I knew well ahead of time that this year's iPhone 16 update figured to be a significant one with the kind of features to make owners of recent iPhones envious of the new models. That's not because of any of the rumors circulating around Apple's latest handsets, although there as certainly an ample supply of those. No, I knew Apple was going to hit it out of the park with its new devices because I bought an iPhone just before the iPhone 16 launch.
Actually, to be accurate, I bought two iPhones. So that figured to make the iPhone 16 twice as good as before.
To briefly recap, back in July, my wife found herself in need of a new phone and my daughter had reached an age where it made sense to get her a phone of her own. We briefly debated holding out until the iPhone 16 launch a couple months later, but a visit to our local Verizon store presented us with an offer we couldn't refuse — half-off an iPhone 15 with trade-in along with a free iPhone 14 for my kiddo since we were adding a line of data to our plan. Not a bad piece of business, except for the part about entirely new iPhones coming along before the new phone smell had even worn off our purchase.
To purchase any bit of tech — smartphones, especially — is to invite the specter of buyer's remorse into your life. You always have that haunting suspicion that something better is going to come along — usually because something better is always coming along. Phone makers work very hard to come up with exciting enhancements to their handsets each year, and the second those are out the door, they've turned their attention on how to top that with the next year's model. So it goes with the iPhone 16.
And yet, I don't have a single regret about jumping into the iPhone upgrade pool a couple of months ahead of time. That's no reflection on any of Apple's new models, which seem pretty impressive if you go by the first impressions in our iPhone 16 hands-on or our hands-on with the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max models. Rather, it's a matter of identifying what you want in a phone and being satisfied with what you ultimately get.
Why we upgraded before the iPhone 16
The right time to get a new phone is the precise moment when you need a new phone
My guiding principle on upgrades is that the right time to get a new phone is the precise moment when you need a new phone. If that dovetails with when your favorite phone maker comes out with a new model, great, but if not, there's no need to make do with an outdated device just because of the promise of something better around the corner.
We bought an iPhone in July because my wife needed an iPhone in July. Could we have stretched it out another two months and gotten an iPhone 16 instead? Probably, but why suffer through that? These aren't pioneer times.
It helps remove the sting a bit that Apple reserved the most impressive improvements to the iPhone 16 Pro models. The bigger screens, the improved camera hardware, the impressive video capture features and the A18 Pro chipset top any of the enhancements you'll find in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. But as stellar as those improvements look on paper, my wife was never going to spend $999 or more on a new phone. There are people in this world who can stare down four-figure price tags on smartphones without blinking, and those people are not us.
That leaves us with the iPhone 16 as the one that got away. (My wife shares my disdain for big-screen phones — it should have been part of our marital vows — so the iPhone 16 Plus would never have been a consideration.) And again, while that seems like a really good phone pending our full review, the changes it introduces didn't address what my wife was looking for in a phone.
We figured that the addition of an Action button and what turned out to be the new Camera Control feature were really possibilities for the iPhone 16, but my wife didn't see either as a must-have addition. Similarly, the new ultrawide lens and its larger sensor should help the iPhone 16 challenge the best camera phones, but the feature my iPhone XR-toting wife really wanted was that 48MP main camera — something the iPhone 15 offered.
My wife also doesn't play the kind of graphically-intensive games that stand to benefit from the new A18 chip inside the iPhone 16. The A16 Bionic has more than enough horsepower for the things she does on a phone.
What about Apple Intelligence?
There's an elephant in the room here, and it goes by the name of Apple Intelligence. By committing to an iPhone 15, my wife essentially gave up any chance of using those features until the next time she moves to a new iPhone, which, given her past upgrade schedule should be sometime around 2029.
Thanks to Apple's WWDC 2024 preview of iOS 18 and the Apple Intelligence features that would arrive in a subsequent update, we had some idea of what she'd be giving up by upgrading to a phone that can't run Apple Intelligence. And going through the list of initial Apple Intelligence features, there's nothing in there that my wife considered a big miss.
Like me, my partner has been a professional writer for the better part of three decades. The suggestion that she needs an AI bot to help her write an email is laughable. She's expressed no desire to create Genmoji or use text prompts to generate images in Apple's Image Playground. Her use of Siri is generally limited to arguing with the digital assistant about setting a timer. The Photo Clean Up tool piqued her interest, but not so much that she's ready to throw her new phone out a window.
To put it more succinctly, my wife hasn't seen anything in Apple Intelligence that she'd consider essential to her iPhone use. That speaks to a larger challenge with Apple's push into artificial intelligence, but let's limit the takeaway for now that for one-third of my household, Apple Intelligence is a non-starter.
iPhone upgrade outlook
So yes, it would have been nice to get our hands on the latest and greatest Apple hardware by holding off for the iPhone 16 launch before upgrading. And maybe there's an Apple Intelligence feature coming down the road that makes my wife rethink her disinterest. But in the end, we're left with an iPhone 15 that delivers exactly what my wife wants in a mobile device at a price she's more than happy to pay. You could do a lot worse the next time you upgrade.
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