iPhone 16e review: A study in contrasts

The iPhone SE is gone and its replacement is here. Or is it? Apple’s newest cheapest smartphone isn’t actually all that cheap and differs from the SE in some major ways. More of a replacement for the iPhone 14, then? Maybe. Kind of. It’s complicated.

I spent a week with the iPhone 16e, putting the device through our exhaustive testing process and weighing its place in the Apple range and your life. Is this the budget (ish) smartphone for you? Let’s find out.

Design and build quality: A smart balance

This is a slim, lightweight, good-looking phone with a classic design that has stood the test of time. It feels great in the hand, and the camera module on the rear is far less obtrusive than those on costlier iPhones, so it doesn’t wobble so much when placed on a flat surface.

If you’re coming from the 3rd-gen iPhone SE the design will feel like a massive step forward: gone is the SE’s Home button, cramped screen, and rounded sides, replaced by a handsome all-screen design with squared-off edges. For those more accustomed to the current iPhone range, however, it will feel like the opposite. The 16e may have been branded to tie in with the late-2024 iPhones but it follows the design cues of two generations earlier.

There are a few differences, but in most respects, you’re looking at the externals of an iPhone 14. It has the same aluminum frame and glass back (without the color infusion added to the iPhone 15), the same 6.1-inch 2532×1170 screen with the same notch, and the same physical dimensions… although it weighs fractionally less than the 14, presumably because of having one camera fewer. (That’s difference number one, which I’ll come back to.)

Another important difference between the 16e and the iPhone 14 and 3rd-gen SE is the inclusion of an Action button in place of the mute switch on the lefthand edge. This can still be used as a mute switch–in fact, that’s what I use it for on my 16 Plus–but you can instead reprogram it to open the Camera app, turn on a Focus mode or the Flashlight, or various other handy options.

That list of actions, by the way, now includes one new option: Visual Intelligence, which on the late-2024 iPhones is triggered using the Camera Control. This is because the iPhone 16e does not feature the Camera Control. I’m not a huge fan of the Camera Control on my 16 Plus, which feels unnecessary (since you can easily swipe to the camera from the lock screen) and which I sometimes press by accident with the fourth finger of my left hand when holding the device in portrait mode. So as far as I’m concerned this is a minor loss. The only downside is that Visual Intelligence has shifted to the Action button, and you’ll find silent mode in the Control Center.

A final cosmetic difference from the iPhone 14 is the range of colors. The iPhone 14 came in six widely varied colors: mild greyish blue, light purple, yellow, black, white, and (Product) Red’s glorious unabashed scarlet. The iPhone 16 has black, white, ultramarine, teal, and an excellent pink. Even the SE had midnight, starlight, and red. But the 16e comes in just white or black. It’s not a lot of choice or visual interest and feels like a deliberate strategy to encourage upselling.

Mind you, the black model I tested is sharp. The rear is super-matt, to the extent that it’s difficult to photograph (my colleague on Macwelt makes the same complaint about the white finish), and I love the contrast between this and the shiny Apple logo in the center. Besides, if monotone finishes strike you as boring, you can always buy a brightly colored case to jazz the phone up a little. I got Apple’s Winter Blue silicone case and like it a lot.

Features: Surprising inclusions, strange omissions

Whereas the physical design is a set of sensible compromises, walking a steady middle path between the outdated look of the iPhone 14 and the unattainable upgrades of the iPhones 15 and 16, the 16e’s features list is more of a rollercoaster ride. It verges wildly from one extreme to another. The device misses out on some truly basic features that budget smartphone buyers have every right to expect, yet manages to squeeze in others that I’d categorise as luxuries.

The first incongruously generous inclusion (and really the defining element of the entire product) is Apple Intelligence, the company’s AI platform and vision of the future. Apple Intelligence is a demanding thing to run, requiring as a minimum an A18 processor and 8GB of RAM, and it would be unrealistic at this stage to fit those things into a budget iPhone. Instead of conceding defeat and leaving the feature out of the 16e (as it did with the 11th-gen iPad), Apple decided not to have a true budget iPhone anymore. That’s why I’m reviewing a $599 phone instead of a $429 one.

