Apple iPhone 16 Pre-Order, In-Store Release Dates Announced

Anyone, including business users, who wants to get their hands on the new Apple iPhone 16, will be able to do so later this month.

In its annual September iPhone preview event on Monday, the Silicon Valley giant said you can pre-order the new iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro on Friday, Sept. 13. It will be available in stores a week later, Sept. 20.

Will this be the year that more companies upgrade their employees' devices? If so, artificial intelligence could be a reason to make the move. Apple says this will be the first iteration of its iconic device that is "purpose-built for generative artificial intelligence," as CNN notes. This offers a natural-language prompt for creating text and images.

Also in the AI realm, Siri, the company's seemingly omnipresent voice assistant, is getting smarter. On the iPhone 16, Siri can understand more complex imperatives, such as sending specific images to a colleague from a company event.

The device also features 17% more system memory bandwidth to better support these intelligence upgrades and an intelligent camera control feature that can pull up information about, say, a business in your neighborhood, simply by pointing your camera at it.

For those that are aesthetically inclined, you can get the new iPhone 16 in a variety of colors, including teal, pink and "ultramarine," in addition to traditional black and white phones.

The more deluxe iPhone 16 Pro has all of those features and a bigger screen than last year's Pro models: 6.3 inches for the Pro and 6.9 inches for the Pro Max. It also offers a series of additional colors.

Videophiles will like the fact that the Pro allows you to shoot in 4K at 120 frames per second. Marketers will enjoy knowing you can turn a clip into slow-motion after recording, not just during the recording.

A new iPhone 16 will set you or your company back $799, while the iPhone Plus starts at $899. The iPhone 16 Pro costs $999, and the Pro Max will dig even deeper into your wallet or your company's coffers, with a price tag of $1,199.

For those of you who use Apple AirPods for video calls, Apple also announced on Monday upgrades to its AirPod line, with particular improvements to how they fit the ears. And if you rely on the Apple Watch to keep you on schedule on the go, the just-announced version has better battery life and charges more quickly than previous versions.