Apple’s 2024 flagship play is now on the table. The iPhone 16 Pro and its larger sibling, the Pro Max, introduced in September 2024 and sold beside the cheaper iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, list at $999 for the base Pro and $1,199 for the Pro Max, with orders open ahead of availability on Friday, September 20. The strategic tell is not the price but the plumbing: among this generation’s quieter moves is support for Wi-Fi 7, the faster and more efficient wireless standard.
The screens grew for the first time in several years. The Pro’s display is now 6.3 inches, up from 6.1, and the Pro Max reaches 6.9 inches, up from 6.7 — a change Apple executed largely by shaving bezels down to what it calls the thinnest borders on any Apple product. The panels keep the Super Retina XDR technology with Always-On and a 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate, add a 1-nit minimum brightness, and carry resolutions of 2622×1206 on the Pro and 2868×1320 on the Pro Max. Both phones are slightly taller, wider and heavier than their predecessors.
The body remains a titanium alloy frame — more resistant to scratches and drops than stainless steel — in black, natural, white and a gold-toned desert titanium finish, fronted by a second-generation Ceramic Shield that Apple rates 50 percent tougher. The USB-C port transfers at USB 3 speeds of up to 10Gb/s and can charge AirPods or an Apple Watch directly; MagSafe jumps to 25W with a new charger, with 15W Qi2 also supported. Beside the customizable Action button sits a new touch- and pressure-sensitive Camera Control, modeled on a DSLR shutter, that launches the camera, takes photos and video and adjusts settings, with third-party apps able to use it too.
Under the hood sits the A18 Pro, built on a second-generation 3-nanometer process: a 6-core CPU pairing two efficiency cores with four performance cores, a 6-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine, with total system memory bandwidth up 17 percent. Apple puts the CPU up to 15 percent ahead of the A17 Pro and the GPU up to 20 percent; a rearchitected interior with an aluminum substructure lifts sustained performance by up to 20 percent, and hardware ray tracing runs up to 2x faster.
The optics got the deepest work. A 48-megapixel Fusion camera with a faster quad-pixel sensor defaults to 24-megapixel images and switches among 24mm, 28mm and 35mm focal lengths; a new 48-megapixel Ultra Wide sharpens macro shots; and both models carry the 5x telephoto with its tetraprism design. Video gains Dolby Vision capture at 4K 120 fps, something no smartphone had offered before, plus spatial photos, an Audio Mix tool for reworking sound after capture, wind-noise reduction and studio-grade microphones. Next-generation Photographic Styles allow color, highlight and shadow edits in real time, on specific colors rather than the whole frame.
The connectivity sheet rounds out the calculus: 5G covering sub-6GHz plus the U.S. mmWave bands, eSIM-only there, Bluetooth 5.3, and that Wi-Fi 7 support. What this signals is a bet that the bottleneck has moved off the device — the chip is fast enough, and the pipe matters more. Strategically, Apple is pushing carriers and router makers to keep pace with a phone that outclasses the networks it will join.
