The iPhone 16 Pro is my first phone that feels like a camera

There’s a popular adage among photography buffs—often attributed to Chase Jarvis—that the best camera is the one you have with you. In other words, It doesn’t matter how good a camera is if you don’t have it in your possession when you want to take a picture.

Nowadays, that would argue for the best camera being the one most of us really do have with us at all times: the one in our smartphone. But my brain has never bought into that idea.

Even as I’ve bought phones that take better and better photos, I’ve defaulted to thinking that my best camera is the conventional one that spends most of its time in a cupboard at home. Currently, that’s a Canon PowerShot SL3 dSLR. It unquestionably has the best lenses—big, honking ones which, in total, cost more than the camera itself. But like every camera that’s only a camera, my SL3 sports an interface that’s optimized for capturing imagery and nothing else. That experience is tough to rival in a device that also lets you make phone calls, read news, watch movies, play games, take notes, navigate cities, and on and on and on.

Not to sound like a photography snob, but even recent smartphones have felt like pretend cameras to me. So every time I’ve bought a new phone, I’ve endured a pang of disappointment as I realize it’s probably not going to become my favorite camera.

With Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro, which went on sale last Friday, my luck has finally changed. No, it’s not the same thing as a good conventional camera. But it’s the first smartphone I’ve owned that seems likely to overcome my nagging regret that I don’t have a more camera-esque camera with me at all times.

The iPhone 16 Pro’s most obvious new photographic feature, the Camera Control, is available in all the new iPhones. It’s a new button on the phone’s right edge that you press to snap a photo, approximating the shutter button that traditional cameras have always had. That’s something you could achieve with the programmable Action Button, which debuted on last year’s Pro iPhones and is present on all the new models. But you can also swipe the Camera Control to zoom. And lightly double-pressing it lets you select other photographic settings—exposure, depth of field, and others.

The Camera Control is just one button/touch-sensitive strip, not a full complement of delightfully physical dials like you find on cameras such as Fujifilm’s exemplary X100VI. And at the moment, it’s still a work in progress. Apple has demonstrated two features that aren’t available yet: lightly pressing it to lock focus (a standard feature on conventional cameras) and long-pressing it to let Apple Intelligence AI tell you stuff about what the camera sees, such as the breed of a dog. I expect the company to further tweak what the feature can do in future software updates.

Already, though, the Camera Control makes an iPhone feel far more like a camera than jabbing at on-screen icons, an unsatisfying process that involves covering the image you’re trying to capture with your fingers and can result in photo-blurring shakiness. The Camera Control also neatly organizes important photo settings in one place. For me, at least, that makes playing with factors such as depth of field way more inviting than when they’re scattered across the on-screen interface.

(Side note: To my surprise, I found the Camera Control much more usable when I stuck my new iPhone inside my case of choice. With the naked iPhone, the button was flush with the phone’s edge and tough to instantly find with my fingertip; inside the case, it sits in an easy-to-locate indentation. The case also seemed to help me perform light presses more reliably. Your mileage may vary: In his iPhone 16 review, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber concluded that the Camera Control is yet more evidence that the best way to use an iPhone is without a case.)

Even before you get to the Camera Control, the iPhone 16 Pro’s photographic tech specs check off some pretty critical boxes that last year’s iPhone 15 Pro did not. It has a 5X optical zoom, a feature that debuted on the jumbo-sized iPhone 15 Pro Max. In the more comfortably pocketable iPhone 16 Pro, that extra zoom range will let me capture wildlife shots I never would have tried with a phone before. (I’ll also use it to photograph tech execs as I sit in the audience at keynote events, letting me leave my dSLR at home.) The 16 Pro’s ultrawide camera’s resolution has quadrupled to 48 megapixels, which is even more noteworthy once you remember it’s also the camera the iPhone uses for macro photography.

I’m not saying I’ll never touch my Canon again. There’s still a charm to the process of choosing a lens, attaching it, and figuring out how to achieve the shot I want purely through playing with light—no AI trickery required. And the SL3 can take hundreds of photos on one charge. The iPhone can’t match that feat, at least not without the risk of it being too drained to perform other tasks. When I’m likely to want to take a lot of iPhone photos—like when I’m traveling—I’ll try to remember to tote a MagSafe external battery pack.

Still, I couldn’t disagree more with anyone who declares that the new iPhones lack major new features. After a few days with mine, I’m convinced it’s the smartphone I’ve been waiting for since phones first got pretty good at taking photos.

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