iPhone 16 MAJOR Leaks & Rumors! Good & Bad News

We’re now just over one month away from Apple releasing the iPhone 16 in September, so today I want to go over the latest leaks and rumors as well as a batch of good and bad news for these phones. As we are so close to launch now, we’re hearing about the features that have made the cut and the features that have gotten postponed or pushed to next year. Let’s start off with the bad news first.

For months now, and especially considering the designs of this year’s iPhones, we have known that the big feature is not going to be what you can actually see. It’s not the vertically stacked camera on the lower-end models with the new capture button that Apple is adding, and it’s certainly not the design of the Pro Models, which looks pretty much one-to-one with last year. The flagship upgrade for every iPhone 16 this year is going to be the new AI features and everything that Apple brings to these phones via Apple Intelligence, which includes some really cool features that Apple has already shown off.

While for a couple of months we weren’t able to go hands-on with these, Apple just released the first iOS 18.1 beta to developers, where a number of new features are finally enabled for the first time. We’ve gotten to see the brand new Siri UI, which in person does look absolutely unreal. Siri now has way more knowledge about Apple products. You can speak to Siri way more comfortably by rolling over your words or correcting yourself mid-sentence. We’ve got the new text generation tools where it can rewrite things to be a certain style, either more kind or more professional. We’ve got suggested replies in places like messages, summarization of emails, which is actually really dope, and in other places, you can now search for photos using more natural language and even generate movies using AI.

Here’s the thing though, as of right now, that’s pretty much all of the Apple Intelligence features that we can currently play with. Everything else, from the new version of Siri that actually knows you and has that personal context, to custom image and emoji generation, even cooler things like the photos retouching AI capabilities, well, Apple’s not rolling all of those out at the same time as these other features. They’re kind of fragmenting the release of these Apple Intelligence features, which immediately made me wonder, well, if AI is the main upgrade for the iPhone 16, surely it wouldn’t be delayed past the launch, right? But, well, according to some new reports, Apple has had a change of plans and they have delayed the launch of AI features with Apple Intelligence on the iPhone 16 until sometime with the release of iOS 18.1 in October. This suggests that when you go and buy an iPhone 16 on day one when it releases in September, it won’t have any new AI features built-in. You’ll have to wait about a month for those to get added to the phone through a software update.

Now, upon initially hearing this bad news, it just didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, how would Apple actually launch the iPhone 16 without you actually being able to use the big new feature right away? But then I was reminded of just last year in 2023 with what Apple did with the launch of the Apple Watch Series 9. The headline feature for last year’s Apple Watch was double tap, where you can pinch your fingers together to perform an action. But when you bought the Apple Watch Series 9 in September right away, the feature was not there. In fact, it took Apple about a month and a half until the first major watchOS 10 update, when we got watchOS 10.1 that included the double tap feature. Basically, an exact parallel to what it appears Apple is going to be doing with this year’s iPhone 16 lineup. It’s like the features come in, just not right away.

By the way, if you love these renders and you want to see more, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss out on any future videos. Luckily, that’s all the bad news. Everything else in this video is a bunch of great things we’ve heard for the iPhone 16 lineup, so let’s move on to that now.

Starting off with a new rumor that I missed from a few months ago, saying that the iPhone 16 would be Apple’s first phone to potentially ship with two terabytes of storage, which would be double the amount of storage that Apple currently offers. It’s been sitting at a terabyte for a while now, and while I didn’t believe this initially, I could absolutely see Apple enjoying the ability to price that 2TB storage option a lot higher, potentially sending a 2TB iPhone 16 Pro Max close to $2,200, which is… I don’t even know how to comprehend that much money for a phone. But hey, maybe you’re looking for an external SSD for your iPhone, and that’s actually why I partnered up with Charge who sponsored today’s video to show you their brand new Charge Disc SSD enclosure.

The fully transparent design on this thing is so cool and installing the 2230 size SSD is easy. You just pop it open right here, slide it in, and you instantly have crazy fast external storage because the Charge Disc has active cooling. Yeah, there’s a little fan built in here so that when you’re using the SSD, you’re getting absolute maximum performance because it won’t overheat, which is an issue I have had with literally every other SSD I have ever owned in my life. Let me just tell you, this has saved me more time in a week of using it than I’ve spent in my entire life wasted on everything else. Now, for additional protection, you can put it inside the little case that it comes with and there’s even a USB-C cable attachment that doubles as a lanyard, but you can also pop it straight into your iPhone and record video from the camera app directly into the SSD. Most importantly, it is super fun and right now you can grab the Charge Disc SSD enclosure for yourself when you use my link down below in the description. A huge thank you to Charge for making this thing, it’s so cool.

Uh, okay, now let’s get back to the rest of the video. Next, the cameras on the iPhone 16 lineup. Honestly, up until this point, we have not heard that many rumors other than Apple adding the 48-megapixel sensor to the ultra-wide lens and maybe some other general sensor improvements. But now, we’ve heard a couple of additional things, including the fact that the iPhone 16 Pro, for sure, is going to be getting that 5x telephoto zoom that is currently only restricted to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Apple is bringing that down to the smaller Pro this year, but according to a report from The Information, they also write, and it sounds like, they could bring that 5x telephoto down to some of the other non-Pro cheaper iPhones for the first time. Now, it’s possible I’m reading this incorrectly, but they mentioned bringing down the 5x telephoto to some of Apple’s smaller iPhones. So would Apple potentially swap out the ultra-wide lens on their cheaper iPhones and finally put the telephoto zoom instead? Again, hard to tell what they exactly meant by that, but it does seem to indicate that potentially the lower-end iPhones could get a crazy good lens.

Next, we’ve also gotten some details that reiterate what Apple is planning to do with the capture button in that it’s not going to be a physical button. Just like the power switch on your phone, simply press it to take a photo or video. According to a new report, Apple is planning to make this touch and pressure-sensitive so that you’ll be able to swipe over it left or right to zoom and lightly press to basically focus your phone. Basically, it sounds like Apple is planning to turn the phones into a traditional digital camera where you lightly press to focus and then you press it down to actually take the photo. That alone is going to make this a massive year for photography, as Apple is basically turning your phone into a professional-style DSLR camera. It also sounds like this is going to be Apple’s first implementation of those haptic responsive buttons that don’t physically move but just respond to pressure and vibrate rather than being a physical button that moves.

Also, for cameras, it sounds like Apple will be making some minor changes to the Face ID system on the front of all iPhone 16s this year. This comes according to DigiTimes, and I believe we’ve heard this maybe once before. There are no specific details as to exactly what Face ID changes are coming. It’s not going to be anything dramatic like a smaller dot; Apple is still keeping the same size Dynamic Island. We have heard that a number of times. Unfortunately, that was pushed to next year. Wish we had some more details about what exact changes were coming, but it just sounds like some minor Face ID upgrades are going to be happening too.

Next, we’ve got some big battery updates. We have heard that Apple was planning to switch at least one iPhone to these new metal batteries that are more efficient and easier to swap out and repair. Now, according to The Information, that is actually coming to two iPhone 16s specifically: the regular iPhone 16 and the regular iPhone 16 Pro, the two smaller phones in the lineup. The reason this is so good is because these two smaller iPhones have significantly worse battery life than the larger models, so the fact that Apple is making these energy density and repairability upgrades to these smaller iPhones first is huge if you don’t buy the big one every year.

And specifically, if you are buying an iPhone 16 Pro this year, Apple is finally increasing the charging speeds of not just wired through USB-C but also through MagSafe. Yeah, according to this rumor, Apple’s going to be upgrading the current peak charging rate of the Pro iPhones