iPhone 16e

Apple announced the iPhone 16e yesterday, the successor to the third-gen iPhone SE. The iPhone 16e marks the first budget iPhone in the second-gen body, with a notch at the top of the screen and a lack of a home button.

The use of a specifically lowercase ‘e’ is interesting, especially since the last phones to use a single letter for differentiating models was 7 years ago with the iPhone XR and XS. The fact that the iPhone 16e’s name is attached to the iPhone 16 line of phones seemingly implies that Apple is going to start launching budget phones similar to Google’s approach, where a Pixel a series phone is released a few months after a line of normal Pixel phones.

In terms of the pricing, I think that reactions are a bit overblown as to comparing it to the prices of previous iPhone SEs. While the $599 price is much higher, I would argue that you get much more for that money compared to buying a third-gen SE. Although the $429 price of the SE 3 is pretty nice for getting into the Apple ecosystem, the main issue lies in the extremely old body and screen that makes up the phone’s actual interface. Most of the $429 you spend on the phone is instead allocated towards the A15 Bionic chip that competes well against other phones in its price bracket, but I would argue that performance intensive tasks that take advantage of the chip are definitely not in the workflows of most budget phone users. Instead, in almost all cases, buying a iPhone from one or two generations behind is a better deal in terms of the hardware. Additionally, since the software lifespans of Apple’s devices are great, software isn’t a concern when buying an older phone since it should still be able to get updates for a long period of time.

Therefore, I think that having a more expensive SE that actually has decent specs is definitely worth the price bump, as big as it might be. However, it still begs the question of whether it’s actually worth buying the 16e over a last-gen phone. Apple is mostly relying on Apple Intelligence to sell the phone, dedicating a large amount of the launch event to showing demos of different features with varying degrees of usefulness. Since the phone doesn’t really add anything of value other than that, I would say that it’s almost always a better idea just to get an iPhone 15-series phone if you can find a large enough discount on it. However, Apple isn’t relying on people who take time to find good deals for phones: they’re relying on people walking into a carrier store, trying to buy a cheap phone for themselves or a family member to stay connected using iMessage and other Apple services. For that, I think that the iPhone 16e is a pretty decent phone, one that’s more affordable than the normal iPhone 16 but doesn’t hold the massive drawbacks of the third-gen iPhone SE.

In terms of hardware, the SE line has always had to have some diminished specs to differentiate it from the normal iPhones. For the iPhone 16e, this seems to be mostly focused to three different aspects: the notch, the single camera, and the lack of MagSafe. The notch on the screen is a bit disappointing but definitely makes sense as a differentiating feature, and I’m happy that it’s the only main drawback to the 6.1-inch screen that’s on the device. In terms of the single 48MP camera on the back of the phone, Apple has been advertising it as fully fulfilling the roles of a normal 1x camera and a 2x telephoto camera in a 2-in-1 camera system. I find this to be a really interesting choice, since this necessitated putting a more technically advanced camera on the phone just to avoid putting a dedicated telephoto camera. However, to consumers, the amount of cameras on a phone serves as an extremely visible separation between different price ranges of phones, meaning that Apple was required to put a single camera on the 16e to distance it from the normal iPhone 16. A lot of people have been complaining about the lack of MagSafe, but I don’t think I can really speak on it as I haven’t used MagSafe a lot. Though, the lack of it is likely also due to wanting to increase separation between the 16e and normal 16, with MagSafe being viewed as a slightly more premium feature to Apple.

Like previous SEs, the phone features an up-to-date A18 chip, though as noted before, scoring well in benchmarks is very different to the actual tasks that users of the phone will actually be doing. This leads to the main reasoning behind the large differentiation in hardware between the iPhone 16e and normal iPhone 16, since the chip can’t serve as a large place of comparison between the phones.

Contrary to seemingly what a lot of people are saying, I think the 16e gets you a much better phone at a much better price compared to the third-gen iPhone SE, but I still don’t think it’s really worth its price compared to a last-gen phone.