JON HONEYBALL -"The more I have to do with UK telcos, the more broken their systems seem to be"

After being tempted by the iPhone 16 Pro Max - for professional reasons, honest - and the Watch 2 Ultra, Jon discovers not everything is perfect in Apple's new generation

- 

It has been a month of bits and pieces. Nothing dramatic, but a whole host of small changes, some of which are still outstanding.

Let's start with the annual ritual, which is the arrival of the new iPhone and Apple Watch.

I keep myself to a fairly rigorous tick-tock regime for these upgrades. I went from iPhone 13 Pro to 15 Pro Max, missing out on the 14 release.

I was going to skip the 16 Pro Max as well, but two factors coincided: first, a bunch of technical improvements that were all relevant to work; the second more personal.

I'll cover the three technical reasons first. The iPhone 16 Pro is Apple's first device to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be). So far, I haven't been impressed by anyone's 802.11be Wi-Fi 7 implementations, either on the client or access point side, as I can't get it to go faster than a well-implemented Wi-Fi 6E 802.11ax setup. In testing, throughput of user data tops out at around 1.8Gbits/sec, which is far from shabby, but that's on a test environment which is 10GbE throughout (the local test servers can feed a full 9.4Gbits/sec speed). So seeing how Apple is going to implement 802.11be is both of technical interest and helpful when I'm testing Wi-Fi 7 devices.

The new 48MP wide camera is also interesting because it aligns better with the 48MP main camera.

The 15 Max Pro "only" has a 12MP wide camera. And why the interest? I want to see what improvements this makes to 3D depth camera footage for the Apple Vision Pro. Finally,

Apple promises faster MagSafe charging and longer battery life, by changing to a later TSMC process.

I have one more personal reason.