the iPhone 16 Pro Max looks like a small upgrade on paper but there are some substantial new features and dozens of tips that you'll need to know in order to get the full experience so in this video I'll be showing you more than 25 tips tricks and just things you need to know about the iPhone 16 pro and pro Max okay so this is the biggest iPhone Apple has ever made at 6.9 in so that means that reachability is going to be a must so you don't have to do tan gymnastics to get to the top of your screen to invoke the control center or to pull down the notification center sometimes it's nearly impossible with one hand and that's why you can do this simple gesture right here where you swipe down and it will invoke reachability so you need to enable this make sure this is enabled inside your settings so go into accessibility and then go down to touch and make sure that reachability is enabled and now when you swipe down from this bottom section of the screen onto the Bottom bar it will invoke reachability which allows you to reach just right here to access the control center of course to scroll and do whatever there as well so makes it easier for this big 6.9 in display and if you want to take this a step further go into your settings go to General and then go down to keyboard and from here you want to enable the one-handed keyboard to be either right or left depending on your orientation so I'm right so I'm going to select that and now when I go to the keyboard I can access the full keyboard with just one hand easily and I can tap this to go back to the old original style and there's even another way to access the controls Center or even the spotlight search without even touching the screen which really comes in handy for the pro Max specifically since it's way up here so check this out I press the action button it invokes the control center there I press it again and the control center goes away or for example if I'm inside of an application and I want to access Spotlight search before I'd have to go out and then swipe down to access it but now if I'm in an application I can just press on the action button and check that out and invokes the spotlight search for me and to do this all you need to do is tap on the plus up in the top right and then just search for control center select that and I have mine set to toggle instead of just showing the control center and then for spotlight search all you have to do is search for search and you'll see it right here and speaking of the action button if this is your first year with an action button you need to know how to take full advantage of this button because it's a lot more powerful than it seems at first especially now with iOS 18 so go into your settings and go to action button and we'll talk about shortcuts in a moments but you also want to check out the controls because this will allow you to access a lot of your control center toggles by simp pressing on the action button but shortcuts is where the real magic happens because if you tap down here this is where you can access any of your you know get started like simple shortcuts but then right here you could do something like showing a folder so for example I have a folder for Action menu so now if I press on my action button check this out I have multiple different menu options to choose from with one simple press of the action button and the way I did that is very simple you just have to go back to your shortcuts right here and then just create a new folder and then add shortcuts into that folder so I have the action menu right here it's just a bunch of shortcuts inside of a folder but you could also take advantage of third party applications as well if you keep scrolling down for example chat GPT I can launch a new voice conversation with the new advanced voice mode in chat GPT by simply pressing on the action button okay so now we need to fix the camera control button so you already know the basics of the camera control button but we might need to fix that so if you're struggling with it check this out let's go into our settings let's go down to accessibility and then we want to look for camera control right here and this is where you're going to have some options that you will want to tweak so for example the controls gesture if you don't like how you accidentally press the camera control button when you're inside of the camera you could actually disable these that way when you press camera control right here we go into the camera application and all it does is takes the picture all you can do is take the picture that's it there's no swiping gestures no menus anything like that it's a simple shutter button so if you prefer that you can do that and I think that's a lot better than just fully disabling the feature all together now also down here you need to change the light press Force so if you do have Light press turned on you might want to change this to lighter so it doesn't take as much force to invoke the Light press gesture and then also down here we have double Light press speed so if you find the speed that it requires to be too fast you can slow that down so you don't have to double tap as fast to pull up the menu and then if we go back into our settings and go to camera and then go to camera control you might also want to disable clean preview so this is turned on by default so what this is is that when you go into this menu and you start messing with it it will remove everything from the UI the top and the bottom right here you can see are just empty it's just black so you can I guess focus on what you're seeing here in the menu but I don't like that so now if you turn that off you'll be able to access everything else that's down here in the regular camera UI so all your different modes you can see your latest photo all of that when you turn that off and here's a quick tip you could also use your finger to navigate through this menu here so you can use your finger here to swipe through the options you can tap and you can use the slider here as well with your finger now if you have an iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max you need to take advantage of the pro raw format and the new jpeg XL codec so here are some tips for that so go into your settings go to camera and first off you want to make sure that under formats this is enabled Pro raw and resolution control that is disabled by default so make sure you go ahead and enable that so you can shoot in Pro raw and then go into Pro default right here and you