iPhone 16e review
The iPhone 16e, introduced on February 19, 2025, serves as Apple's latest entry-level smartphone, succeeding the iPhone SE series. Priced at $599 in the U.S., it offers a blend of modern features and some compromises to maintain affordability.
Design and Display
The iPhone 16e adopts a design reminiscent of the iPhone 14, featuring a 6.1-inch OLED Super Retina XDR display with a resolution of 2532 × 1170 pixels. This edge-to-edge screen marks a departure from the older SE models, eliminating the Home button in favor of Face ID for biometric authentication. The device is available in two colors: Black and White.
Performance
Under the hood, the iPhone 16e is powered by Apple's A18 chip, accompanied by 8 GB of RAM. Notably, this variant of the A18 features a 4-core GPU, compared to the 5-core GPU found in the standard iPhone 16 models. Despite this, performance remains robust for everyday tasks and applications. The device also debuts Apple's in-house C1 modem, enhancing connectivity and potentially contributing to improved battery efficiency.
Camera
Equipped with a single 48 MP Fusion camera, the iPhone 16e offers optical-quality zoom up to 2x by cropping the sensor. While it lacks an ultra-wide lens, the main camera supports features like Night Mode, Deep Fusion, and Photographic Styles, delivering commendable photo quality in various lighting conditions. The front-facing 12 MP TrueDepth camera supports Portrait mode and 4K video recording.
Battery Life
One of the standout features of the iPhone 16e is its impressive battery life. Users have reported extended usage times, likely attributed to the efficient A18 chip and the new C1 modem. Apple claims up to 26 hours of video playback, making it a reliable companion for daily use.
Notable Omissions
To achieve its price point, the iPhone 16e omits certain features found in higher-end models:
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MagSafe Charging: The device lacks MagSafe support, limiting it to standard Qi wireless charging up to 7.5W.
Ultra-Wideband Chip: The absence of the U2 chip means features like precise device tracking are unavailable. -
Display Features: The 16e retains the traditional notch design and does not include the Dynamic Island feature introduced in recent models.
Conclusion
The iPhone 16e strikes a balance between modern functionality and cost-effectiveness. While it lacks some premium features, its solid performance, impressive battery life, and updated design make it a compelling choice for those seeking an affordable iPhone experience. However, potential buyers should weigh these omissions against their personal needs and preferences.
The most expensive cheap iPhone yet
The iPhone 16e rethinks—and prices up—the basic iPhone.
For a long time, the cheapest iPhones were basically just iPhones that were older than the current flagship, but last week’s release of the $600 iPhone 16e marks a big change in how Apple is approaching its lineup.
Rather than a repackaging of an old iPhone, the 16e is the latest main iPhone—that is, the iPhone 16—with a bunch of stuff stripped away.
There are several potential advantages to this change. In theory, it allows Apple to support its lower-end offerings for longer with software updates, and it gives entry-level buyers access to more current technologies and features. It also simplifies the marketplace of accessories and the like.
There’s bad news, too, though: Since it replaces the much cheaper iPhone SE in Apple’s lineup, the iPhone 16e significantly raises the financial barrier to entry for iOS (the SE started at $430).
We spent a few days trying out the 16e and found that it’s a good phone—it’s just too bad it’s a little more expensive than the entry-level iPhone should ideally be. In many ways, this phone solves more problems for Apple than it does for consumers.
A beastly processor for an entry-level phone
Like the 16, the 16e has Apple’s A18 chip, the most recent in the made-for-iPhone line of Apple-designed chips. There’s only one notable difference: This variation of the A18 has just four GPU cores instead of five. That will show up in benchmarks and in a handful of 3D games, but it shouldn’t make too much of a difference for most people.
It gets quite bright, though; Apple claims it typically reaches 800 nits in peak brightness but that it can stretch to 1200 when viewing certain HDR photos and videos. That means it gets about twice as bright as the SE did.
Connectivity is key
The iPhone 16e supports the core suite of connectivity options found in modern phones. There’s Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and Apple’s usual limited implementation of NFC.
There are three new things of note here, though, and they’re good, neutral, and bad, respectively.
USB-C
Let’s start with the good. We’ve moved from Apple’s proprietary Lightning port found in older iPhones (including the final iPhone SE) toward USB-C, now a near-universal standard on mobile devices. It allows faster charging and more standardized charging cable support.
Sure, it’s a bummer to start over if you’ve spent years buying Lightning accessories, but it’s absolutely worth it in the long run. This change means that the entire iPhone line has now abandoned Lightning, so all iPhones and Android phones will have the same main port for years to come.
