We’ve all been there: I’m on an evening flight and someone pulls out their phone and lights up the cabin like a Broadway musical. My eyes sting, I blink, I become annoyed and I start having an internal debate about whether to go all Larry David on the poor sap and their phone — which apparently has a screen that glows brighter than the sun.
Those kinds of events might be in my traveling past. At last, Apple has come to the rescue by lowering the minimum brightness across all the displays on its iPhone 16 series.
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With a flurry of additions, like bigger batteries and the new Camera Control button, it might seem odd to shine a light on such a minor feature. The display’s lower brightness is easily lost among all the other hubbub surrounding the iPhone. After all, there are Snoop Dogg commercials for the iPhone 16 with him touting Apple Intelligence. I’ve even gone on record to say that the iPhone 16 Pro’s updated slow motion recording feature is my favorite thing on an iPhone in years.
But the minimum brightness on the iPhone 16 is something you can only appreciate when you see it (or don’t) — even if you aren’t on a dark plane or enjoying an evening car ride.
Previous iPhone models had screens that could dim down to 2 nits. The iPhone 16 can go even lower, all the way down to 1 nit. Now, this isn’t Apple pulling a Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap and saying,