Transcript
by Josh Teder
I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra I bought for well over 6 months, and now that I’ve gotten some time to compare it to my new iPhone 16 Pro Max that I bought, I’m going to take you through which one I think is the better phone.
Camera System Comparison
The iPhone 16 Pro Max’s number one advantage is its camera system. While both phones take excellent photos, the iPhone’s photo processing just feels a bit better, mainly staying away from the oversharpening issues I found with some photos on the S24 Ultra, and especially with its video quality. I don’t think this is a situation where the 16 Pro Max’s camera system is leaps and bounds ahead of the S24 Ultra’s; it’s more that the issues I’ve had with the Ultra compared to Apple’s system make the iPhone the clear winner.
Now new this year, you can adjust photographic styles that you set even after taking the photo as long as you’re storing images in the HEIF format, and Apple’s expanded the number of styles you can apply with their new phone. Some styles look more like Instagram filters, like “Quiet” or “Cozy,” which add color tints and adjust highlights and saturation. Others like “Natural,” “Standard,” and “Neutral” aim for different variations of the iPhone’s default processing without giving it a filtered look, and this actually addresses one of the biggest complaints I’ve had with iPhone photos as of late.
The default standard processing often lacks contrast, shadows, and way over-boosts highlights. With this feature, you can finally get photos out of your iPhone that don’t just look like the normal overprocessed images from an iPhone we’ve all been accustomed to seeing, and what’s really cool about the photographic styles is not only can you apply them before or after you take the shot, but there’s actually three elements you can adjust within each style itself: tone, color, and palette or intensity. Tone controls shadows and highlights, basically your brightness and contrast. Color handles saturation and vibrancy, though you’ll need to switch styles to change the color temperature from a warmer one to a cooler one and vice versa, and palette adjusts how strongly the style is applied to your photo.
Samsung does have filters that you can apply to your images before you take the photo, and you can even create your own based off photos that you’ve previously taken, which has sort of worked, but overall by default, Apple is actually giving you more control over the camera processing than Samsung with this feature. The S24 Ultra, though, does have better zoom capabilities with its 10x, even if that’s actually achieved through cropping a larger 5x sensor rather than a true optical zoom like the S23 had.
One last point about both camera systems: even with the iPhone’s new capabilities so far, they still produce images that look like they’re from a smartphone. Now that’s not inherently bad, but if you want better photos, you’re still better off putting your money towards a new dedicated camera over a smartphone.
Price Comparison
The second advantage for the iPhone is price. While the iPhone 16 Pro Max starts at $1,199, the S24 retails for $1,299, though you can typically find Samsung’s phone on sale now that it’s close to a year old, and if you want to see if they’re currently on sale, check out our blog post at 6monthsl.net, which has that information links to multiple retailers for easy comparison shopping. Link to that in the description.
Design and Form Factor
The third major advantage for the iPhone is weight and form factor. There’s only a 5g weight difference between these phones since the iPhone gains some weight over the 15 Pro Max; however, the iPhone’s rounded corners still make it easier to handle compared to the S24 Ultra’s more pointed edges, which makes that phone feel larger than it actually is. Another benefit with the iPhone’s form factor this year is Apple didn’t force people to get the largest, most expensive phone just to get the best camera system. The 16 Pro Max and 16 Pro share identical camera systems and features.
Apple Ecosystem and iOS Features
The fourth advantage is iOS and the Apple ecosystem. Some highlights include Control Center, which is now completely customizable and has a Controls Gallery where your favorite apps can develop their own controls. For example, I can unlock and turn on my Model 3’s climate control right from Control Center.
Apple services are just better than Samsung’s. You get Apple Music, Fitness+, Games, Apple TV+, plus class-leading accessories, and other devices like iPads, Macs, AirPods, and the AirPods Max are all particular highlights. Interactive widgets and icon theming plus the new Control Center customizations all help show how iOS has made gains in customizability in recent years. Samsung still has way more, but the iPhone certainly isn’t as locked down as it used to be with what you can customize.
You can even reorder apps without starting at the top left corner, and then there’s iMessage, a sticky product that now has send later, more animations, and ways to tap back on messages, and you can even send messages via satellite in select countries. AirPlay is another great part of the ecosystem. It’s the technology that lets you tap to play on your HomePods from your iPhone and dynamically group speakers together on the fly.
The systemwide password app makes it easier to get to all of your saved passwords and manage PassKeys. Continuity Camera letting your iPhone turn into a webcam is pretty effortless, same thing with Continuity in general between all of your devices.
Performance and Intelligence Features
The fifth highlight is chip performance. Now in everyday use, I have not noticed a difference between these two phones with the apps that I use on them, but if you’re a mobile gamer or you just use apps that are really CPU intensive, then yes, you likely will notice a difference, though note the S24 Ultra’s GPU performance is slightly ahead of the iPhone’s in many benchmarks.
The sixth advantage for the 16 Pro Max is Apple Intelligence and its related features. You get call recording with a transcription and summary, notification summaries, and writing tools across the OS to proofread and rewrite text. Samsung has some of the writing tools with Galaxy AI but only in specific Samsung apps versus having them show up systemwide across the OS.
