The iPhone 17e

Monday, 9 March 2026

Over the years I’ve been writing here, I’ve often used the term speed bump to describe a certain type of hardware update: a new version of an existing product where the new stuff is mostly faster components, especially the CPU and GPU, but where a lot of the product, including the enclosure, remains unchanged. I’ve been thinking about it all week, as I tested the iPhone 17e, because the 17e is the epitome of a good speed bump. But it’s a funny term, because in real life, a speed bump — on the road — is something that slows you down. But in computer hardware it’s about going faster, or doing more, even if only slightly.

The other thing I find mildly amusing about the word “bump” and the iPhone 17e is that it’s the one and only iPhone in Apple’s lineup that doesn’t have a camera plateau — a.k.a. bump. The lens itself does jut out, slightly, but it’s just a lens, not a plateau, harking back to iPhones of yesteryear, like the iPhone XR from 2018.

Speed bump hardware updates never update every component. That’s not a speed bump. Only some components get updated. In a good speed bump update, the parts that get upgraded are the parts from the old model that were most lacking. My review last year of the iPhone 16e was fairly effusive, but I noted one primary omission: MagSafe. There were, of course, other compromises made for the 16e compared to higher-priced models in the lineup, but MagSafe was the one feature missing from the 16e that really bothered me. I’m not sure there was a single review of the 16e that didn’t list the omission of MagSafe as the 16e’s biggest shortcoming.

Apple’s explanation, a year ago, for omitting MagSafe was that the customers they were targeting with the 16e were people upgrading from 4-, 5-, or even 6-year-old iPhones, so they were accustomed to charging their phones by plugging in a cable. I can see that. People who bought an iPhone 16e in the last year didn’t miss MagSafe because they never had a phone with it. But, for those of us who have been using iPhones with MagSafe, the lack of MagSafe on the 16e was the primary reason to steer friends and family away from getting one. It’s not just about charging, either. I use MagSafe in a bunch of places, in a bunch of ways. I have a dock next to my bed and another next to my keyboard at my desk. I have a MagSafe mount on the dashboard of my car (which is so old it long predates CarPlay). I have a handful of MagSafe accessories like this snap-on stand from Moft that I recommended last summer, and portable MagSafe battery packs like this one from Anker (battery packs like these make for great travel items — they double as bedside chargers in hotels). I don’t carry a MagSafe card wallet or use PopSocket-style attachments, but a lot of people do. MagSafe is just great, and the lack of it on the 16e was the biggest reason not to recommend it. Just because the target audience wouldn’t miss it — because their old phone didn’t have it — doesn’t mean they wouldn’t miss out by not having it on their new one.

Well, that’s over. The 17e has MagSafe, and supports inductive charging at speeds up to 15W. (The iPhone Air supports charging up to 20W, and the 17 and 17 Pro models up to 25W.) Apple could have stopped there — with the addition of MagSafe alone — and the 17e would’ve been a successful year-over-year update.

But that would’ve been only a ... err ... mag bump, not a speed bump. Apple also bumped the SoC from the A18 to the A19, the current-generation chip from the regular iPhone 17. This is not a huge deal, year-over-year, but faster is faster and newer is better. (The $599 iPhone 17e, with the A19, is about 1.2× faster in both single- and multi-core CPU performance than the $599 MacBook Neo, with the year-old A18.)

The upgrade to the A19 enables a better image-processing pipeline for the camera, which allows the 17e to offer Apple’s “next-generation portraits”, which are an obvious improvement over the previous portrait mode offered by the 16e. But the camera hardware itself — lenses and sensors, both front and back — is unchanged year-over-year. The technical specs for the camera, as reported by Halide’s nifty Technical Readout feature, are identical to the 16e. It’s a fine camera, but not a great camera. Just like last year with the 16e, the camera’s limitations are most noticeable in low-light situations. Still, both of these things are true:

• The 17e camera is by far the weakest iPhone camera Apple currently offers. (It does not come close to the quality of the also-single-lens iPhone Air camera.)
• For the people considering the 17e, it’s probably the best camera of any kind they’ve ever owned, and a big improvement over their current, probably years-old, phone.

The 17e camera system remains limited to Apple’s original Photographic Styles; all the other iPhones in the new A19 generation — the 17, 17 Pro, and Air — offer a much improved “latest-generation” Photographic Styles. In practice, this means the system Camera app on the 17e only offers these styles: Standard, Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. The second-generation Photographic Styles, which debuted last year on the iPhone 16 models, offer a much wider variety of styles and more fine-grained control, all of which processing is non-destructive. To name one obvious scenario, the new generation of Photographic Styles offers several black-and-white styles. When you shoot with these B&W styles, you can subsequently change your mind and apply one of the color styles in the Photos app, because the styles aren’t baked-in. But with the original-generation Photograph Styles — the one the 17e is limited to — the styles you shoot with are baked into the HEIC (or JPEG) files. You can apply non-destructive filters in post, including black-and-white filters, but those filters are simplistic compared to the new-generation Photographic Styles — and unlike the new Photographic Styles, you can’t preview the old filters live in the Camera app viewfinder. If you care about any of this, you should spend the extra $200 to get the regular iPhone 17, or perhaps, the still-for-sale iPhone 16, both of which offer both better camera hardware and software than the 17e. If you don’t care about any of this, the 17e might be the iPhone for you.

Here’s a link to Apple’s ever-excellent Compare page, with a comparison of the 16e vs. 17e vs. 17. (For posterity, here’s that Compare page archived as a PDF.) Other than the addition of MagSafe, the next biggest change from last year’s 16e to the new 17e is that base storage has increased from 128 to 256 GB (while the starting price has remained unchanged at $600). Nice. Also, there’s a third color option, “soft pink”, in addition to white and black. Lastly, the 17e gains the Ceramic Shield 2 front glass, which Apple claims offers 3× better scratch resistance. That’s nice too.