might want to change the pro raw format to jpeg XL lossi and the reason for that is because the difference in quality between lossless and lossi is very minimal like it's hard to tell a difference but if you take a look at the file sizes down here 46 megabytes for lossless and 20 megabytes for l c so a big difference in file savings there especially if you take hundreds of photos which you will over time so I'd recommend having this set to Pro raw Max and then jpeg XL lossi as the Kodak now keep in mind this will save the photo as a dng file which works in most photo editing software it just might not be as compatible on the web straight from the camera so you can download shortcuts or convert it to a JPEG if you want but it will be DG by default and keep in mind you could always change this from the camera app as well so if you see up here we do have our raw Max button so if you tap and hold on that that will allow you to change between raw 12 megapixels raw Max which is 48 megapixels or Heath max if you want to shoot 48 megapixels in Heath format you can do that as well but I do think that jpeg XL is going to be better at least that's what I'm using now here's a tip if you're a pro raw shooter like I am so before with the iPhone 15 Pro Max which I have here on my left it was so much slower to shoot consecutive shots when shooting 48 megapixel raw but take a look at how much faster it is with the iPhone 16 Pro Max so I'm just going to keep mashing the shutter button here and you'll be able to see how many more photos the iPhone 16 Pro can take versus the 15 Pro so if you're somebody who took a lot of raw format photos you know back to back like this just know that you can do a much better job a much more efficient job here on the 16 Pro Max compared to the 15 pro and pro Max now the biggest downside of shooting in Pro raw is that you don't have access to the new photographic Styles which are actually useful now so you do miss out on live photos as well but if you go ahead and disable that you will see that we have a new icon up here in the top right of the screen and that is for the new photographic Styles so if you tap on that that will give you this new menu here where you have have undertones and if you swipe over to go to the rights we have different mood filters so in my opinion the mood filters are basically worthless they're kind of like you know Instagram filters I don't mess with those but a good tip here is to go into undertones and tweak one of these to be your go-to for certain scenarios like skin tones for example so a good one for skin tones is either gold or Amber I found Amber is really good for skin tones and you can adjust using this Square down here so if you move left to right that adjusts the color if you move up and down that adjusts the tone and you'll see the numbers changing up top so there are five undertone styles by default and you can tweak each one of these and they will stick now you also have this intensity slider down here as well which changes the pallet number up top and you also have a reset button there if you want to reset it to default now if you just want a quick and easy way to get a better look for your photos I would recommend dropping the tone down near 50% so the color that can be tweaked based on the photo but I think for most people just dropping the tone down to near minus 50 is going to give you a nice look to your photos and make it look a little bit more professional like a professional camera took it and when you want to take a photo you can just snap right here and it will take that photo and it will save your tone and color right here as well now here's something important if you shoot in jpeg which is the most compatible you cannot change the photographic style after shooting it so go into your camera settings right here and if you go down to format you want to make sure that you're on high efficiency not most compatible if you want to be able to change the photographic Styles after the fact and if we go back to our camera settings and go to photographic Styles this is where it will have you select a default photographic style so if you go to get started it will make you select four photos so you can see how the you know style looks for different types of lighting in different photos so you can just swipe over and see what you like so I'm going to do mine as Amber and you can change the intensity right there we're just going to go ahead and tap on continue and now is where you can change the tone and color and this allows you to dial in a nice look and again the further down you go right here if you just move your finger up and down that gets you to drop the tone a little bit which I think makes photos just look better especially on iPhone so there we go we have our style selected and that will stick now you can see it there as Amber now also you want to go into preserve settings right here and make sure that photographic style is enabled so it preserves your settings and saves them for the next time you go into the camera app and that's great if you don't want to always use the default setting so if you don't have that selected it will always just default to Amber instead of what you shot PR previously so you want to make sure that your preserve settings are on for photographic style and fun fact if you send a photo that was edited with the photographic Styles you can see the new UI on older iPhones so I'm on my iPhone 15 Pro Max right now and you can see I have the slider here to adjust everything in the photo using the new Square UI here for the intensity the tone and all of that so I can change that on an older device and you can even see the numbers up top as well that's pretty cool so after you take a photo if you tap on the edit button down here here next to the eye you can see that Styles is selected by default and this is where you can change the different styles right here or customize it after the fact so if you maybe want it to be a little bit different than what you shot it as you can go ahead and change that right there and then tap on done and now if you want to apply that new style to multiple other photos that you maybe took you know with a different photographic style you can go right here and go to copy edits and go ahead and copy the style and then tap on select and select the other photos that you want to apply that same filter to or that new color style too and go ahead to the three dots right here and go to paste edit and it will paste the edit from that photo