The iPhone will have a ChatGPT integration with iOS 18.2, while the S24 Ultra already has a full Google Gemini integration, though there are some issues with that. Though it can’t play music from services like Apple Music or Spotify at the time of recording, the biggest problem with Apple Intelligence is its slow rollout. The company is marketing these phones heavily with Apple Intelligence, but the really interesting stuff like a better Siri and the phone being able to use your personal context data to do things on your behalf – all of that stuff isn’t shipping until sometime next year. It’ll be by the time I do my 6 months later review of this device before we really know how much of a difference the Apple Intelligence features made.
Button Features and Controls
The seventh highlight is the dedicated Action Button as well as the new camera control button. You can do some pretty complicated things with the Action Button like mapping it to a shortcut. Samsung does have a similar feature for buttons on their phone called Button Action, but they don’t actually have a dedicated physical button that’s only meant for customization like Apple.
The camera control button is one new interesting addition to all iPhones this year. Pressing it opens up the camera from wherever you are on the phone; pressing it again will take a photo. What’s really interesting about this button is yes, it is a physical button, but it’s also one with a capacitive touch capability as well, where if you slightly press down, it’ll open up camera controls in a new little window. Double press to get to the menu of camera controls to use, and then you can adjust things like focus, exposure, photographic styles, and more. Right now, I haven’t found it particularly useful other than just opening up the camera app, but some of this is just combating muscle memory and just learning that there’s a new button on the phone that can do different things.
S24 Ultra Advantages
Now let’s look at the S24 Ultra and its advantages. The first highlight is display tech. It has 75% less glare with Gorilla Glass Armor, and it’s four times more scratch-resistant than the previous S23 and three times better with drops. The S24 Ultra screen can also get brighter; it peaks at 2,600 nits versus 2,000 nits for the iPhone.
The second advantage for the S24 Ultra is One UI and customizability. There are a lot more ways to customize things like volume step. You get a better split-screen experience with Edge Panels, whereas with Apple, you don’t get any kind of split-screen experience at all.
The third highlight for the S24 Ultra is the S Pen. You can write notes, convert handwriting to text, use it as a camera remote, magnifying glass, and more, and for those who love a stylus experience, it’s one of the few phones that comes with one this good. The iPhone has no built-in stylus support at all.
The fourth advantage for the S24 Ultra is Samsung Galaxy AI and its exclusive features. You get Circle to Search, translation in messages, and live call translation, which is very cool. There’s also Instant Slow Motion – you can take a video at normal 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second, and it’ll slow it down and use AI to fill in the missing frames to make it a slow-motion video.
The fifth advantage for the S24 Ultra is that Android is just a more flexible operating system. You can sideload apps onto it, run custom launchers, and overall do way more customizing to the Android operating system itself, something Apple just doesn’t allow with iOS.
Battery Life and Repairability
Now before we get to my recommendations, I did want to briefly mention battery life. Both phones can easily last me all day. My use is light to moderate, typically 1 to 2 hours of onscreen time and 2 to 3 hours of background activity music and podcasts, and while my impression so far has been the iPhone’s might be a bit better, it wouldn’t be totally fair to compare the two since the S24 Ultra’s battery I have has gone through many more cycles at this point compared to my new iPhone.
Next, let’s talk downsides, and the major downside for these phones, besides obviously being potentially addictive, is repairability. While both companies have made strides with these two models in making the actual repairs easier to do, to change the battery on either device, you need to either bring it in somewhere for a repair or get a kit and take the phone apart at home yourself. These are not batteries that are easily swappable by most consumers.
Final Verdict
So if we put aside ecosystems for a second and just look at the phones themselves from a hardware and software perspective, the phone that’s easier to handle, a bit less bulky, with a more dependable camera system and a much better performing chip – that’s the iPhone 16 Pro Max. I do think between these two phones so far this year, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the better phone. It would be closer if I hadn’t run into all of the issues I’ve had with Samsung’s camera system, plus the phone’s edges and bulk just make it feel a bit more cumbersome to hold compared to the 16 Pro Max, which itself is a larger phone – it actually has a larger display than the S24 Ultra.
Now when you consider the ecosystems, that’s likely going to draw you to one phone over the other. For me, because I work on a Mac, I’ve got an iPad, Apple TV, and generally love my AirPods Max, my current headphones of choice, having an iPhone as my personal phone still makes more sense than an Android phone like the S24 Ultra. But if you primarily use Windows devices, Samsung or Android tablets, computers, and televisions, then it’s likely you are going to benefit from having a phone that’s better aligned with those devices, and you can see if either phones I’ve talked about have gone on sale by visiting our blog post at 6monthslater.net, which now has updated live prices for all the devices I talked about plus links to other retailers for easy comparison shopping.
Additional Resources
And if you want to see more of my thoughts on how these two ecosystems compare, you can get to a video I did that compares iPhone versus Android and which one I think is better for most people by clicking the card here, and then you can click here to get to other videos I’ve done like the 6 months later review of the S24 Ultra, and if you’re looking at the S24 Ultra, another phone I’d consider looking at is also the Pixel 9 Pro XL, and I did a comparison between those two phones you can get to by clicking there as well.
If you like this video and found it helpful, make sure you hit that Thumbs Up Button below, and if you have either of these two phones or their previous versions, let me know what you think of them. Would you buy them again? Let me know down in the comments.
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