Apple has brought its latest budget phone, the $599 iPhone 16E. There were no in-person events, nor were they online. The journalist scrambled his colleague’s sheds and took photos of his phone. Instead, CEO Tim Cook tweeted that new hardware was approaching just days before Apple announced its phone via a press release.
Therefore, the 16E is not an exciting device. It’s something safe. This is the amalgam of the previous iPhone for creating reliable products while keeping costs down. The phone is most similar to the iPhone 13 and 14, including both the dimension and the display notchup top. Here is the action button on the iPhone 15, but there is no camera control for the 16.
From an innovation perspective, the most exciting element of the iPhone 16E must be a custom C1 modem. That’s not an emotion you hear too often. The modem is clearly sexy. Most consumers only acknowledge their presence when they go to Fritz. But it’s not technology that makes components interesting. The fact is that this is the first time Apple has made it.
The 16e is freely borrowed from previous Apple handsets, but there are elements of the company’s latest flagship that help to justify Apple’s new naming scheme. The most powerful argument in favour of abandoning the familiar iPhone SE branding is to include another component, the A18. This is the same processor found on a regular iPhone 16.
This is important for several reasons. First, the 16E is $200 cheaper than the iPhone 16. This has been the cheapest way to get a chip so far. The second and most important is future prevention. Apple will continue to support the chip longer than the A16 chip on the iPhone 15.
Beyond bug fixes and security updates, future prevention is also included in Apple Intelligence, an early generation AI platform that the company is banking as the future of the iPhone. Before last week, the existing iPhone 16 line and the most expensive iPhone 15 model were the only iOS devices capable of performing functions.
“Modern” accepts familiar form factors
However, please do not get tangled. The star of this show is not a specific silicon. That’s the price. Ultimately, pricing is why analysts point out the possibility of the iPhone 16E to help Apple make up for lost ground in major markets such as China and India. With the grand plan of things, the $200 price drop from the entry-level iPhone isn’t that big, but every bit is important, especially in the developing market where true flagships can struggle.
However, when you delete the price, it will not automatically convert to a flood of new iPhone users. Apple faces extremely tough competition with domestic Chinese manufacturers. This is a phenomenon that is likely to worsen as trade tensions rise.
Markets like India have other complicated factors, as both the iPhone 14 and 15 buy for a while through the retail channel. With the cancellation of the iPhone 14, the new stuff will be much more difficult here in the US, but the iPhone 15 is still officially available starting at $699.
Elements like these blur the position of the 16E in the current iPhone lineup. The $100 price difference between IT and 15 is important, but it’s not near the price bay where some Android manufacturers are placed between the middle tier and flagship devices. Serviceable and inexpensive Android devices were not in short demand. The iPhone 16E is not a budget device in itself, as Apple hasn’t created a budget device.
What makes the line even more blurry is the fact that the 16E iPhone 14-inspired design doesn’t feel like a throwback like the last SE when it was released in 2022. The 16E still has a notch display rather than a dynamic island (introduced in the 14 Pro), but the overall design of the line has not changed radically over the past few years. For this reason, the 16E feels like a “modern” iPhone. The last SE wasn’t.
This is a benefit to most potential buyers, but there are definitely some who will lament the end of Touch ID in favor of Face ID. The arrival of the 16E marks the end of the “small” iPhone. Some miss the more compact 4.7-inch display found in the last SE. The arrival of the 16E means that you will no longer be able to purchase your iPhone on a screen that is less than 6 inches.
The iPhone 15, iPhone 16E, and iPhone 16 all feature 6.1-inch Super Retinas XDR displays. The screen is almost the same, but there are some important differences. The 16e has a notch at the Dynamic Island location, and is at its peak with a brightness of 1,200 knits compared to the up to 2,000 knits of other models. The three phones share roughly the same footprint and weight.
All three have a USB-C port by law, but the 16E does not have a Magsafe connector on the rear. The phone is charged via QI standard, but its speed is 7.5 watts, and charges up to 25 watts, 15 watts and 16. The 16E shows off the longest battery life of three phones to 22 hours of 16 and 20 hours of 15 in 26 hours. The new C1 modem played a key role in extending the 16E battery life. This allows you to free up more battery space than the old silicone and free up more battery space than the iPhone 16.
Both the iPhone 16 and 16E have the latest A18 chip with a 6-core CPU and a 16-core neural engine. The 16E uses a 4-core GPU for 5 cores of the 16, and it hits a bit on the graphics processing side. All three phones start with 128GB of storage and can be upgraded to both 256GB or 512GB. Meanwhile, the 16 and 16e sports 8GB of RAM to 6GB of 15. A little extra boost in RAM should help with some of the Apple Intelligence processing for that device.
Intelligent design
Currently, Apple Intelligence features rewrites, summaries, and generated images of text created through Image Playground. Is the ability to run Apple’s answer to Google Gemini enough to choose the 16E over the so-intelligent iPhone 15? Of course, the usefulness of the platform varies dramatically between individuals in its current form. But these are very early days.
Apple is committed to providing its generative AI and is set to be the center of updates for years to come. While we can’t promise life-changing features on the horizon, there’s a perfect chance that we’ll take away technology and kick ourselves in a year or two.
Visual Intelligence (Apple’s answer to Google Lens) is also available in 16E, but since it does not have camera control, you will need to access it using the action button. What’s more noteworthy than the lack of camera control, however, is the presence of a single camera on the back of the iPhone 16e.
During its announcement, Apple highlighted this fact, which is shiny and instead called the “2-in-1” camera system. Through the magic of calculation photography, the iPhone 16E is a single camera smartphone that “feels” like two camera systems. This is summarised into a 48-megapixel sensor with an “integrated telephoto”. This means that the image offers a tighter 12 megapixel image version without significantly sacrificing the zoom quality.
Even if the aforementioned image sensors utilize flashy fusion technology, they inevitably lose the versatility of moving from two image sensors to one. For some users, this alone is enough to justify the $100 to $200 added and get an iPhone 15 or 16 instead. That said, the 16E can get some nice shots for a single-sensor phone, and can show a big leap to the last iPhone SE.
It will result in the required functions
Every time the price drops by $100, you’re sacrificing something. That’s how profit margin works. Choosing the best “entrance-level” iPhone in the current lineup is no longer easier than the past. It comes down to the features you need and what you want without it.
16E is a feature prioritization exercise. If you want everything up to date, add $200 to get your regular iPhone 16. If Apple Intelligence is not a priority, the iPhone 15 has it.
Ultimately, there is an amazing little sunlight between the iPhone 16 and 16e. It prioritizes Apple Intelligence by including A18 and 8GB of RAM. Mobile phones are sacrifices with affordable names, such as Magsafe, Dynamic Island, Camera Control, and Dual-Camera systems. If you can live without all of them, then you should definitely save $200.
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