My iPhone 16 Pro arrived today. My first sense upon taking it out of the box was, “Whoa, this is bigger than the iPhone 15 Pro.” I haven’t had a chance to take photos yet, but it’s noticeably bigger and heavier when placed side by side. It definitely won’t fit in the iPhone 15 Pro case I had.
I tried to use the Quick Start process for setting it up, copying data from my iPhone 15 Pro. That failed four times in a row. Why did I try that many times? The first time the phones were downstairs so I wasn’t looking at them and figured I must have missed something. The second time I had both phones upstairs and tried to log into Tonya’s mac.com account for some purchases we shared at some point and it generated a code. She wasn’t home so I went downstairs to find her iPad, carrying the iPhone 16 Pro with me. That seemingly took it outside the Bluetooth range of the iPhone 15 Pro and broke the connection. The third time, I didn’t do anything wrong and it just got to the point of starting to transfer data and failed. Each time, iOS insisted on erasing the iPhone 16 Pro completely and starting over from scratch, so I’ve gotten a little tired of setting up Face ID and entering my credit card number CVV codes.
After those failures, I opted to restore from iCloud, and that’s going on right now. Interestingly, as soon as I did that, the iPhone 15 Pro updated its iCloud backup. The restore completed fine, and the iPhone 16 Pro is now retrieving apps.
FWIW, you could have used a USB-C cable to directly connect them and do a Quick Start that way. That said, the included USB2 cable would have been slower than a cable that can handle USB3.
I am still setting up my 16 Pro Max, but I had similar Quick Start issues. I’m pretty sure I had the same thing happen last year – I got spinners after it successfully transferred my AT&T phone number to the new phone and then nothing happened. Just spun forever. I think it has something to do with me having poor cell coverage at my home – enough to get the number over, but it fails at some final handshake or something – but who knows.
I finally excited Quick Start and tried to do it again, but it wouldn’t initiate even after toggling bluetooth off/on and rebooting both phones. I couldn’t get Quick Start to come up. Then I noticed it said you could do via an iPad, so I woke up my iPad and sure enough, the Quick Start came up there. But when that one came up, it also came up on my old phone! So I did it from old phone and that seemed to work on 2nd try (probably since there was no need to transfer the phone number over as that had already been done).
Now it’s restoring all my apps. It sure is annoying to do all the 2nd factor, credit card codes, etc. for everything. I got the new watch 10, too, so I had to do everything 2x. And the watch didn’t completely work at first since the phone was still downloading apps (some of my complications are for specific apps so they showed up blank). Also of note: couldn’t pair new watch with old phone as it wasn’t updated to iOS 18 yet – new watch requires 18.
Just played with camera and Camera Control for two minutes, not enough for any kind of evaluation, but so far I like it! Photographic styles are sweet and the control is pretty cool. I’ll need to actually take pictures with it to see how well it works in practice.
I also upgraded two Macs today to Sequoia and so far that seemed to go okay. Had to pay to update Bartender to version 5, but so far everything seems to be working.
I upgraded to a 16 Pro from a 15 Pro and had no issues. I also got a Watch 10 today and had some problems getting the initialization from the iPhone 16 Pro done. The issue was that I had the iPhone too close to the watch when capturing the magic image. I needed to pull the phone back so that the whole watch face was being captured.
I added a mobile Driver’s License for California to both the phone and the watch wallets. California just joined the programs yesterday. I tried going through the process yesterday evening, but the verification step got stuck. Since I was getting the new phone today, I realized that it was better to just cancel the process and start over once I got the new phone.The verification happened within 30 minutes of it being submitted.
Finally, I played with the new camera control a bit (using an Apple Clear Case). I had some difficulty doing a double half-press to change the selection menu and ended up with a bunch of junk shots.I have finally figured out that I can do the half-press by resting my index finger on the edge of the case and barely touching the button.
I used the Quick Start to copy from my 15 Pro to the new 16 Pro. While there were 2 small hiccups, overall it went quite well and only took around an hour (of the course it took more time to finish downloading all my apps, and I haven’t checked to see if it got all my iCloud Photos & videos).
The 2 hiccups were:
it didn’t set up my cellular connection when it was supposed to, perhaps because of a marginal cell signal in my house. But I was able to go the south side of my house and get it working quite quickly after the main setup.
one of my credit cards required typing in a code sent by SMS, and the regular setup/copy process proceeded before I had a chance to enter the code. Again, I was able to enter the SMS code after setup and all was well.
The thing that really impressed me was that it was able to automatically move my Apple Watch series 9 pairing over to the new phone without me taking any additional actions whatsoever. This is contrary to all the Apple documentation I’ve come across.
Speaking of Apple documentation, it’s a real hodgepodge mess when it comes to describing the steps for moving to a new iPhone. I found multiple pages, each with different recommended steps, and even some direct contradictions. Fortunately, the hardware and software has been refined enough over the years to make the docs almost superfluous in my case.
