Apple iPhone 16e Review: Questionable Value

The iPhone 16e isn’t for me. If you’re an avid tech enthusiast and Apple fan, it’s probably not for you either. It’s for the person holding on to an iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X, ready to upgrade because their more than seven-year-old smartphone isn’t working too well nowadays. They want a new phone, and it just needs to be an iPhone.

A part of my brain won’t stop thinking about whether this nearly once-in-a-decade upgrade for these folks wouldn’t be better served if Apple had included its nice-to-have amenities, like MagSafe or the ultra-wideband chip for improved AirTags tracking. Even lacking these features, the price of the iPhone 16e feels $100 too high considering the many excellent competing phones in this bracket. It also makes the iPhone lineup confusing—it’s $170 more than Apple’s previous iPhone SE that’s no longer available.

I have spent much of my time this past week using the iPhone 16e and thinking about its $599 MSRP, which naturally must mean that something is awry. This may not matter much to people in the US, who favor purchasing through carriers that subsidize the cost, though they’re still paying for a $600 (locked) phone spread over a few years. But when the used iPhone marketplace is healthy and thriving, it feels as though anyone considering an iPhone 16e will find better value with an iPhone 15 or iPhone 15 Pro.

Cell Boost

The best iPhone 16e feature? Battery life. Considering this is a 6.1-inch iPhone, which historically perform the lowest in battery tests, this is a welcome surprise. With average use over the past week, I struggled to bring the phone below 50 percent. (It usually hovered around 51 or 49 percent by bedtime.) Yes, that means the iPhone 16e has better battery life than the iPhone 16.

On one particular day when I used it for GPS navigation, music streaming, and picture snapping, it was left with around 30 percent before bed. And another busy day, I hit nearly nine hours of screen-on time and had 15 percent in the tank. That’s excellent. It’s still not the best iPhone battery life in the lineup—that’d be the iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus—but it’s enough to keep that battery anxiety at bay when you’re out and about.

Apple claims this battery boost is in part thanks to the first-ever Apple-designed C1 modem inside the phone. Apple spent years building this connectivity chip to reduce its reliance on partners like Qualcomm, and it seems to have paid off. I didn’t experience any issues with cellular connectivity over the past week with the AT&T eSIM Apple provided, though this also could depend on region. (I’m in New York City.) I ran speed tests via Ookla on various phones alongside the iPhone 16e and did not find anything out of the ordinary. That said, remember Antennagate? We’ll have to wait and see how the C1 modem performs in the hands of far more people across the world.

One tidbit: This phone only supports sub-6 5G speeds. That’s the general flavor of 5G you’ll encounter most of the time. The pricier iPhones support millimeter-wave 5G (mmWave), which enables much higher download speeds, but it’s only present in select areas, like airports, stadiums, and in dense cities. Again, I’m in New York City and had no trouble with the 16e’s cellular performance. The Wi-Fi chip is separate from Apple’s C1, and the iPhone 16e is stuck on Wi-Fi 6. It’s not a big deal because Wi-Fi 7 is in its early days, and you need to buy a Wi-Fi 7 router to make use of its perks anyway.

You may also have seen in Apple’s comparison tool that the iPhone 16e lacks “DC-HSDPA,” even though it’s available in its pricier siblings. This is a 3G carrier aggregation technology that isn’t as common these days, since 3G networks are being deprecated, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

The better run time and C1 modem are the two notable features of this iPhone. As for the rest of the hardware, there are similarities with the iPhone 16 range but often a small change here and there. For example, the OLED display is protected by Apple’s Ceramic Glass technology, but it doesn’t use the newer, stronger ceramic mixture found in the iPhone 16, just the older recipe.

Similarly, the A18 chipset inside is nearly identical to the iPhone 16, except there’s one less graphics core (totaling four instead of five). I fired up Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Genshin Impact, and while I noticed a slight increase in stutters, particularly in the latter game, the experience didn’t feel wildly different. This iPhone can handle almost anything you plan to throw at it.

