Thoughts and Observations on Today’s iPhone 16e Announcement

Wednesday, 19 February 2025

Last week Tim Cook teased a “newest member of the family” product announcement coming today; turns out it was the iPhone 16e, a device whose name briefly paralyzed me with indecision regarding how to capitalize it,¹ which replaces the three-year-old iPhone SE (3rd generation) in the lineup.

The Announcement

Apple made the announcement in a 13-minute video that is currently atop their home page, but seemingly only perma-linkable at YouTube. (Maybe this?) It was also, of course, announced in a press release on Apple Newsroom. The first three minutes of the video feature Tim Cook (talking about how great iPhones are, the iPhones 16 in particular, and Apple Intelligence). Cook hands things off to iPhone product marketing VP Kaiann Drance for the next five minutes; Drance mostly recaps iOS 18’s tentpole features, especially, of course, Apple Intelligence. Drance hands off to keynote first-timer (I think) Lucy Browning, a director of iPhone product design, who talks up the 16e specifics. The most unusual thing about the video is its setting: not Apple Park, not the Steve Jobs Theater, but the infinite white void, where, in a bygone era, Apple TV commercials like the famed Hodgman/Long “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” series were set. (The new infinite void is arguably light gray, not white.)

The Name

First, the name. It’s not the fourth-generation iPhone SE, and instead sports an altogether new “e” suffix. Apple has used an “S” suffix with the iPhones 4S, 5S, 6S, and XS; “C” with the iPhone 5C, and “R” with the XR. We shall see if this “e” is a one-off. In an online press briefing today, when asked whether the E stands for anything, an Apple rep said no, it does not stand for anything, but that it’s built for everyone. I don’t think she meant to imply that the E secretly stands for everyone, if only because I’m pretty sure Apple doesn’t want everyone buying the lowest-price iPhone model. Apple never had an explanation for the “SE” name either, although in my head I’ve already read that as maybe sorta kinda standing for special edition? Way back in the day, I think Phil Schiller once said the “S” in “iPhone 3GS” stood for speed, because the 3GS was in fact strikingly faster than the year prior’s 3G, and the “C” in “iPhone 5C” definitely, if unofficially, stood for color. But it’s best not to waste too much time trying to find any logic to this other than that Apple thinks “iPhone 16e” looks and sounds cool. I’m just glad it’s not the “iPhone 16 AI”.

Using the “16” generation as part of the name is more interesting than the new E suffix. It perhaps suggests that E edition phones might become annual. I wouldn’t bet on that. But the SE models came out in March 2016, April 2020, and March 2022, so the gaps have been irregular. At the very least though, the 16e name will help make it clear, in years to come, what the basic specs of this iPhone were and when, roughly, it debuted. Every time I’ve referenced the third-gen SE in the last year or two, I’ve had to look up exactly when it debuted and which A-series chip it sported (A15, same as the iPhone 13).

Pricing

As expected, the existing third-gen iPhone SE is now out of the lineup. The third-gen SE debuted in March 2022 with a starting price of $430 (for a paltry 64 GB) with 128 and 256 GB configurations for, respectively, $480 and $580. The new iPhone 16e starts at $600, which, depending how you look at it, is either a $170 increase (for the price of the cheapest new iPhone Apple sells) or a $120 increase (for the price of the cheapest 128 GB iPhone Apple sells). I’ve already seen gobs of people arguing that the iPhone 16e “should” start at just $500, but if you look at Apple’s pricing for the entire iPhone 16 lineup, there are $200 gaps, for the same storage tiers, between the 16e and regular 16, and between the regular 16 and 16 Pro. So I’d argue that $600 is the “right” price. It’s also worth pointing out that, according the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’s inflation calculator, $500 in January 2022 is about $565 in January 2025 dollars.

Here’s a table with the lineup of new iPhones Apple currently sells. I’m including the now-discontinued iPhone SE for reference. Also note that while these are the only models Apple itself sells to consumers, other old models are still sold by various carriers and retail partners around the world, including the iPhone SE for now.

	Chip	64 GB	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB	1 TB
iPhone SE	A15	$430	$480	$580	—	—
iPhone 16e	A18	—	$600	$700	$900	—
iPhone 15	A16	—	$700	$800	$1,000	—
iPhone 16	A18	—	$800	$900	$1,100	—
iPhone 16 Pro	A18 Pro	—	$1,000	$1,100	$1,300	$1,500

iPhone 16 Plus and 16 Pro Max cost $100 more than their regular-size siblings.
iPhone 16 Pro Max is not available with 128 GB, and thus starts at $1,200.

