Can iPhone 16 Outdo Pixel 9? What Apple Needs to Do to Regain My Loyalty

I’m really excited to see what Apple has in store for the iPhone 16 at its “Glowtime” event on September 9. As someone who’s been an iPhone user my whole life, I have to admit that I’m curious to know what it would take to win me back. I made the switch to a Google Pixel 9 Pro recently, and I have to say, it’s been a lovely experience.

My old iPhone was pretty ancient, so the bar was set pretty low, but thankfully, the Pixel 9 Pro cleared it with ease. In all honesty, after reading our Pixel 9 Pro review, I was just curious to see what a Google Pixel phone would be like, and it quickly became apparent that for everyday use, there’s very little that separates a Google Pixel from an iPhone. Sure, they use different hardware, the haptic feedback is slightly different, and the camera specs are different, but for everyday use, it’s all about the experience.

Once you get used to using the Play Store instead of the App Store, life just carries on as normal. Pixel phones have face recognition for unlocking the phone, just like iPhones, and they also have fingerprint recognition for added security when making payments.

All the apps I used on my iPhone, like Facebook, Threads, X, Instagram, Slack, Gmail, YouTube, and so on, are available on the Pixel 9 Pro, and they all work exactly the same way. The basic gestures for using the phone are similar enough, and my AirPods Pro work just fine with an Android phone. I can even keep my Apple Music subscription and Google Pay works just like Apple Pay in shops. Even my banking apps look and feel the same.

One area where Google and Apple have the chance to differentiate themselves is with artificial intelligence. Google has gotten its AI assistant, Gemini, to market first, but at the moment, I’d describe the Gemini execution as a bit clunky. You can tell your Pixel 9 to use Gemini instead of Google Assistant, but there are still some things that Gemini can’t do, so it pulls in help from Google Assistant anyway, and it sometimes feels like they’re fighting each other for ownership of the phone.

When I say “Hey Google, launch Gemini,” Google Assistant tells me it can’t find Gemini on the phone and then starts telling me about the Project Gemini spaceflight missions! The only way to get to Gemini Live is by launching Gemini and then touching the Gemini Live button on the phone. It feels counterintuitive to have to touch the phone to get to the part where you talk to the phone… But the lack of deep integration goes further – you can’t start timers from inside Gemini Live right now, for instance, and a lot of the features that Google showed off at the launch event, like searching in your Gmail inbox using Gemini Live, require extensions that haven’t launched yet. Basically, a lot of Gemini Live is “coming soon.” Plus, you have to pay for it.

So, it looks like Apple has a chance to use Apple Intelligence to better Gemini when it launches the iPhone 16 range. Unfortunately, it’s not like Apple is about to knock Gemini out of the park with Apple Intelligence. At launch, it’s looking like the iPhone 16 lineup, which comes with iOS 18, won’t have any Apple Intelligence features at all. We have to wait for them to arrive in iOS 18.1 when it launches in October (hopefully), then we have to wait until early 2025 for the full Siri 2.0 experience.

It used to be the case that I’d compare phones in two ways, firstly on specs like processor, memory, and camera, but then consider the operating system and apps, and how they would fit in with my current workflow. These days, I’m finding the line between iOS and Android operating systems has blurred enough that they feel interchangeable, so now it’s down to who nails AI. There is one exception to the spec comparison though, and that’s RAM. RAM is integral to how well AI performs on a smartphone, so I’ll be interested to see how much RAM Apple packs into the iPhone 16 range on September 9, and then we’ll know if Apple can win me back.