at a glance the iPhone 16 Pro Max doesn't look or feel much different from the precedent it and perhaps that's not to be expected the competitive game of smartphones is now one of inches the question is can the small or even invisible changes add up to something big in the early going with the iPhone 16 Pro Max I would say the answer is yes there is one other truly noticeable physical difference between the old and new iPhones the iPhone 16 Pro Max has the new camera control this button is bigger deal than I imagined and I'm almost embarrassed to say that I already like it quite a bit covered in shapphire the roughly half in Long button seats on the phone's left side a couple of inches down from the power sleep or city button it's resisted and is both a physical button and haptic one a hard press gives instant access to the iPhone 16 Pro Max camera that's nice trick but of course you could program the action button to do so too however when I pressed lightly on camera control I felt a little haptic vibration and then could sweep up and down on the button to quickly switch between the phone's cameras if I lightly pressed twice I gained access to deeper image controls using the camera control however was not initially obvious I was pressing too hard and then not hard enough it took me about 20 seconds to figure it out I could use camera control to Swit Zoom depth of field and image Styles oh and you are not blindly guessing which settings the camera control enables every time I used it a little black cutout appeared on the screen right next to the button to show me every setting and control yes if you hold the phone in landscape mode it begins to feel like you are using a traditional camera with one caveat the feature that would let me light press to lock focus and lock press to shoot is not yet enabled I can though always full press to complete taking a photo I even saw how Snapchat is already using camera control to control images simply and send photos to friends with the Press of a button camera control seems like a slight misnomer the button will also be used to enable Vision intelligence which lets you point the phone at an object and press the button to get a description it's like Circle to search without the circle or I guess Google and as I noted above the button is resisted and I found that it's quite hard to trigger it accidentally that's a good thing the other big changes are in software and silicon inside the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the new a18 Pro this is the Apex Apple silicon mobile chip a 3 NM CPU that has more power for the pro phones it should also provide enough power to gain to your heart's content the iPhone 15 Pro Max was a pretty decent little game gaming console so I would expect no less from this bigger and better equipped Beast I will know more when I finally test the phone is this the best iPhone Apple has ever made possibly it will certainly claim a spot near the top of our best iPhone list and maybe even best smartphones I will offer my definitive take when I finish my full review thanks for watching see you in the next one