This is the first in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I did this last year and you can read last year’s iPhone report card here.

iPhone 16 Pro

I really, really liked the 15 Pro lineup, and I would place it in the S-tier of iPhone releases all time. I just think that phone was such a win over the 14 Pro in so many ways that it felt like a significant improvement over what came before. By comparison, the 16 Pro felt much more to be an iterative release, which I'm generally fine with, and surely would mean this is even better than last year’s Pro phones, right?

Well…

The big win here has been the battery life, which has improved notably over the 15 Pro in my experience. I also appreciate photographic styles getting a revamp, and I’ve enjoyed shooting with the amber preset, which I find makes my photos look better than they have in years straight out of the camera. Other than that, honestly the changes have been pretty neutral at best.

In my review, I said the camera control button was too fiddly for its own good, but that I ultimately liked my phone better with it there. A few months later and I actually think I might prefer my iPhone without it.

One issue is the complexity of it. Trying to perform the camera functions it enables is so slow and clunky it’s borderline useless, although it’s even worse because I would often accidentally graze the button when taking photos and screw up something on accident. No big deal, you can turn off most of the smarts of the button and just make it a simple camera launcher and shutter button, right? Well, yes, although even then I find myself continuing to use my action button as my camera launcher and shutter button. Hell, I think I use the volume up button more often as a shutter than the camera control.

With iOS 18.2 the camera control button also turned into a way to launch Google Lens…sorry, visual search. Alas, just like Google Lens has shown me for many years, taking a photo of something and asking “what is this?” isn’t really something that’s useful to me in the real world. Even trying to replicate their demo of asking what breed a dog is fails horribly for me…it just tells me “it’s a dog, dummy” (the "dummy" is implied) and on the off chance it actually tries to guess the breed, it gets it wrong.

All of this could be forgiven as a neutral if I could simply ignore this button, but it turns into a negative when it means I need to have a hole in the side of my iPhone case that just feels bad.

Then there’s Apple Intelligence, which accounts for damn near 100% of the marketing around these phones, and reader, I kinda think it sucks. I had high hopes for writing tools, but that doesn’t have a good UI for comparing your writing to the potential slop it spits out (unless you use Apple Notes), so I don’t find it useful in proofreading my writing.

Image Playground images are cringy garbage and even the genmoji, which many of us thought would be fun, has proven to be something I don’t see anyone I know using. I think genmoji works under the asumption that emoji are just small images, but I think emoji are real language in the same way words are. Using a peach or a fire or a specific laughing emoji means something specific and you don’t get that with genmoji.

I already mentioned the visual search being useless for me and while Apple will tell you that Siri is better in some ways, I honestly can’t see it as it continues to fall back to Google or ChatGPT for many questions. Supposedly it will have an understanding of data on my phone and be able to do things for me one day, but that’s not here yet and likely won’t for quite a while. As we're learned from Siri over the last 14 years, always expect a delta between what Apple says Siri can technically do and what you'll actually find it useful for. Right now Siri is unchanged in my experience, and I'm skeptical that it's going to live up to the expectations some have for it.

As with basically all iPhones ever made, the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max are good phones, and there’s not another phone released this year I’d rather be using, but if the 15 Pro line was S-tier for me, I think the 16 Pro line is C-tier right now.

iPhone 16

All of my camera control and Apple Intelligence complaints above apply to this phone as well, but I will be a bit nicer to this phone since it got a lot of solid updates over last year’s 15 lineup (which I also thought was very good). The new colors were spectacular, some of the best colors we’ve ever had in the iPhone, the two-generation processor bump from the A16 to the A18 make this feel less like last year’s model, the updated camera sensor for the main camera is welcome, they improved the battery life, the action button makes its non-Pro debut, and faster MagSafe charging all add up to a very solid phone.

iPhone SE

Another year, another year without an iPhone SE update. 2022’s 3rd generation SE remains the option for budget buyers, and at this point I would suggest anyone in the market for this phone hold off as long as you can because this device is really long in the tooth at this point.

