There are plenty of options to choose from when it comes to buying an iPhone. In fact, I dial into all the best Black Friday iPhone deals to save you on models like the iPhone SE (2022), iPhone 12, iPhone 13, and more. Out of all of them, the one I recommend over all of them is Amazon’s deal on the 1TB iPhone 16 Pro with Boost Mobile.
This deal effectively brings its cost to $0.01 when you checkout and pay. I can’t stress enough about why this is a big deal because you’d usually pay $1,599 outright for it for this top-of-the-line model with a whopping 1TB of storage. Even though it’s the one I recommend, you can also snatch the iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Plus for the same cost at a penny. Here’s why it’s the absolute best Black Friday deals you'll find.
You’re not forced into doing a trade-in to get the discount. One of my biggest annoyances about today’s phone deals is that oftentimes carriers (and retailers) lure people in by claiming you get insane savings, only to find out that the lower advertised price is driven by doing a trade-in — which usually needs to be a newer model to get the biggest savings. With this iPhone 16 Pro offer, there’s no trade-in whatsoever. You get the discount without having to give up your existing phone.
For example, AT&T is giving customers an iPhone 16 Pro for free, but it requires trading in a top-of-the-line model from last year, like the iPhone 15 Pro, in order to get a $1,000 trade-in credit to effectively make the iPhone 16 Pro for free. But to be fair, the only stipulation with Amazon’s deal is that you need to commit to paying $78.89/month for 36 months. This calculates to about $2,840 for the entire term, which isn’t too bad considering that Verizon and AT&T’s unlimited plans on average are $90/month.
Beyond the savings, the reason why I recommend the iPhone 16 Pro this year as the iPhone to own is because it gains the best part about the iPhone 16 Pro Max — its 12MP telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom. Last year’s model topped out with a 3x optical zoom camera, so having the same 5x optical zoom reach as the more expensive iPhone 16 Pro Max makes it the iPhone to own. I also prefer it because of its more compact size, that’s unless you like a larger phone.
On top of all of this, I’ve put the iPhone 16 Pro (and 16 Pro Max) through several photo shootouts against its main rivals to determine if it’s really the best camera phone out there. And since it shares the same camera setup as the iPhone 16 Pro Max, I’ve used its cameras for astrophotography to capture my favorite star clusters, galaxies, and nebulas in the night sky.
I love how blazing fast it is for just about everything, including when it comes to playing my favorite games. But the biggest treat about this year’s model is the arrival of Apple Intelligence with the release of iOS 18.1, which brings Apple’s flagship into a whole new era with the help of AI features.