The iPhone 16e disappoints me, and it’s all Apple Intelligence’s fault

I suppose the verdict will vary depending on who you ask, but the iPhone 16e is a disappointment to me. I thought we were going to get a budget phone with surprisingly good specs. Instead, we got a mid-priced phone with some surprisingly bad features. And it’s all Apple Intelligence’s fault.

But things could have been so different. Apple’s AI platform was always going to cast its shadow over this launch, but it seemed possible—likely, even—that it would be one of those nice positive shadows. The shadow of a cactus giving solace to a parched cowboy in the desert, perhaps.

Apple Intelligence is one of Cupertino’s key business priorities at the moment, so it has to be a success. For strategic reasons, therefore, it’s imperative that any new iPhones support the platform, which requires high specs of at least 8GB of RAM and an A18 processor. Those specs seem like a godsend for customers: What a wonderful motivating factor when it came time to replace the 3rd-gen iPhone SE, which has just 4GB of RAM and an A15 chip. Thank you, Apple Intelligence!

As we now know, it didn’t work out like that. Apple did replace the 3rd-gen iPhone SE with a phone equipped with those specs, but it didn’t keep the price at $429 or anywhere near. It announced instead that the entry-level phone would start at… $599. Now, technically we can’t describe this as a price hike, because the new handset has been explicitly branded as a member of the iPhone 16 generation, and to be fair, it has far more in common with those phones than the departed SE.

So, rather than set out to build an AI-infused iPhone SE, Apple built the iPhone 16e around the necessary Apple Intelligence specs and then shaved off just enough features to hit a reasonable price point. As such, Apple has given up on the budget market entirely, the exact opposite of what I meant when I wrote recently, and optimistically, about the power of accessibility.

It’s also worth pointing out that, along with Apple Intelligence, the iPhone 16e has plenty of compromises, the sort of compromises we would have expected and accepted from a $429 device, but which seem oddly stingy when it starts at $599. There’s just one camera on the rear, of course. (Fun fact! Apple’s first phone with two cameras on the rear was the iPhone 7 Plus in 2016. It added a third to the 11 Pro in 2019. But sure, why expect a $599 iPhone in 2025 to have more than one camera?)

You also miss out on the iPhone 16’s Camera Control, you get a notch instead of a Dynamic Island, and there’s one fewer core on the GPU. All of these were expected and even understandable. But Apple has also decided not to include MagSafe, which is a big disappointing surprise (and, Apple insists, unrelated to the C1 modem).

What I’m getting at is that this phone is somehow both more expensive and less impressive than I was expecting, and I’m not happy. Apple Intelligence is fine, but it doesn’t make up for what the iPhone 16e sacrifices. Maybe this will all make sense in a year’s time, when the iPhone 17e comes out, the 16e can get a price cut, and the range shuffles back to some kind of normality. Maybe I was naively optimistic not to realize that the inevitable spec bump would be accompanied by an inevitable price jump. And maybe, just maybe, this is yet another thing we can blame on AI.