Apple today announced iPhone 16e, a new addition to the iPhone 16 lineup that offers powerful capabilities at a more affordable price. iPhone 16e delivers fast, smooth performance and breakthrough battery life, thanks to the industry-leading efficiency of the A18 chip and the new Apple C1, the first cellular modem designed by Apple. iPhone 16e is also built for Apple Intelligence, the intuitive personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence while taking an extraordinary step forward for privacy in AI.
The iPhone 16e isn't for me. If you're an avid tech enthusiast and Apple fan, it's probably not for you either.
This is why I think a used iPhone 15 Pro is the way to go for an iPhone at this price. You get far more “Pro” features at nearly the same price as the 16e, even in “mint” condition. The iPhone 16e is a perfectly reliable iPhone. It just isn't good value.
It’s official: the small smartphone is dead — put to rest by Apple and its newly launched iPhone 16e.
In theory, the 16e would have been a strong candidate for the small phone category. Small phones are a risk, and it seems even the world’s most influential phone-maker didn’t think it was worth the squeeze. So instead, we get yet another 6.1-inch device — the same size as the iPhone 16.
The iPhone 16E seems like a nice phone, but in the context of the past and contemporary offerings it really doesn't make any sense. The 16E replaces the SE, a device targeted at people who want small phones with essential feature sets for a cheap price. The Apple experience without the Apple tax. I myself was planning to upgrade to the next SE, which I assumed would have features like FaceID and the old notch, a decent camera (without all the multi-camera fuss of the Pro line), decent performance, for a solid price, like the old one. Though I was ready to bite on a new SE, this 16E doesn't really make sense for me, and I'm just not sure if it makes sense for anyone. It's missing some nice-to-have features (MagSafe, ultra-wide-band chipset, great camera, etc.), which would be fine for the budget-conscious SE buyer, except it's $100-$200 more expensive than the price of the outgoing SE when you factor in reasonable storage. It's the size of a regular iPhone 13 Pro or 14 Pro, which is not a small phone by any means, despite replacing the SE, a dedicated small phone. It uses a novel modem (C1), which is great and all, but I don't think people trying to get a simple Apple experience via an SE replacement will want to beta test Apple's completely untested new hardware. I guess I'm just left wondering who this phone is for. It's not good value, and it has an incomplete feature set for almost any kind of buyer.
Jason Snell (via Michael Tsai):
So much for a “low-cost” iPhone. At $599, the iPhone 16e is the cheapest new iPhone you can buy, but its starting price is 40 percent higher than the $429 iPhone SE. There’s been a lot of talk about the iPhone SE being an important phone for Apple to use in emerging markets that are much more price sensitive, but after this move, it’s hard to imagine that such a strategy is still in effect.
The size wars are over, and we lost. For a lot of people, the iPhone SE was a proxy for “a smaller iPhone.” But it never was, really—it was just an older phone design, and since all smartphones have gotten larger over time, that meant that the iPhone SE was smaller. Those days are over—the 16e is just the same size as an iPhone 16. As someone who bought and loved an iPhone 13 mini, let me say it: The days of the tiny iPhone ain’t never coming back. I know, I know, but the market has spoken, and it turns out that bigger phones just sell better. Fans of smaller phones are just going to be unhappy, and I’m sorry about it, but that’s where we are.
Previously on this blog: