Apple delivered its newest price range handset, the $599 iPhone 16e, with out pomp. There was no massive occasion in individual, nor was there one on-line. No journalists scrambled by hoards of colleagues to snap images of the cellphone. Instead, CEO Tim Cook tweeted out that new {hardware} was on the way in which, days earlier than Apple introduced the handset through a press launch.
Accordingly, the 16e isn’t an thrilling machine. It’s a secure one. It’s an amalgam of earlier iPhones, in a bid to create a product that’s dependable, whereas holding prices down. The handset most carefully resembles the iPhone 13 and 14, each in dimensions and the inclusion of the show notch up high. The iPhone 15’s Action button is right here, however the 16’s Camera Control is absent.
From an innovation standpoint, the iPhone 16e’s most fun factor must be its customized C1 modem. That’s not a sentiment you hear too typically. Modems are decidedly unsexy. Most customers solely ever acknowledge their existence when theirs goes on the fritz. But it’s not the expertise that makes the element attention-grabbing. It’s the truth that that is the primary time Apple has made one.
While the 16e borrows liberally from earlier Apple handsets, there are parts of the corporate’s newest flagship that assist justify Apple’s new naming scheme. The strongest argument in favor of ditching the acquainted iPhone SE branding is the inclusion of one other element: the A18. That’s the identical processor discovered on the common iPhone 16.
This is vital for a few causes. The first is that the 16e is $200 cheaper than the iPhone 16, which was, thus far, the most affordable approach to get the chip. The second and extra vital is future-proofing. Apple will proceed supporting the chip longer than it can the iPhone 15’s A16 chip.
Beyond bug fixes and safety updates, future-proofing additionally consists of Apple Intelligence, the nascent generative AI platform the corporate is banking on as the way forward for iPhone. Before final week, the prevailing iPhone 16 line and the most costly iPhone 15 fashions had been the one iOS units able to working the function.
A “trendy” tackle a well-known type issue
Don’t get issues tangled, although. The star of this present isn’t a specific piece of silicon. It’s the value. Pricing, in spite of everything, is why analysts have pointed the iPhone 16e’s potential to assist Apple make up for misplaced floor in key markets like China and India. In the grand scheme of issues, a $200 value drop from the entry-level iPhone isn’t large, however each bit counts, notably in creating markets the place true flagships can battle.
But dropping the value level doesn’t mechanically translate to a deluge of latest iPhone customers. Apple faces extraordinarily stiff competitors from home producers in China — a phenomenon that’s solely more likely to worsen as commerce tensions improve.
There are different difficult components in markets like India, the place each the iPhone 14 and 15 shall be round to buy by retail channels for some time. The iPhone 14’s discontinuation makes discovering a brand new one far tougher right here within the U.S., however the iPhone 15 continues to be formally accessible right here, beginning at $699.
Elements like these obscure the 16e’s place within the present iPhone lineup. A $100 value distinction between it and the 15 isn’t insignificant, but it surely’s nowhere close to the value gulf some Android producers put between their mid-tier and flagship units. Serviceable, low cost Android units have by no means been briefly demand. The iPhone 16e isn’t a price range machine, per se, as a result of Apple doesn’t make price range units.
Further blurring the strains is the truth that the 16e’s iPhone 14-inspired design doesn’t really feel like throwback in the way in which the final SE did when it was launched in 2022. While the 16e nonetheless sports activities the show notch fairly than the Dynamic Island (launched on the 14 Pro), the general design of the road hasn’t radically modified during the last couple of years. For this motive, the 16e seems like a “trendy” iPhone in a method the final SE didn’t.
That’s a profit for many potential consumers, however there’ll undoubtedly be those that will mourn the top of Touch ID in favor of Face ID. The 16e’s arrival additionally heralds the top of the “small” iPhone. Some will miss the extra compact, 4.7-inch show discovered on the final SE. The 16e’s arrival means that you may now not buy an iPhone with a display screen beneath 6 inches.
The iPhone 15, iPhone 16e, and iPhone 16 all sport a 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR show. The screens are largely the identical, however there are just a few key variations. The 16e has a notch within the place of the Dynamic Island and tops out at 1,200 nits of brightness in comparison with the utmost 2,000 nits on the opposite fashions. The three handsets share almost equivalent footprints and weights.
All three sport a USB-C port (by regulation), although the 16e doesn’t function the MagSafe connector on the rear. The handset does charging by the Qi commonplace, although its speeds high out at 7.5 watts, to the 15’s 15 watts and the 16’s 25 watts. The 16e sports activities the longest acknowledged battery lifetime of the three telephones, at 26 hours to the 16’s 22 hours and the 15’s 20 hours. The new C1 modem performed an vital half within the 16e prolonged battery life, being each much less energy starvation than older silicon and smaller in a method that allowed the corporate to release house for a bigger battery than the iPhone 16.
Both the iPhone 16 and 16e sport the newest A18 chip with a six-core CPU and 16-core neural engine. The 16e takes a little bit of successful on the graphics processing facet with a four-core GPU to the 16’s 5 cores. All three telephones begin at 128GB of storage, upgradable to each 256GB or 512GB. The 16 and 16e, in the meantime, sport 8GB of RAM to the 15’s 6GB. That little additional increase of RAM ought to assist with a few of that on-device Apple Intelligence processing.
Intelligent design
Apple Intelligence presently options textual content rewrite, summaries, and generative imagery, created by Image Playground. Is the flexibility to run Apple’s reply to Google Gemini sufficient motive to go for the 16e over the much less clever iPhone 15? The platform’s usefulness will, after all, differ dramatically between people in its present type. But these are very a lot early days.
Apple is dedicated to its generative AI providing, and it’s set to be the centerpiece of updates for years to come back. I can’t promise any life-changing options on the horizon, but it surely’s totally potential you’ll kick your self in a 12 months or two for deprioritizing the expertise.
Visual Intelligence — Apple’s reply to Google Lens — can be accessible on the 16e, although the absence of the Camera Control function means you’ll should entry it by the use of the Action Button. More notable than the absence of Camera Control, nevertheless, is the presence of a single digital camera on the rear of the iPhone 16e.
Apple glossed over this truth in the course of the announcement, as a substitute highlighting what it calls a “2-in-1” digital camera system. Through the magic of computational images, the iPhone 16e is a single-camera smartphone that “feels” like a two-camera system. This boils right down to the 48-megapixel sensor with “built-in telephoto,” which suggests the picture will provide you with a better, 12-megapixel model of the picture, with out majorly sacrificing picture high quality for zoom.
You will inevitably lose versatility transferring from two picture sensors to at least one, even when mentioned picture sensor makes use of fancy fusion expertise. For some customers, this alone is sufficient to justify the added $100 to $200 to get the iPhone 15 or 16 as a substitute. That mentioned, the 16e is able to getting some good photographs for a single-sensor handset and positively marks a giant leap during the last iPhone SE.
It comes right down to the options you want
Every time the value drops by $100, you’re sacrificing one thing. That’s how revenue margins work. Choosing the most effective “entry-level” iPhone within the present lineup is much less easy than it may need been previously. It comes right down to what options you want and what you’re prepared to do with out.
The 16e is an train in function prioritization. If you want the newest all the things, eat the additional $200 and get the common iPhone 16. If Apple Intelligence isn’t a precedence, the iPhone 15 has you coated.
In the top, there’s surprisingly little daylight between the iPhone 16 and 16e. It prioritizes Apple Intelligence by the inclusion of the A18 and 8GB of RAM. The handset makes sacrifices within the identify of affordability, like MagSafe, Dynamic Island, Camera Control, and the dual-camera system. If you possibly can stay with out all these, by all means, save your self the $200.