That’s about it for what’s improved in the 17e compared to the 16e. But that’s enough. With the old iPhone SE models, Apple only updated the hardware every 3–5 years. The new e models are seemingly on the same annual upgrade cycle as the other generation-numbered models.¹ Adding MagSafe, going from the A18 to A19, increasing base storage, and adding a new colorway is a solid speed bump.

The next way to consider the 17e is by comparing it to the base iPhone 17. What do you miss if you go with the 17e — or, what do you gain by paying an extra $200 for the 17?

• The base 17 has a ProMotion display with dynamic refresh rates up 120 Hz and an always-on display. It’s also a brighter display (1000 vs. 800 nits SDR, 1600 vs. 1200 nits HDR). The iPhone 17 is the first base model iPhone with ProMotion, and it also sports a slightly bigger display (6.3″ vs. 6.1″) despite the fact that the 17 is only 2mm taller and exactly the same width as the 17e — the increased screen size is mostly from having smaller bezels surrounding the display.

• The iPhone 17 comes with Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for precision Find My support. If you track, say, an AirTag using the Find My app, the iPhone 17 supports the cool feature that guides you right to the device, with distances down to fractions of a foot. The iPhone 17e doesn’t support that — it just lets you do the old Find My stuff, like having the lost device play a sound, and showing its location on a map.

• Camera Control: On my personal iPhone 17 Pro, I only use the Camera Control button for launching the Camera app, and as a shutter within Camera (and other camera apps, like !Camera, Analogue,² and Halide). I don’t use it for adjusting controls, because it’s just too finicky. But I love it as a dedicated launcher and shutter button. I keep trying to invoke it on the 17e to launch the Camera app, even now, a few days into daily driving it.

• The iPhone 17 has the clever Dynamic Island; the 17e has a dumb notch. The Dynamic Island is nice to have, but despite having one on my personal phone for 3.5 years (it debuted with the 14 Pro in 2022), I can’t say I’ve particularly missed it during the better part of a week that I’ve been using the 17e as my primary phone. I actually had to double check that the 17e doesn’t have it while first writing this paragraph, because, over my first few days of testing, I just hadn’t noticed. But then I went out and ran an errand requiring an Uber ride, while listening to a podcast, and I noticed the lack of a Dynamic Island — no live status update for the hailed Uber, and no quick-tap button for jumping back into Overcast.

That’s a fair amount of better stuff for $200. But none of those things jumps out to me as a reason not to recommend the 17e for someone who considers price their highest priority. With 256 GB of storage, even the base model 17e is recommendable without hesitation. The omission of MagSafe on last year’s 16e was low-hanging fruit for Apple to add this year, as was the meager base storage of 128 GB. I don’t think there’s anything on par with MagSafe for next year’s iPhone 18e. (My first choice would be the second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — I’d like to see precision location make it into everything Apple sells sooner rather than later.)

Across several days of testing, 5G cellular reception was strong, and battery life was long. I ran Speedtest a few times, at different locations in Center City Philadelphia, and each time got download speeds above 500 Mbps and upload speeds around 40–50 Mbps. Apple’s in-house C1X modem is simply great.

Here’s a table with pricing for the iPhone models Apple currently sells:

iPhone	SoC	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB	1 TB	2 TB
17e	A19	—	$600	$800		—
16	A18	$700	—	—	—	—
16 Plus	A18	$800	$900	—	—	—
17	A19	—	$800	$1000	—	—
Air (17)	A19 Pro	—	$1000	$1200	$1400	—
17 Pro	A19 Pro	—	$1100	$1300	$1500	—
17 Pro Max	A19 Pro	—	$1200	$1400	$1600	$2000

This is a very compelling lineup, and the 17e shores up the lowest price point with aplomb:

• Good: iPhone 17e
• Better: iPhone 17
• Best: iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air, depending how you define “best”.

In New York last week at Apple’s hands-on “experience” for the media, which was primarily about the MacBook Neo, I got the chance to talk about the 17e, too. Apple’s product marketing people tend to compare the 17e against the iPhone 11 and 12. Those are the iPhones most would-be 17e buyers are upgrading from. Things they’ll notice if they do upgrade to a 17e:

• Much better battery life. Not just compared to an iPhone 11 or 12 that’s been in use for 4–5 years, but against a factory fresh battery in those older iPhones. Apple’s “streaming video” benchmark goes from 11 hours to 21 hours comparing the 17e to the 12. And if they are upgrading from a phone with a 4- or 5-year-old battery that’s been through hundreds of charge cycles, they’re going to notice even more.
• A noticeably brighter screen (800 vs 625 nits).
• A much improved camera. Even if they’re not serious about photography, the 17e camera is noticeably better than the cameras from half a decade ago.
• Everything will feel faster.

Frankly, I’m not sure who the year-old iPhone 16 is for today, especially considering that Apple is now only offering it with 128 GB of storage. The potential appeal of the still-available 16 Plus is more obvious: if you want a big-screen iPhone, it’s much less expensive than a 17 Pro Max. And, unlike the regular iPhone 16, the 16 Plus is available with 256 GB. But at that point, I’d encourage whoever is considering the $900 iPhone 16 Plus with 256 GB storage to pay an extra $100 and get the iPhone Air instead. The overall lineup would have more coherence and clarity if Apple just eliminated the two 16 models. I suspect Apple is on the cusp of completely moving away from the strategy of selling two- and three-year-old iPhones at lower prices, and updating their entire lineup with annual speed bumps.