onto all your other photos that you select now also on the iPhone 16 pro and pro Max we can now shoot in 4k 120fps so to access this all you need to do is tap on the little icon up in the top where it says 30 and change that to keep tapping it until you see 120 and now you will be able to shoot in 4k 120 FPS and you can slow it down to 30 60 24 FPS without the video quality looking choppy so if you go into the video that you record and tap on the edit option down here you'll see the speedometer up in the top right hand corner if you tap on that that will allow you to slow down the playback speed okay so now let's talk about Pro res video because pror video is easily one of my favorite features of the pro series iPhones and it gets even better with the iPhone 16 Series so we have some stuff to talk about here so first off you'll notice that we can now only shoot in log or HDR so if you go into your settings and go to camera and then down to formats all the way down here at the bottom we have the prores toggle which that should be turned on and then go to prores encoding and you only have to choose from log and HDR it's HDR by default but I would recommend changing that over to log just because it looks a lot more natural and you get a lot more information and data with a log recording versus HDR now another tip here is to shoot prores video either straight to an SSD so you can do that when you plug it in and you'll see now that I have an SSD plugged in if I tap on prores right here it shows my Max time is 180 minutes whereas without it it will show that my Max time is 5 minutes so massive difference there but not only that you want to also be sure to offload your videos to an SSD do not try to send your prores videos to your computer via airdrop or any other way the best way to do it is to just plug an SSD straight into your iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max and transfer it all you need to do is go into the share sheet on your video and go to save to files and then just make sure you're on your external drive now here's another tip if you're shooting in log download an application like Kino to add some color to the video if you don't have an editing Suite or if you just need to color grade quickly so you can see here I have a pror video that was shot in log and it's going to look very dull because it's in log however we have some filters down here that will automatically add color to it on the Fly and when you apply it it will will just export it straight to your camera roll so this can be great if you're on the go and you may not have access to like a Final Cut Pro for example so if I select the stalman 3 right here if I go ahead to apply it will export it very quickly and now you'll have color for your log footage so if you go to it you can see that the file size is much smaller so it's still 4K but it's only 96 megabytes for example for this video so much smaller file size which can also be nice now Switching gears from the camera let's talk about the always on display because this is a great feature that's on the iPhone 16 pro and pro Max so if you go into your settings and go to display and brightness and then go down here to always on display and turn that on you'll notice that when you go ahead and lock your device you have a nice always on display here where you can always see the time however if you want to avoid tapping on your screen to see your battery percentage you can do what I've done here and add a widget so that along with the time you could also always keep an eye on your battery life so to do this just tap and hold on your lock screen go to customize and go to your lock screen and then go right here and you want to add a battery widget so mine pops up right here if not you can go ahead and scroll down until you get to batteries and select the big one and if it shows your Apple watch you want to change this to the iPhone so just tap on it right there and deselect automatic and then just choose your device from the list so mine is the 16 Pro Max main there we go and now it will show the battery life of my iPhone even when my device is in the always on mode that way I don't need to tap on the screen and you know to be able to see my battery like up there in the top right now the iPhone 16 Pro does have faster 5G speeds compared to previous iPhones so the reports say it's up to 26% faster in 5G download speeds thanks to the new Qualcomm modem but the tip here is that just because the 5G is better does not mean that you should have 5G always on so go to your settings and then go into cellular go into your phone number right here and right here under voice and data you want to make sure this is turned onto 5G Auto so a lot of people are compelled to just turn 5G on all the time because of the faster speeds but the thing is you might not always have 5G access in every location and that will drain battery constantly searching for a 5G connection so I would make sure to have this set to 5G Auto that way it only connects to 5G when it's actually available and it's not constantly searching for that 5G signal and I also have 5G Standalone turned off that is personal preference but that uses 5G for all cell activity so that could also potentially drain a battery life for me it has it may not be the same for you I just prefer to have that turned off and this set to 5G Auto now going back to the camera but not to talk about the camera itself we need to talk about the new microphones inside of the iPhone 16 pro and pro Max because now exclusive to the 16 Pros we have a new four mic array which allows us to get access to a new studio audio mix so if you go to a video that you recorded and tap on the edit button right here you have to make sure it's a video with some sound in it you will see that we have the audio mix feature down here in the bottom so you have different options for this but the exclusive one to the iPhone 16 Pros is going to be studio and you can adjust the intensity of this as well so what this will do is basically make it sound more like you're in a studio if you're in an environment that makes your voice sound very echoey and like you don't have good Acoustics in the room so try this out here's an example of how good it works okay so we're testing out the studio audio mix feature and we're trying to see if this actually sounds like a studio or something better than where I'm at right now so I'm in a big open area and you know my voice is going to be carrying a lot it's not quite echoey but