The finality of this shift solves a few problems for Apple: It greatly simplifies the accessory landscape and allows the company to move toward producing a smaller range of cables.
Satellite connectivity
Recent flagship iPhones have gradually added a small suite of features that utilize satellite connectivity to make life a little easier and safer.
Among those is crash detection and roadside assistance. The former will use the sensors in the phone to detect if you’ve been in a car crash and contact help, and roadside assistance allows you to text for help when you’re outside of cellular reception in the US and UK.
There are also Emergency SOS and Find My via satellite, which let you communicate with emergency responders from remote places and allow you to be found Along with a more general feature that allows Messages via satellite, these features can greatly expand your options if you’re somewhere remote, though they’re not as easy to use and responsive as using the regular cellular network.
Where’s MagSafe?
I don’t expect the 16e to have all the same features as the 16, which is $200 more expensive. In fact, it has more modern features than I think most of its target audience needs (more on that later). That said, there’s one notable omission that makes no sense to me at all.
The 16e does not support MagSafe, a standard for connecting accessories to the back of the device magnetically, often while allowing wireless charging via the Qi standard.
Qi wireless charging is still supported, albeit at a slow 7.5 W, but there are no magnets, meaning a lot of existing MagSafe accessories are a lot less useful with this phone, if they’re usable at all. To be fair, the SE didn’t support MagSafe either, but every new iPhone design since the iPhone 12 way back in 2020 has—and not just the premium flagships.
It’s not like the MagSafe accessory ecosystem was some bottomless well of innovation, but that magnetic alignment is handier than you might think, whether we’re talking about making sure the phone locks into place for the fastest wireless charging speeds or hanging the phone on a car dashboard to use GPS on the go.
It’s one of those things where folks coming from much older iPhones may not care because they don’t know what they’re missing, but it could be annoying in households with multiple generations of iPhones, and it just doesn’t make any sense.
Most of Apple’s choices in the 16e seem to serve the goal of unifying the whole iPhone lineup to simplify the message for consumers and make things easier for Apple to manage efficiently, but the dropping of MagSafe is bizarre. It almost makes me think that Apple might plan to drop MagSafe from future flagship iPhones, too, and go toward something new, just because that’s the only explanation I can think of. That otherwise seems unlikely to me right now, but I guess we’ll see.
The first Apple-designed cellular modem
We’ve been seeing rumors that Apple planned to drop third-party modems from companies like Qualcomm for years. As far back as 2018, Apple was poaching Qualcomm employees in an adjacent office in San Diego. In 2020, Apple SVP Johny Srouji announced to employees that work had begun.
It sounds like development has been challenging, but the first Apple-designed modem has arrived here in the 16e of all places. Dubbed the C1, it’s… perfectly adequate. It’s about as fast or maybe just a smidge slower than what you get in the flagship phones, but almost no user would notice any difference at all.
That’s really a win for Apple, which has struggled with a tumultuous relationship with its partners here for years and which has long run into space problems in its phones in part because the third-party modems weren’t compact enough.
This change may not matter much for the consumer beyond freeing up just a tiny bit of space for a slightly larger battery, but it’s another step in Apple’s long journey to ultimately and fully control every component in the iPhone that it possibly can.
Bigger is better for batteries
There is one area where the 16e is actually superior to the 16, much less the SE: battery life. The 16e reportedly has a 3,961 mAh battery, the largest in any of the many iPhones with roughly this size screen. Apple says it offers up to 26 hours of video playback, which is the kind of number you expect to see in a much larger flagship phone. I charged this phone three times in just under a week with it, though I wasn’t heavily hitting 5G networks, playing many 3D games, or cranking the brightness way up all the time while using it.
That’s a bit of a bump over the 16, but it’s a massive leap over the SE, which promised a measly 15 hours of video playback. Every single phone in Apple’s lineup now has excellent battery life by any standard.
Quality over quantity in the camera system
The 16E’s camera system leaves the SE in the dust, but it’s no match for the robust system found in the iPhone 16. Regardless, it’s way better than you’d typically expect from a phone at this price.
Like the 16, the 16e has a 48 MP “Fusion” wide-angle rear camera. It typically doesn’t take photos at 48 MP (though you can do that while compromising color detail). Rather, 24 MP is the target. The 48 MP camera enables 2x zoom that is nearly visually indistinguishable from optical zoom.
- Conclusion
The iPhone 16e strikes a balance between modern functionality and cost-effectiveness. While it lacks some premium features, its solid performance, impressive battery life, and updated design make it a compelling choice for those seeking an affordable iPhone experience. However, potential buyers should weigh these omissions against their personal needs and preferences.