I’m going to need to replace my iPhone 11 soonish and iPhone 16 seems like a common sense choice (I like to keep a phone for as long as possible so hopefully I keep my iPhone 16 until I replace it with the iPhone 21). My main areas of interest in general is battery life and camera. Now obviously I’ve seen the specs but would love to get some real world opinions on how much better the camera on the 16 actually is?

I swear, the iPhone 11 camera (even though it’s technically way behind the 17 Pro Max) is so good for vlogs and YouTube videos. Seriously, if you import the footage to PC and edit it in CapCut, it’s like you’re editing clips straight from a real camera.

What’s weird is that my 15 Pro Max footage actually looks worse than my iPhone 11’s for some reason. Specs-wise it shouldn’t even be close, but the 11 just has this natural, clean look. Maybe it’s because my 11 is on the old iOS 18 beta from a while back, and my 15 Pro Max is still on iOS 17.5 I honestly have no idea.

Either way, people seriously sleep on how good the iPhone 11 camera still is in 2025. If you want a cheap vlog setup that looks pro, grab one.

About two years ago I was ready to finally upgrade my old iPhone and the latest at the time was the 15. I bought the 15 Pro expecting to use it for good photography, and couldn’t help but notice that the pictures seemed worse than on my girlfriend‘s 11 Pro. One day we took a picture side-by-side and sure enough, the 11 Pro blew the 15 Pro out of the water in clarity, sharpness, etc. So I downgraded to a normal 15 as I didn’t care about the camera that much anymore and that was that. Well, a few days ago we went into the Apple Store to upgrade her 11 Pro to a 16 Pro, hoping they fixed it. Not even close. I couldn’t stand it and I snapped two side-by-sides to show the staff. Please have a look at the pic. Left is obviously the 16 Pro, right our “outdated” 11 Pro. One of the staff members tried to convince me that it had to do with lens switching but I explained to him that at the same FOV there shouldn’t be such a loss in quality and we basically went back-and-forth at different zoom levels, and the 16 Pro simply could not keep up (it did of course have more zoom, but we’re talking about comparing apples to apples FOV-wise.)

I am just baffled and have been now for years. Apple, the golden child of imaging and digital graphics, lost the photography throne to Samsung and others long ago. (When we want really good photography we use our Galaxy S20 Note Ultra.) Can anybody explain this to me? I had the Apple staff go over certain settings with me, hoping maybe there was something that could improve things, and nothing worked, even forcing 48MP. How/why have they let this happen? How does their 5 year old model beat everything coming out today? WTF??!