They say bigger is better, but does the extra screen real estate justify the extra expense of the Apple iPhone 16 Plus?
Ever since the birth of the smartphone, gadget lovers have been on a quest for the seemingly paradoxical holy grail of increasingly larger screens on increasingly smaller devices.
One of the key challenges was that, as smartphone screens approached the seven-inch barrier, they became too wide and cumbersome to comfortably hold in your hand.
Of course screen sizes are measured on the diagonal, so the compromise has been to squeeze the aspect ratio – making phones continually taller but barely any wider.
Unfortunately, the trade-off for curbing the width is that things on the screen don’t appear larger. For example, the text and images in an online article don’t get any bigger, you can just see a few more lines of text at the bottom of the screen before you have to scroll.
That’s fine if you want a bigger screen in order to see more text. It’s not so useful if your eyes aren’t what they once were, so you want a screen that makes things bigger, so everything is easier to see. It’s an important distinction to make when choosing your own plus-sized devices.
Foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold would seem to have finally conquered the challenge of keeping a big screen in your pocket which is both tall and wide. Of course, Apple is yet to come to the folding party, with iGadget lovers needing to make do with an iPhone Plus or Max, unless they want to lug around an iPad Mini.
The 6.7-inch Apple iPhone 16 Plus and 6.9-inch Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max are Cupertino’s latest big-screen smartphones, but are those extra inches worth the extra dollars?
Apple iPhone 16 Plus review
First impressions
In real life, the Apple iPhone 16 Plus is a little underwhelming alongside a regular-sized iPhone, especially if the Plus moniker led you to expect a considerably larger handset for your extra $200.
The iPhone 16 Plus sports a 6.7-inch display, compared to the standard iPhone 16’s 6.1 inches – which sounds like a big jump. At first glance the extra height looks promising, sticking with the same super-tall 19.5:9 aspect ratio, but somehow the phone hasn’t quite expanded in equal proportions.
The iPhone 16 Plus is 13.3 mm taller than the standard – roughly the thickness of a finger. That’s a 9.01 per cent increase, but still not quite enough to add an extra row of icons to the home screen.
Meanwhile, the Plus has grown 6.2 mm wider, an increase of only 8.65 per cent.
It might seem like splitting hairs, but the result is a so-called “Plus” handset that’s barely any wider than its standard brethren. While the official product photography makes the extra height look impressive, stack one phone on top of the other and you get a clearer idea of what the larger screen brings to the party.
The upside is that the Plus is still comfortable to hold and only gains 29 grams, meaning it should fit in most hands and pockets that will hold a standard iPhone 16.
The downside is that reining in the width means that things on the screen are barely any larger than on the standard iPhone 16.
Put the two phones side-by-side with the default display settings and the font sizes are exactly the same (see below), not even taking advantage of that tiny bit of extra width to make the text a fraction bigger.
The Plus does however take advantage of its slightly wider screen to make images a little larger, and to fit more words on each line. Combined with the extra height, this means you can see an extra two lines of text when reading a GadgetGuy review – which helps a bit but is not exactly a major improvement.
Apple iPhone 16 Plus specs and price
| Display size | 6.7 inches, 19.5:9 aspect ratio |
| Display resolution | 2796 x 1290 460 ppi |
| Display technology | OLED “Super Retina XDR” display HDR display Wide colour (P3) Haptic Touch 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio (typical) 1,000 nits max brightness (typical) 1,600 nits peak brightness (HDR) 2,000 nits peak brightness (outdoor) 1 nit minimum brightness |
| Bands | 5G: sub-6 with 4×4 MIMO 4G: Gigabit LTE with 4×4 MIMO and LAA 3G: WCDMA 2G: GSM |
| Chipset | A18 chip |
| CPU | 6‑core CPU with two performance and four efficiency cores 16‑core Neural Engine |
| GPU | 5‑core GPU |
| Rear cameras | 48 MP Fusion: 26 mm, ƒ/1.6 aperture, sensor‑shift optical image stabilisation, 100% Focus Pixels, support for super-high-resolution photos (24MP and 48MP) Also enables 12 MP 2x Telephoto: 52 mm, ƒ/1.6 aperture, sensor-shift optical image stabilisation, 100% Focus Pixels, 2x optical zoom, 10x digital zoom |
| 12 MP Ultra Wide: 13 mm, ƒ/2.2 aperture and 120° field of view, 100% Focus Pixels | |
| Front camera | 12 MP ƒ/1.9 aperture Autofocus with Focus Pixels |
| RAM | 8 GB |
| Onboard storage | 128, 256 or 512 GB |
| microSD slot | No |
| Charging | USB-C 2.0 Wireless charging up to 25W with 30W adapter or higher |
| Battery | 4,674 mAh |
| Wi-Fi | Wi‑Fi 7 (802.11be) with 2×2 MIMO |
| Bluetooth | 5.3 |
| Operating system | iOS 18 |
| Security | Face ID |
| Ruggedness | IP68 (maximum depth of 6 metres for up to 30 minutes) |
| Dimensions | 160.9 x 77.8 x 7.8 mm |
| Weight | 199 gm |
| Colours | Black White Pink Teal Ultramarine |
| Price (RRP) | From $1,599 |
| Warranty | One year |
| Official website | Apple Australia |
Features
That’s quite a spec sheet, the entire iPhone 16 range is certainly impressive. There’s no question that Apple iPhone 16 Plus is a great phone. The question is whether it’s $200 better than the standard iPhone 16 when almost nothing separates them apart from a slightly larger display.
