iPhone 16 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra - which one should I actually buy in 2026 - thoughts

[Ava82]

Upgrading from a three-year-old phone and I have narrowed it down to these two. iPhone 16 Pro at around £999 and Galaxy S26 Ultra at around £1199. I am not currently locked into either ecosystem. I do a lot of photography, some video editing, and I need something that will last at least four years. What would you actually choose and why?

[Isla]

The ecosystem question is the one you need to answer honestly before anything else. If your laptop is a Mac, your tablet is an iPad and your earbuds are AirPods then the iPhone integration advantage is real and valuable. If you are on Windows and Android you lose most of that

[Hannah]

iPhone 16 Pro if longevity is the priority. Apple's five to six year iOS update commitment is not matched by Samsung regardless of what the advertising says. In year four your iPhone 16 Pro will still be getting security patches and feature updates. A Samsung from the same era may not

[Router48]

Galaxy S26 Ultra if photography is the genuine priority. The 200MP main sensor, the built-in S Pen and the zoom range on that camera system are simply ahead of what Apple offers. The 10x optical zoom alone changes what you can capture compared to 5x on the iPhone

[SuperPosition78]

Galaxy S26 Ultra is too big for a lot of people and that matters for a four-year commitment. Hold one before you buy it. The 6.9 inch screen is genuinely unwieldy for one-handed use and pocket carry. The iPhone 16 Pro at 6.3 inches is significantly more manageable day to day

[StormForge62]

For video editing the ProRes recording on the iPhone 16 Pro and the Final Cut integration if you use a Mac is the more practical workflow. The Galaxy produces excellent video but the file management and editing pipeline is less streamlined unless you are using Samsung-specific tools

[NeonPhantom]

I switched from Samsung to iPhone two years ago after seven years on Samsung and the main thing I noticed was the software consistency. Every app on iOS is better designed and more stable than its Android equivalent. That gap matters more than any hardware spec after the first month

[Glenn_44]

Why not iphone17?