What I want in 2025

Let’s start at the bottom of the line with the SE, which I do think will get an update this in 2025. I’m expecting a spring release window and I expect the new SE to adopt the iPhone 14 design. Back when the SE used the iPhone 5 design, people said the SE was for people who liked small phones, and when it adopted the iPhone 6 design, people said the SE was for people who liked the home button. I keep saying this over and over, but I think the SE is for people who want a cheap iPhone, it’s nothing more than that, so Touch ID can go. I also think this phone will get the A18 processor, which is a little aggressive, but is also in line with how the SE has traditionally operated: last year’s processor in an older form factor. Critically, the A18 will mean this phone can use Apple Intelligence, which I think Apple is intent on all of their new devices running by the end of 2025.

The normal iPhone 17 will likely differentiate itself from the Pro line this year more than any time in recent memory. There is a lot of smoke in the rumor mill around this new thing iPhone, but where it fits in the lineup is shifting by the day. My gut feeling is that the thin iPhone is the iPhone 17. It’ll have an A19 SoC inside and sport a new, thin body style. Instead of simply being worse versions of the Pro phones, the normal iPhone will be more like the MacBook Air compared to the MacBook Pro in that it can actually be better in terms of size and weight, which will be fun. We had a number of people this year consider not going Pro since the 16 had so many good features, and I expect that same storyline to play out even more this year as the thinner iPhone 17 will be very tempting.

Which brings us to the iPhone 17 Pro lineup, which I really don’t know what to think of right now. I kinda think it will be another year of iteration contained in a phone that looks basically the same as the last 2 models. I think the ultra-wide camera will start to shoot 24MP images by default, the camera control will get iterated on in some way that shows they understand how people use (or don’t use) it today, the screen will get brighter in some situations, and I think the natural titanium color will live on for another year, cementing itself as a core color for as long as the iPhone uses titanium rails.

How is the iPhone as we exit 2024?

I have this thought rattling around in my head that Apple Intelligence sabotaged the iPhone this year. Apple clearly felt the heat from other companies and they put on quite a show about how significant AI was in these new phones. I haven't even mentioned the fact that for over a month after this phone was out, the entire marketing campaign was about features the iPhone people were buying literally didn't have. This is rough stuff that Apple fanboys would blast Google or Samsung for doing. Even at the end of the year, many things Apple Intelligence is supposed to do aren't here yet and I guess iPhone 16 buyers will need to cross their fingers that in 2025 the things they saw Apple show off are actually coming to the phone they bought in the late summer of 2024.

All of the marketing and positioning from Apple for this phone revolved about Apple Intelligence, and the few Apple Intelligence features they're released so far are pretty bad: notification summaries are a meme, the image generation is atrocious, the UI for writing tools makes Grammarly look like the most refined software in the world, and Siri got a glow up in animation only, but remains just as useful as she's been for years. Oh, and from what I can tell from surveys and my own personal group of family and friends, none of these features have any real traction – people don't seem to care yet.

I used the word "sabotage" because other than Apple Intelligence, I think the new iPhones are quite good. Battery life is improved, the flawed camera control button has potential, the overheating issues of the 15 Pro were greatly reduced, and revamped photographic styles are a big win for those of us who want more control over our photos. Meanwhile, the base line of iPhones got a lot of the Pro features from last year and are a great buy for a lot of people as well. No, we didn't get an iPhone SE update this year, but that's not a big surprise given the timelines we tend to see for that product. These are good phones burdened by corporate paranoia about getting left behind.

As we exit 2024, the impression I get from the iPhone is that Apple is in its "let's add a bunch of random things to the product and see what sticks" phase. The iPhone is closing in on being 20 years old, so I get that a lot of the low-hanging fruit is already taken care of, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Apple continues to make stellar hardware and the best software for any smartphone out there in my book, but I think Apple Intelligence casts a shadow over these products right now and I hope that Apple is learning form their first year of releasing generative AI features and this whole story gets much better in 2025. Apple's got amazing people who can build great things, so I've got confidence they can do it, I just hope they are able to prioritize things that are more aligned with what their users want rather than what their investors want.