Key differences in the iPhone 16e from the regular iPhone 16 (and iPhone 15), roughly in order of interest, or at least interestingness, to me:

No MagSafe

I find this a surprising omission. The 16e does support inductive Qi charging, but only at a pokey 7.5-watt rate. The regular 16 and 16 Pro models support MagSafe charging at up to 25 watts, and the iPhone 15 at 15 watts. You can charge an iPhone 16e using a MagSafe charging puck, but only at 7.5 watts, and it won’t magnetically snap into place. It’ll just function as a non-magnetic pad. I don’t know if this decision was about component pricing (the $200 difference has to come from somewhere, and it’s not going to be Apple’s margins), the internal space that MagSafe components occupy in the device (see next section), or marketing differentiation. Probably some combination of all three. The old SE only supported 7.5-watt no-MagSafe Qi charging as well.

Battery

Battery life is better than the regular iPhone 16. This is equally surprising to me. From Apple’s own Comparison page:

How exactly is the 16e achieving battery life that surpasses the more expensive iPhone 16, and is effectively on par with the much more expensive iPhone 16 Pro? I suspect it’s a combination of a larger battery and a more efficient cellular modem. As rumored, the 16e is Apple’s first iPhone with an in-house–designed modem, which, in the video, Kaiann Drance introduces thus (emphasis added): “And with iPhone 16e, we’re expanding the benefits of Apple silicon with C1, the first Apple-designed cellular modem. It provides fast and reliable 5G connectivity, and it’s the most power-efficient modem ever in an iPhone.” Just as with CPUs and GPUs, Apple’s interest in custom silicon isn’t only about price and performance — it’s about efficiency too. Drance then continues (speaking over a cool breakaway animation of the 16e’s internal components), “We combined the incredible power efficiency of Apple silicon with an all-new internal design for iPhone 16e that has been optimized for a larger battery. Together, it paves the way for an unprecedented level of battery life in a 6.1-inch iPhone.” There might be other changes that allow the 16e to accommodate a larger battery than the regular 16, but from the spec sheet, the obvious one is the omission of MagSafe.

Apple’s C1 Chip

The power efficiency sounds great, and of course the modem supports “5G”, but it doesn’t support mmWave / ultra wideband, the crazy super-fast variant of 5G with Wi-Fi-like speed and Wi-Fi-like short range from carrier antennas that serve it. Block-by-block here at home in Philadelphia, I see ultra wideband from Verizon on some blocks of the city (denoted by the “5G UW” icon in the status bar), but not most. But do I really care? I honestly don’t know why I’m supposed to care about 5G at all compared to LTE. Using LTE instead of 5G (let alone using 5G ultra wideband) makes no practical difference for anything I do over cellular on my phone. Obviously Apple wants to support ultra wideband in its own modems eventually, but their renewed deal with Qualcomm — announced and crowed-about only by Qualcomm, because Apple despises them and deeply resents its own dependence upon them — covers “smartphone launches in 2024, 2025 and 2026”. So I don’t think we’ll see a C-series chip in this September’s expected iPhone 17 or 17 Pro — but perhaps we’ll see one in the rumored iPhone 17 “Air”.

Remember too that when last I saw it tested — by Nicole Nguyen in 2022 — disabling 5G and exclusively using LTE extended the battery life of an iPhone 13 Pro from 13 to 15.5 hours in her video-streaming test. Ultra wideband 5G is indeed insanely fast, and regular 5G is generally faster than LTE, but for most people in most places, not in ways that practically matter, especially considering the effects on battery life. “Plenty fast enough, with longer battery life” is a better trade-off than “way faster than you’ll notice, with somewhat shorter battery life”.

Speaking of wireless, I don’t know if it’s related to the C1 chip, but the iPhone 16e supports only Wi-Fi 6, not 7, and doesn’t support Thread networking.

Just One Front Camera, but It’s “2-in-1”

No surprise here — cameras are expensive, and only offering one makes for very obvious differentiation. Apple’s calling this lone camera “2-in-1” because, like the main camera on other recent iPhone models, it offers both 1× and 2× optical fields of view (1× uses the entire 48MP sensor, producing a 12MP image by treating the sensor pixel array as “quad pixels; 2× produces 12MP images by cropping the center 12MP of the sensor). The lack of a second ultra-wide camera means not just no 0.5× lens, but also no macro photography, and no spatial photos or video. The 16e also offers only “Photographic Styles”, not the “latest-generation Photographic Styles” offered by the 16 and 16 Pro.

If you really care about your camera, the iPhone 16e isn’t the iPhone for you. As mentioned above, it has fewer lenses and the imaging pipeline doesn’t support the next-generation Photographic Styles (which, five months in, I continue to really enjoy in my own photography). But that doesn’t mean the iPhone 16e isn’t a valid choice for people who care about their photos. Some people really do care about their photography, but also really just point and shoot using their main 1× camera, no matter which iPhone model they own. Not worrying about camera hardware and only concerning yourself with lighting and framing is a philosophy shared by many seriously talented photographers.