Was this drastic step worth it? Yes and no. Apple Intelligence is still at an early stage in its development, with features gradually rolling out as they’re finished… or in some cases, before they’re finished. It doesn’t feel very polished right now, but this probably won’t be representative of your experience across the life of the phone; Apple is very committed to AI right now and we can expect future iOS updates to feature a lot of improvements in this area. It’s a good thing that 16e owners will get to be a part of that.

There are far too many components of Apple Intelligence to cover them all here, but here are a few thoughts from my time with the iPhone 16e:

• Visual Intelligence: For certain things, this is fun and useful–it can identify cars, dogs, and plants quickly and accurately. But can be flaky, misunderstanding street signs and failing to recognize what was obviously a London phone number on a storefront with only the initial zero cropped out.
• Genmoji: Hit and miss. Lots of duff results, like a request for a “cat on a bus” showing the cat superimposed over the bus rather than riding the bus; my “tiger eating grapes” had a bunch of normal grapes in one hand and random objects (a strawberry; an iced gem) in the other. You have to filter out the dross. And any time you mention a person (I thought “Edgar Allen Poe eating ice cream” would be funny) it insists you instead choose someone from your Photos folders. I couldn’t see an obvious way around this.
• Web page summaries: Mostly excellent on factual/informative pages, although it struggled badly with opinion pieces that follow an argument. To its credit, the feature admitted this weakness when I selected an article of that type.
• Clean Up: Inconsistent. I had trouble removing a car from a scene, which left behind a distorted shadow.
• Writing Tools: Good for correcting typos and grammar errors but the stylistic amendments can be painful. When told to rewrite something “like a professional document” it simply replaced every normal word with a longer synonym, like someone who’s just taken a vocabulary course.
• Notification summaries: Unreliable, as we all know.

Apple Intelligence is technologically quite impressive but nevertheless goes wrong fairly often and isn’t the most intuitive to use: more of a curiosity or proof of concept than a serious set of tools, really. It will get better, but right now it’s of limited value. And that’s leaving aside the ethical issues (using up water, taking people’s jobs) that AI poses more generally.

Still, the inclusion of Apple Intelligence led to the second act of generosity: an exceptionally (some would say unnecessarily) impressive set of tech specs. Having that chip and RAM combo will be useful for things other than AI; they’ll ensure the 16e is future-proofed to run demanding apps for a long time to come, for one thing. And it also means it has some serious processing power, which I’ll explore in a later section.

We’ve covered the positives, but now we need to mention the negatives, and there are two almost criminal gaps on the feature list. First, the iPhone 16e doesn’t support MagSafe, even though the iPhone 14 did (as did the 12 and 13 before it). This, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is a huge disappointment.

Before the launch of the iPhone 12, wireless charging felt like the poor cousin of its wired equivalent: slower, less power-efficient, and just as much of a hassle because you had to make sure the phone was in the sweet spot on the charging puck, and a single accidental nudge could result in an uncharged device. MagSafe, which pulls the phone into the sweet spot and holds it there securely, changed all that. The only time I use wired charging with my iPhone 16 Plus is when I desperately need to top up the battery as quickly as possible before going out.

The iPhone 16e, by contrast, feels like a step back to 2020, and wireless charging is once again a tiresome worry. At least you get an onscreen graphic and haptic vibration to tell you charging has begun–but it isn’t as easy, and doesn’t offer the same speeds, as charging with all the other MagSafe-compatible iPhones. Which is to say, every single other model.

The second disappointing negative is the fact that the 16e also has only one rear camera lens. This carries implications for Portrait Mode, zoom, and more, which I’ll discuss in the next section.

