iPhone 16 vs iPhone 11: 5 reasons why it’s worth making the leap after 5 years

Apple released an all-new iPhone 16 lineup this month with larger batteries, a new camera capture button, and more. The company calls them its first iPhones built for Apple Intelligence. People are hanging on to their current iPhones longer than ever simply because smartphones are getting better. Today I’m going to share the top five features you’ll get if you finally decide to upgrade.

A much better display: Super Retina XDR

Apple introduced OLED displays to the non-professional iPhone in 2020, but if you’re using an iPhone 11 or earlier, you’ll still be using the older LCD display. With OLED, you’ll have a much higher resolution display, better colors, deeper blacks, and support for high dynamic range content.

In short, everything you look at will look much better on Apple’s Super Retina XDR display. It’s also much brighter – the iPhone 16 supports up to 2,000 nits outdoors compared to the iPhone 11, which has a peak brightness of 625 nits.

Personalized AI on your iPhone

Apple Intelligence was unveiled at WWDC in June and offers all-new Siri capabilities with personal context, writing tools to streamline your typing, Genmoji to create your own emoji, a new “Cleanup” feature to remove unwanted content from a photo, and more.

Not all of these features are available at launch, but regardless, you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 to use any of them. The all-new Siri feature is expected to arrive in the spring, while everything else will arrive before the end of this year, with iOS 18.1 in October and iOS 18.2 in December.

Better battery performance

There’s a lot going on in the battery and charging department with the iPhone 16 compared to the iPhone 11. Apple has switched from Lightning to USB-C in the iPhone 15 line, providing unified charging. You can now use the same cable for your phone, laptop and tons of other devices.

Batteries have also improved significantly this year – the iPhone 16 was tested for an additional 5 hours of video playback compared to the iPhone 11, an increase of approximately 30%. With longer battery life, you don’t have to worry about charging your iPhone frequently.

Charging is also faster than ever before as iPhone 16 supports up to 45W wired charging and up to 25W wireless charging (with MagSafe), while iPhone 11 only supports up to 20W wired charging and up to 25W wireless charging 7.5W

A dynamic island

Apple has introduced Dynamic Island in the iPhone 14 Pro, replacing the traditional “notch” on the iPhone. It’s a combination of hardware and software that allows users to interact with alerts, apps, and other forms of applications directly from the top of the iPhone. You can use it to control music, answer phone calls, and all kinds of other interactions.

Dynamic Island also works with live activities, so apps like Flighty can display your flight details right in the pill notch at the top of your iPhone.

Additional buttons

Since iPhone 11, the iPhone has gained two new buttons, both an action button (replacing the mute switch) and a “camera control button.” Apple doesn’t want to call Camera Control a button, but that’s what it is.

The action button still functions as a mute toggle by default, but if you don’t want to change it often, you can set it to do a lot of other things, including focus mode, opening the Camera app, toggling the flashlight, recording Voice Memos, and more. Additionally, in iOS 18, apps will be able to create their own controls for both the Action button and Control Center, so this should be a big step forward. You can read all about the action button here.

As for Camera Control, this is a new toggle in iPhone 16, providing users with convenient and versatile ways to use the iPhone camera. Pressing the button will open the camera app from anywhere, pressing the button in the camera app will take a photo, and holding the button will start recording a video.

By default, moving the button will zoom in. However, you can half-press the button twice, which will bring up a menu that allows you to configure the swiping action. It can be configured between exposure, depth, zoom, cameras, style and tone. You can read all about how the Camera Control button works in our summary.

Other smaller features

• 48 MP camera with 2x optical zoom option
• Newer ultra-wide-angle camera with macro support
• Better water resistance
• Optical image stabilization with sensor shift
• Video in cinematic mode
• Action movie
• Spatial photos and videos
• 5G support
• WiFi 7
• MagSafe wireless charging

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There are plenty of great reasons to finally upgrade to iPhone 11 this year, especially if you’re running out of storage space, don’t have enough battery life, or feel like you’re otherwise dissatisfied. However, if you don’t mind waiting another year, there are plenty of interesting improvements coming next year with Apple’s next big iPhone refresh: the iPhone 17 Air.

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