The only other improvement is a larger battery, which means you should squeeze an extra five hours out of the 16 Plus when watching videos. That’s a big jump that could save the day on a long-haul flight. Yet for your average commuter, even the standard iPhone 16 battery should get you through the longest day.
It’s a shame Apple couldn’t throw in a few extra bonus features to help make the iPhone 16 Plus a more attractive step up. Of course, if you’re after extra features, then Apple wants you to dig deep and upgrade to a Pro model like the Apple iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max.
All of the Pro features that trickled down this year, like the Action and Camera Control buttons, came to both the standard 16 and the 16 Plus.
So, screen size and battery aside, there’s no other reason to favour the Plus over the standard iPhone which is $200 cheaper. As such, a review of the Apple iPhone 16 Plus really needs to focus on these features rather than cover all the same ground.
Readability
Thankfully, the 16 Plus’ slightly larger display doesn’t come at the expense of image quality. It bumps up the resolution to 2796 x 1290, to maintain the same 460 ppi sharpness.
To be fair, one benefit of the Plus’ taller screen is that, if you dip into the iOS menus and change the Display Zoom from ‘Default’ to ‘Larger Text’, you get a larger font without sacrificing as many lines of text as when enabling Larger Text on the standard 16.
This advantage offers some benefit for those of us hoping to see things more clearly, rather than just see more.
Going back to that GadgetGuy review, with Larger Text enabled on both handsets, you now see an extra four lines of text on the Plus.
In other words, if you’ve enabled Larger Text on a standard-sized iPhone so it’s easier to read, but you’re frustrated at how little text now fits on the screen, then the extra money for the 16 Plus might make a lot of sense.
Rather than thinking of the Plus as having a larger screen for seeing more, think of it more like a large-print iPhone for enabling Larger Text without seeing less.
Similarly, enabling Larger Text on a standard iPhone forces some menus to spill onto an extra row, whereas on the Plus you generally see a larger version of what you would see on the standard iPhone without Larger Text.
An alternative to changing the Display Zoom setting is to bump up the font size in the iOS menus, which offers larger text in the menus and apps that support dynamic text. You can also make the text bold.
You might use a combination of the three, but keep in mind that Zoom and bold don’t actually change the font when looking at a web page in Safari. So they don’t help when reading that GadgetGuy review, but they do help elsewhere on the phone, in apps like Mail.
Of course, Safari has its own built-in zoom, plus some websites like the Sydney Morning Herald have text size options at the top of each article on both desktop and mobile devices – which is great when it comes to making content more readable on the fly.
Multimedia
While there are lots of options when it comes to scaling text, you’re not so fortunate when it comes to scaling images and video.
This comes back to the issue of the iPhone 16 Plus being taller but barely any wider than the standard iPhone. This means it can’t make photos much larger in portrait mode, even when you’ve made the text easier to read.
Flip the handset on its side into landscape mode and you see more of a difference, which might also come in handy when taking photographs.
The fact images aren’t significantly larger in portrait mode, which is how people mostly hold their phones when scrolling social media, is particularly frustrating when it comes to reading text embedded in images, such as memes.
Bumping up the phone’s text size obviously won’t help here. To be fair, it’s not Apple’s fault that the text in memes doesn’t scale up when you change the phone’s text settings. Even so, you might be disappointed with the 16 Plus if you were hoping for a screen both taller and wider so that it would make images much larger in portrait mode.
It’s a similar story with the hefty 6.9-inch iPhone 16 Pro Max, which sounds like a giant but is actually 2 mm narrower than the 16 Plus. It simply gets taller to gain those extra inches on the diagonal.
Who is the Apple iPhone 16 Plus for?
Unless you’re primarily chasing battery life, whether or not you’ll be impressed with the Apple iPhone 16 Plus comes down to your expectations in terms of the larger screen.
If you’re more interested in the large screen than the larger battery then proceed with caution, as the seemingly big jump from 6.1 to 6.7 inches might not offer the benefits you’re hoping for.
If you’ve got 20/20 vision and you’re sticking with the default display settings, you won’t actually see much more on the 16 Plus compared to the standard 16. An extra two lines of text doesn’t seem worth the trouble, especially when images aren’t larger.
At first, I was disappointed with the Plus, but if your vision isn’t perfect and you’re diving into the settings to compensate, a plus-sized iPhone starts to look more attractive. Treating it like a large print iPhone, you can bump up the font size without sacrificing how much you can see on the screen.
So proceed with caution and don’t assume that bigger is better with the iPhone 16 Plus. If you don’t see the benefits of stepping up to the Plus, perhaps save that extra money for when Apple finally jumps on the foldable bandwagon and (hopefully) offers a smartphone display that’s both taller and wider.
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