Camera performance: Mostly good, but with disappointing limitations

Whereas the iPhone 16 Pro has three cameras on the rear and the iPhone 16 has two, the 16e has just one. If that makes it sound like it will be a third as good at photography as the Pro model, don’t worry; the good news is that not all lenses are created equal, and the additional lenses on the other models are somewhat less important than the one on the 16e. Nevertheless, this is a serious disadvantage for the new phone.

The 16 Pro’s third lens is the telephoto. The fact that the 16e doesn’t get it means (like the 16) it doesn’t have optical zoom in the strict technical sense, although Apple claims a 2x zoom by cropping into the center of high-resolution shots taken using the main lens. Given that the 16e has the same whopping 48MP wide-angle camera as the other iPhone 16 phones, 2x shots have plenty of detail—it is just as good as a non-zoomed shot taken using the iPhone 14’s perfectly decent 12MP camera–so that’s fair enough. But zoom in any more (up to 5x, for example, which the Pro can achieve with no issues) and images will start to lose detail and show pixellation.

A bigger loss for me is the ultra-wide secondary lens. As the name suggests, this means you miss out on the handy 0.5x anti-zoom option for wider-angle shots, an important tool when photographing landscapes. But the fact that the 16e doesn’t have two lenses means you also can’t take macro shots or “true” Portrait photos, and my suspicion is that the average iPhone owner takes more photos of people than landscapes.

There is still a Portrait option in the 16e’s Camera app, of course, but this is all done via software trickery rather than by comparing depth data from two lenses. This trickery relies on iOS knowing what it’s looking at, so it only works on people. I tried taking Portrait shots of mailboxes, dogs, and cats, and in every case, it said “No person detected” and refused to play ball.

Even if you do snap a human model, the bokeh effect won’t be as good as the other iPhone 16 phones. I noticed some softness around the edges, with parts of my model’s clothing and hair blending erroneously in with the background. It’s not terrible by any means but it is noticeably worse than the real thing.

In other respects, however, the 16’s camera performance is excellent, and that’s what I mean by the relative importance of the lenses. My guess is that for 90 percent of iPhone photography, the limitations listed above won’t be a factor. For those 90 percent of shots, detail was excellent, color reproduction was vibrant and faithful, and the results were great.

The 16e even did well in difficult lighting thanks to the inclusion of Smart HDR 5, the latest iteration of a feature that takes multiple exposures and blends elements of each into the finished shot so that bright light in one part of the frame doesn’t result in loss of detail in another darker part. This wasn’t perfect, but I found that I could shoot a shadowed building with a bright sun directly behind, genuinely making the worst compositional decisions on purpose, and still clearly discern the brickwork. No small feat.

Performance: Is there such a thing as too fast?

That last section was critical, but we’re back on solid ground here. With an A18 processor and 8GB of RAM, the iPhone 16e is an insanely overpowered phone for the money, and this was reflected in speed testing.

In terms of general processing, this is essentially the same as the iPhone 16, and it’s about as powerful as iPhones get right now. Across the CPU tests in Geekbench 5 and 6, and the various Neural Engine tests in Geekbench AI, there was nothing to choose between the 16e and even the 16 Pro, despite the latter featuring an A18 Pro. This is an absolute powerhouse.

Graphically it’s a different story because the 16e has just a four-core GPU, compared to the 16’s five cores and the 16 Pro’s six. In Geekbench 6’s GPU test, the 16e was around 27 percent behind the 16 Pro, and we saw consistently lower frame rates across all the graphics tests in 3DMark. In these areas, the 16e performed closer to the iPhone 15 Pro.

In real-world use, however, the 16e was fast and slick, performing at the highest level across every app I used. But in truth, I’d expect an iPhone with a considerably weaker set of specs to perform the same way. It’s tempting to say that this is overkill, although as mentioned earlier, the 16e’s chip and RAM make it superbly future-proofed.

C1 modem: A questionable upgrade

This is the final surprising inclusion I’m going to talk about in this article. The 16e features Apple’s new in-house C1 cellular modem, which promises improvements to battery performance, and it gets at least six and likely 18 months before any flagship iPhone model.