Moving the watch pairing over has been part of the procedure for a few years. Since I was setting up a new phone and watch, my procedure was to set up the phone and move the watch pairing from my old phone. Then, I set up the new watch from the new phone.
One thing I do when migrating to a new device is, immediately after the migration finishes, access the device name field in the General->About setting and change it to something different from the old device.
Mine arrived yesterday as well. The phone-to-phone transfer worked flawlessly for me. I left them side by side and did without a phone for an hour or so. The only glitch was getting it attached to the Verizon network. My wife is the name on that account and we had a little difficulty getting the permission for the new phone because she wasn’t logged in properly or something. Anyway, once the code from Verizon arrived the switch took little time. My AW Ultra also transferred without me doing anything, and the AirPods worked immediately. Once all of the apps redownloaded, I’ve only had to enter passwords a few times; a lot of things simply worked. When I checked the Bluetooth list it had also transferred my Garmin HRM belts (why those?), while I had to manually repair with my Edge and Epix. So far, so good.
The 16 is bigger than the 15, but mostly in the vertical. It seems that horizontally it might be a little smaller. I’m not sure it will fit properly in the phone pouch in my CamelBak; the 15 barely fit.
I didn’t even think of that (and Apple’s instructions said nothing about it)—thanks for the reminder!
It’s not inconceivable that was the problem for my first failure, since cell coverage here is very weak, and the first try had to transfer and activate the number, something that didn’t happen on any subsequent tries.
I saw this too, but I use my iPad so little that I didn’t trust its state to be useful. Between one of my tries, I powered both the new and old iPhones off and back on, which ensures that they saw each other properly but didn’t result in a completed Quick Start.
Apple’s documentation has had some conflicting information, but yes, it should be able to move the pairing over to the new iPhone, and that worked for me too.
Yes! There are always a couple of messages or alerts or something on the new phone that reference the name of the old phone because you haven’t yet had a chance to change it.
I agree with @MyBlueSky — I can’t imagine it would download anything but the most recent version. I know some people want to finesse every app update, but I gave up on that on iOS many years ago and just let all apps update themselves. I don’t have time in my life to manage that many updates, the vast majority of which aren’t well enough described to inform an upgrade decision anyway.
Coming from an XS. Also experienced failed Quick Start. In my case I got an ominous warning that the new phone didn’t have enough storage, even though I knew my existing data should fit easily. Repeated with the customize option that worked despite the fact that I went with the defaults and didn’t customize anything. Then it failed repeatedly to transfer my watch. Had to update watch OS and set it up as a new device. All told it took over five hours to get things working the way they had been before the new phone arrived.
Now that I’ve used it over the weekend, I’ve decided the hardware design is Apple’s weakest since iPhone 3G with its cheap-feeling plastic convex back. The increased dimensions and sharp sides feel worse in my pocket than the XS but don’t payoff with a noticeably larger display. Don’t like the action button. Find the camera control pointless. But worst is the deeper camera bump. I ordered Apple’s clear case and find it very off-putting that the phone won’t lie flat.
My trade-in kit hasn’t arrived so I’m contemplating returning the 16 in favor of a new battery for the XS. Or maybe I should investigate third-party cases.
For perspective, the notion of returning a new Apple product is anathema to me. I’ve been using Macs since 1984. Bought iPod, Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods on each respective launch day. The fact that my most recent prior purchase, iMac M1 on its 2021 launch day, still ranks as my favorite-ever Apple product makes my disappointment with iPhone 16 all the more notable.
This is something I cannot wrap my head around. Even if you get a case, most cases (including all of Apple’s) have a lip around the camera cutout so that even the case will wobble. It’s as if people want a wobble! Ludicrous.
If you’re having a problem with getting the half-tap options to work in the new Camera Control, some options in the Setting>Accessibility>Camera Control may help:
Setting the Light Press to ‘Lighter’ made distinguishing the half-press from the full-press easier. I also set the Double Light-Press Speed to ‘Slow’, which improved its reliability.
I set up my wife’s new 16 Pro Max from her 14 Pro Max using a USB to lightning cable and it worked fine. She has thousands of photos and all was good. It did update her Ultra watch. However, she has a second Apple Watch 6 and it would not pair. Had to erase it and pair as new but iCloud backup for the Apple Watch 6 did move all her setting over. Overall easiest new Apple iPhone setup I have had.
That’s good to know - Apple hasn’t officially documented either use of direct cabling yet on their official support page, but I saw a version of the direct USB-C to USB-C connection for the 15 Pro/Max to 16 Pro/Max on Mastodon last Monday.
The issue with using USB-C to lightning from even a 14 Pro Max is that the 14 Pro Max is using USB2 transfer speeds, snd I think for most people the peer-to-peer direct WiFi connection would be faster. But at least it’s something that works.
And the watch didn’t completely work at first since the phone was still downloading apps (some of my complications are for specific apps so they showed up blank). Also of note: couldn’t pair new watch with old phone as it wasn’t updated to iOS 18 yet – new watch requires 18.
