself.

On a phone.

I hope they enable this with external microphones too. While I’m sure the new microphones are great (considering they were a big step up when they added similar microphones to the MaBooks) they still won’t compare to being able to use dedicated high end microphones. The ability to connect multiple external microphones over USB-C and still have the software mixing functions would be really useful, although it’s possible that the processing requires the knowledge of the positioning of the microphones. Even so, to be able to do this on a phone in realtime without external editing is great.

The way I see it, the iPhone Pro has basically become a multifunction production studio in your pocket. You can pretty much do almost any kind of creative production on a pocketable computer. It’s the kind of thing that was sci-fi years ago. It’s like a tricorder for creatives. When you think about the processing power of the A18 Pro alone, it’s crazy. Recently shared benchmarks put it on par with the M1 for CPU speed. And it’s in a phone. If third party software takes full advantage of this, they could become indispensable devices for creatives. I guess in some respects they are already, but the latest round of features is kind of icing on the cake. When I think back over the years at all the dedicated equipment and boxes that you used to need, and these functions are now able to be done on the iPhone it’s really impressive.

And I’m sure someone will say - but android has been able to do x, y, z for years - and maybe some of that is true - but can it do it all in such an integrated package? With such integrated and well thought out software and such an integrated ecosystem? Im sure some will insist they can, but I haven’t seen anything that is designed so specifically for creative professionals. Maybe one of the high end Sony phones.

Most people will probably say: “I don’t need those features” and you’d be right - most people don’t - but I’m talking about creative professionals here. I’m not just talking about people posting to TikTok either (not to belittle TikTok) - I’m talking TV and Film. I’m talking high end corporate and commercials, news and documentary projects. There have been many productions using iPhones for these. They may not be used for the main camera on TV and Film productions, they are usually kept for specific purposes, but when Apple introduced Apple Log last year they really opened up a whole world of options for creatives.

When the iPhone Pro first came out there was certainly an argument that it wasn’t really a “pro” device and that Apple was just milking the “pro” name. I think that really changed when the iPhone 15 Pro came out. Especially with the addition of USB-C, Apple Log and ProRes. This was the first step in this transition to it really being a proper professional device. There are plenty of news producers shooting solely on iPhone. I could see shooting a proper feature documentary on the phone now too - especially in situations where a full camera setup may not be practical. I know you could do this already and I’m sure there have been documentaries filmed with the iPhone, but now you can have far more creative power and control to not just capture footage, but to capture cinema quality footage and multichannel audio too.

Just look at the apple event itself - captured on an iPhone.

But hey - some random dudes on Twitter X said it’s no different from the normal iPhone so what do I know?