No Camera Control Button

The other camera-hardware-related ding against the 16e is that it doesn’t have the new Camera Control button/slider on the side. I know several iPhone 16 owners who claim they never use it or even flat out dislike it, because they find themselves invoking it only by accident. I really like it, and use it as my primary way to launch the Camera app and to capture images. But, you know, we all captured images and videos just fine for 17 iPhone generations without that hardware button. No matter how much you like it, you certainly don’t need it.

But, up until now, you did need the Camera Control button to invoke the visual intelligence feature of Apple Intelligence. A press-and-release of Camera Control launches your favorite camera app; a long-press invokes visual intelligence. Apple’s solution to enable visual intelligence on the iPhone 16e, despite it lacking the Camera Control button, is two-fold. First, visual intelligence is now available in Control Center. Second, as demonstrated by Apple in the announcement video, you can assign the Action Button to visual intelligence. (By default, just as with other iPhones equipped with the Action Button, it defaults to toggling silent mode, like the dedicated ringer switch of yore — where by “yore” I mean still on the iPhone 15.)

Apple representatives also told me today that owners of the iPhone 15 Pro will soon be able to bind their Action Button to visual intelligence, “in a future software update”. I suspect that future software update is iOS 18.4, which should be launching in beta any day now, but Apple wouldn’t comment, on or off the record, when exactly this feature will come to the iPhone 15 Pro. They also confirmed that the Control Center button to launch visual intelligence is also coming to iPhone 15 Pro (and presumably iPhone 16 models, too). The iPhone 15 Pro, despite qualifying for Apple Intelligence, has heretofore lacked the visual intelligence feature, because the visual intelligence feature has only been trigger-able via the Camera Control button. It’s a little odd, frankly, that Apple didn’t enable this feature via the Action Button and Control Center for 15 Pro users months ago — perhaps they really wanted to wait for the 16e announcement?

Display

The 16e display specs seem pretty good, but the front sensor array is behind a notch, not a dynamic island. That’s a reasonable design trade-off for the lowest-price model. The 16 and 16 Pro displays offer brightness specs of 1,000 nits (typical), 1,600 nits (HDR), and 2,000 nits (outdoor). The 16e display offers 800 nits (typical), 1,200 (HDR), and doesn’t go higher than that. The 16 and 16 Pro dislays also go down to just 1 nit minimum brightness; Apple doesn’t list a minimum brightness for the 16e display.

Silicon

The A18 chip in the iPhone 16e seems (on the specs page) nearly identical to that of the iPhone 16, except for the number of GPU cores: the 16e has only 4 GPU cores, but the regular iPhone 16 has 5. (The A18 Pro chip in the iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max has 6 GPU cores.) No big whoop.

What’s more interesting than comparing to the iPhone 16 is comparing to the iPhone 15, which costs $100 more than the 16e. Because the only A17-generation chip was the A17 Pro that went into the iPhone 15 Pro models, the regular iPhone 15 has the same A16 chip from the iPhone 14 model year. Aside from all the general performance improvements in the A18 compared to the two-year-old A16, the big functional difference is that the iPhone 16e supports Apple Intelligence and the iPhone 15 does not. As covered extensively when Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC last June, that’s mainly a function of RAM, but whatever the reasons, the less expensive iPhone 16e has Apple Intelligence, and the iPhone 15 does not. Maybe that’s not a big whoop, but it’s definitely a whoop of some sort.

Perhaps, like the three generations of SE models, the iPhone 16e is designed to stay around for several years at this price point. If it does, the fact that it costs $100 less than the “year-old regular iPhone” will make more sense come September, when that $700 year-old model is the iPhone 16. But until September, the iPhone 16e looks like a better phone in several ways than the iPhone 15. It has a faster chip that supports Apple Intelligence and significantly longer battery life. The iPhone 15 does have a 0.5× ultra-wide camera, and it has a slightly better display (that includes the nicer dynamic island instead of a notch). And of course the iPhone 15 comes in colors like pink, yellow, green, and blue. But if you keep your phone in a case all the time, like most people do, you probably don’t care about the color of your phone much. The iPhone 16e is arguably just plain a better phone than the iPhone 15, and I think it’s almost inarguably a better value at $100 less.

Colors

You can get any color 16e that you want, so long as it’s black or white. The third-gen iPhone SE came in midnight, starlight, and Product Red. (Is Apple done partnering with Product Red now? I think Apple Watch Series 9 was the last device offered with Product Red.)