Pixel 9 Pro vs iPhone 16 Pro: Let’s take the battle to the AI grounds

Nowadays, the hardware is starting to get more and more irrelevant when it comes to smartphones. On the one hand, we have more than enough power for day-to-day tasks, on the other hand, AI is taking over as the main driver for innovation, and it’s mostly software. However you want to put it, most of the AI tasks are done in the cloud, even though big companies are trying to push through “on-device” AI as the primary way to do it.

That being said, there’s still some innovation going on, and it has implications for efficiency. The iPhone 16 Pro is expected to have the new A18 chipset, probably with the “Pro” moniker, and an improved NPU to handle some machine learning tasks. The Pixel 9 Pro will come equipped with the next-gen Tensor G4 chipset. The in-house developed Google silicon is designed with machine learning performance in mind, so despite some lackluster results in synthetic benchmarks for the past generation of Tensors, the AI performance, and everyday performance in general could be very similar between these two phones.

The RAM situation is again a bit hard to compare, as Android and iOS handle apps differently. In general, iPhone devices need less RAM to get the same performance, as apps are quite optimized and there’s only Apple using iOS, as opposed to a huge number of brands using Android. That being said, we expect the Pixel 9 Pro to sport at least 12GB of RAM, while the iPhone 16 Pro could get away with only 8GB, even though Apple might jump higher due to AI requirements.

Speaking of AI again, the situation is very turbulent at the moment, and the fact that Apple struck a deal with ChatGPT to integrate the LLM into iOS, and that there are rumors that the Cupertino company is talking to Google to get Gemini on the iPhone 16 lineup shows that Apple is playing catch-up on that front.

So, we’re not sure how this one will play out, but in the best-case scenario, these two will feature similar AI magic onboard, and if things go south, Google will still have an advantage. The same goes for the software support. Pixel phones now come with seven years of major OS updates, and that’s two more years compared to what Apple is offering.

The camera systems on both phones are subject to change. Based on what we could gather over the past few months, the iPhone 16 Pro will most likely feature the same 48MP Sony IMX803 main sensor (there’s potential to see the stacked design IMX903, but it will probably be reserved for the iPhone 16 Pro Max). We expect an upgraded 48MP ultrawide camera, as well as the same tetraprism zoom camera from the previous model, sporting 5x optical zoom. Rumors say there will be a new antireflective coating on the lenses to battle lens glare.

The Pixel 9 Pro will feature a very similar camera system in terms of lenses and capabilities. We expect the device to come with a 50MP main camera sensor, accompanied by a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 48MP periscope zoom lens with 5x optical zoom. Of course, post-processing algorithms will play a huge role in the final result and photo quality, so we will need to snap some samples and put them side by side for objective comparison. Stay tuned for that!

Normally, you can’t argue with or cheat physics. Larger batteries equal longer autonomy. When it comes to iPhone devices, Apple has managed to somehow optimize them to perform on par with their Android counterparts with larger batteries.

For example, the iPhone 15 Pro Max comes with a 4,422mAh cell but performs on par, and sometimes better than the Galaxy S24 Ultra and its 5,000mAh battery. With that in mind, we expect the 3,577 mAh battery in the iPhone 16 Pro to deliver similar battery life to the 4,575mAh cell we expect the Pixel 9 Pro to have.

There are some rumors pointing toward faster wired charging on the iPhone 16 Pro, with numbers as high as 40W circling around. We don’t have much on the Pixel 9 Pro front, Google might, in the worst case scenario, keep the 30W wired charging from the previous generation, which will be unfortunate. Stay tuned for real life battery and charging tests once we lay our hands on the devices.