The key part of the A18 chip is support for Apple Intelligence. I won’t dig too deep here, because my thoughts haven’t changed much since I first wrote about Apple’s artificial intelligence features. I don’t find many of the features useful. The improved Siri with ChatGPT is nice, but it is still a little slow and can make some errors. Even Genmoji—a lighthearted way to create new emoji—feels disappointing because it doesn’t always want to make precisely what I want. I asked for catdog, Apple, not a cat next to a dog.

The only good thing to note here is that Apple is no longer gate-keeping Visual Intelligence to iPhones with the Camera Control button. This Google Lens-like feature can be assigned to the Action Button (which officially replaced the mute switch in 2023). It’s also good to hear that this will come to the iPhone 15 Pro in a software update soon.

I didn’t mind the lack of the Dynamic Island on the 16e—I like the feature, but it wasn’t hard to adapt to life with the infamous notch again. It reminds me of how much time we spent squabbling about notch and bezel sizes back in the day. We have worse things to contend with these days. However, it does raise the question of whether Apple just looked at what spare parts it had lying around and assembled the 16e like some kind of Frankenphone.

Speaking of the screen, it doesn’t get as bright as the iPhone 16 range, but it’s perfectly legible on sunny days. I wish Apple jacked up the refresh rate—most Android phones at this price have 90- or 120-Hz refresh rates for a smoother display experience, but the 16e maxes out at a measly 60-Hz.

Price Fix

It’s easy to think the iPhone 16e has the same 48-MP camera as the iPhone 16, but that’s not true. The sizes of the pixels in the sensor are smaller, meaning they won’t capture as much light as the larger pixels in the iPhone 16 sensor. In a few low-light comparison shots, I had to really pixel peep to see that the pricier iPhone does deliver slightly sharper details and less noise, but the differences are negligible.

You may feel more constrained by the fact that there’s just one camera. Usually I’d say I’m happy with a usable single camera rather than having a second, crappy ultrawide lens, like on many midrange and budget phones. But this is a $600 smartphone. Samsung’s Galaxy S24 FE has a triple-camera system that produces good-quality images and costs a smidge more, so I’m not sure why Apple couldn’t figure out something similar.

The good news is that this single camera is capable (the 12-MP selfie camera is reliable too!). The iPhone 16e generally snapped more detailed and sharper photos than the Google Pixel 8A I compared it with, though it still struggles with motion, and you need to be very still in low-light conditions lest you end up with a blurry shot. Portrait mode doesn’t fare well at night—it kept saying I needed more light, whereas the Pixel 8A didn’t have any issues.

The two most perplexing omissions from this phone are MagSafe and the ultra-wideband chip. Over the weekend, I hopped in my car and went to put the iPhone 16e on my MagSafe wireless car charger and it didn’t magnetically attach. It’s annoying—I’ve been using MagSafe Android cases for years because I like MagSafe so much, and now Apple just cut it from its newest phone. If you too have a lot of MagSafe accessories—maybe you’re upgrading from an iPhone 12—you can use a MagSafe case, but it won’t give you the same benefits as native MagSafe built into the phone (like faster charging and more efficient energy transfer).

Similarly, every iPhone since the iPhone 11 has an ultra-wideband chip. It’s what lets you precisely track AirTags so you know exactly under which couch cushion the remote is. That’s not available on the iPhone 16e. Instead you’ll see the general area of the AirTag and will have to find it yourself.

These two features may sound small, but do you know how popular AirTags are? MagSafe is also just pure convenience. It’s not only about charging—I don’t need to unclamp my car charger just to place my phone on it. Including them would have been a perfect way for people coming from an iPhone X to appreciate the more modern iPhone features.

This is why the iPhone lineup is a little confusing. Apple sells the standard iPhone 15 for $699, and it has many of those perks (plus more), but it doesn’t have Apple Intelligence support—and you know that as the years go on, more features will be siloed into Apple Intelligence versus iOS. Your options might also be a little limited in the used market if you want the convenience of USB-C, since that only debuted on the iPhone 15 series.

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.