I can still feel like I'm in a big open space and I want to feel like I'm in a studio like a tight space with good Acoustics so hopefully this audio mix can do that for me and by the way since those microphones are so good now you might also want to use your phone to take audio notes more often and to do this an easy way to do that is add the voice notes as your lock screen controller here your quick control so that way if you press and hold on that it will automatically launch Voice Memos right here in the dynamic Island and you can record even when your phone is locked so you can see it's still moving up there it's still recording while my device is locked and I can go ahead and press and hold right here to disable that and end that recording now here's a quick tip about the cameras so this year with the iPhone 16s we have an anti-reflective lens coating on the triple camera setup now so this is going to help reduce glare when taking photos and video so here's a shot of the Sun that I took with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and of the 16 Pro Max at the exact same time and take a look at how much better the anti-glare is on the 16 Pro Max so if you were afraid to shoot shots of the Sun or shots at night with you know a lot of glare in them fear no more because it's a lot better here with the 16 pro and pro Max now here's a tip for taking portrait photos in the photo section right here so you don't have to be in portraits you can now change the portrait lighting straight from the photo tab you don't have to be in the portrait mode anymore to not only take portrait photos but also to adjust the lighting and by the way that is a setting so if you don't have that turned on just go into your settings and go to camera and then go down near the bottom under the fusion camera and look for portraits in photo mode and make sure that's turned on and while we're in here you might also want to change the fusion camera settings to change the default 1X lens so you can choose between 1X 1.2 and 1.5 if you have these additional lenses selected and what this is is that when you tap on the 1X you'll see that it changes between those different lenses so 1X 1.2 and then also 1.5 and if you don't like that you can turn off the additional lenses or if you want to set the default lens of 1x to be 1.5 you can change that right there now the battery life on your iPhone 16 Pro Max is probably going to last a good while but you should also know that when you do go to charge you can now charge faster both wired and wirelessly so I'm charging via the new magsafe Puck here because we can now charge wirelessly via magsafe at 25 watts that's much faster than the 15 watt wireless charging from the 15 Pros now you could also charge faster wired as well so it's around 39 Watts so it's a little bit faster than previous years but not a huge difference I really just noticed the biggest difference from wireless charging using the new mag safe pu now speaking of battery life here's another tip that you might want to know about so if you go into your settings and go to battery and then to charging you might want to change the charge limit from 100% to somewhere around 90% so 85 to 90% is what I find to be the sweet spot but you can change this if you would like now if you're wondering why would I only want to charge my phone up to 90% instead of 100% And the reason being is because that's not good for a lithium ion battery over a long period of time to constantly charge up to 100% so if you're planning on keeping your phone for more than like a year a year and a half then I would suggest changing this to maybe 85 to 90% as the charge limit if you're planning on upgrading every single year by all means keep it at 100% because it won't impact you in that short amount of time now here's a tip related to the brightness of your phone's display so if you've ever tried to lower your iPhone's brightness late at night all the way down to like 0% and you still felt like it was too bright well the iPhone 16 pro and pro Max could address that because we now have a Onnit minimum brightness now here's another tip related to the flashlight so if you activate the flashlight you might want to adjust the beam and the spread of the FL flashlight you can now do that straight from the dynamic Island here so we have this nice animation and you can change the intensity of the flashlight Beam by simply swiping up right here you can also change the spread by moving side to side and you can actually see a difference when using this as well so whatever you set it to that will be the default the next time you go in and access your flashlights now here's a tip for USBC so if you're coming from a device that didn't have USBC before you should know that the USBC port on the iPhone is not just for charging up your phone you could also use this to charge other devices and other accessories so take a look at this since we have a USBC to USBC connection going here it knows that my 15 Pro Max has more battery life so it's charging up my iPhone 16 Pro Max right now so that works with USBC to USBC but if you charge USBC to lightning it will always use USBC as the power source and it will charge up the lightning phone but as we showed earlier you could also plug in ssds you can plug in those mini fans you can plug in pretty much anything that has a USBC chord webcams you can plug in anything like that and be able to access it most of the things with the iPhone 16 and 16 Pros which is really cool and then the final tip here is that you can now restore your iPhone 16 from another iPhone or iPad there's no need for a computer anymore so this uses the same recovery OS that lets you restore an Apple Watch or an Apple TV via an iPhone so now all you you have to do is sit your bricked iPhone 16 next to another iPhone or iPad and the firmware recovery system will begin so it's going to download a new iOS firmware and transfer it to the brick device so that's pretty cool and you can see this was reported by 9 to5 Mac so those are 25 tips and tricks for the iPhone 16 pro and pro Max exclusively so I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you learned at least one new thing if you did I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up and if you want to see more videos like this be sure to subscribe to the channel I do these tips videos all the time and I will have my review coming very soon on the iPhone 16 Pro Max as well but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soon