On the surface that’s a remarkably generous decision, and we’d never expect a new processor, say, to first appear this low down in the range. But after testing we would argue that Apple isn’t being generous at all and that the 16e is instead being used as a testbed for a risky new component with cons as well as pros.

Regardless of its effect on battery life, which I’ll discuss in the next section, the C1’s main job is to deliver cellular connectivity, and it simply doesn’t do this as well as the Qualcomm Snapdragon X71M modem in the iPhone 16. My colleague Jason Cross ran speed tests across multiple locations and concluded that the C1 delivers roughly the same upload speed as the X71M but about half the download speed.

Early tests do suggest that the C1 does draw less power, perhaps 25 percent less. But this is unlikely to have a huge effect on battery life.

Battery performance: Good, but not that good

Boasting a larger-capacity battery than either the iPhone 16 or 16 Pro, plus the power-conserving capabilities of the C1 modem, the iPhone 16e has all the makings of a battery star. Sure enough, Apple estimates up to 26 hours of video playback, well ahead of the 16’s 22 hours and only slightly behind the 16 Pro’s 27.

In practice, this aspect of the 16e’s performance was mildly disappointing. In the battery component of Geekbench 4 (thanks again to Jason Cross for running these tests) the 16e managed 13 hours and 38 minutes, lower than any other 16-series iPhone. That’s also lower than some other reviewers have reported, so Jason checked everything and repeated the test, with no improvement.

This isn’t bad, to be clear. It’s better than any pre-16 iPhone, including the much larger 15 Pro Max, and you can expect far longer life in normal use; the battery test is deliberately very demanding to highlight differences in performance. While I was testing the 16e it would generally end the day with 30 to 50 percent of battery power remaining, the only exception being a day of ludicrously intense benchmarking which it still survived with 11 percent left. Battery life is very good… just not quite as good as we expected.

Price: A nasty shock

The iPhone 16e starts at $599, in yet another surprise. We were expecting this phone to replace the iPhone SE, which started at $429, but Apple went in a different direction and no longer offers a budget smartphone.

To be fair, there was no way a phone with these specs was going to be feasible at $429 (or $479 for the SE with the same 128GB of storage), and it isn’t the 16e’s fault that Apple has given up on what I think is an important market. The question is not whether the 16e should cost $479, because it clearly shouldn’t, but whether it’s worth $599. Here’s how much the three configurations will cost:

• iPhone 16e (128GB): $599/£599
• iPhone 16e (256GB): $699/£699
• iPhone 16e (512GB): $899/£899

Should you buy an iPhone 16e?

The iPhone 16e is such a strange phone. In many ways it’s astonishingly good, delivering superb speed, good battery life, the latest Apple Intelligence features, and an attractive design at an affordable price. And then you bump into the lack of MagSafe and the single rear camera lens. The only word for it is lopsided, and I’m struggling to see who the iPhone 16e is for.

You’re forced to pay for a state-of-the-art processor which is overkill for most people and is only there for Apple Intelligence–an AI system that is flawed and very much a work in progress. Do most phone buyers even care about AI? I’m not sure, although its importance will increase so perhaps it’s good to be prepared.

I’m quite shocked that Apple thinks it can get away with a single-lens camera setup in the year 2025, given that it’s been selling dual-lens iPhones since 2016 and triple-lensers since 2019. Perhaps it’s lucky for the 16e that we’ve reached a point in smartphone camera development where even the worst cameras are still good enough for most people’s needs most of the time. Still, it’s worth saying that you could easily get a much better camera on a cheaper and older refurbished iPhone. You wouldn’t get Apple Intelligence, but at least you’ll get MagSafe.

Is the iPhone 16e worth $599? Yes, it probably is. If you weigh up the things that Apple included against the things it didn’t, I guess it adds up to something around that price. It’s just that the various elements don’t mesh together in a way that makes sense. It would be like going to the supermarket and buying the cheapest wine and the most expensive steak. You’d end up paying a fair price, but you probably wouldn’t enjoy the pairing.

So who is this phone for? Who are these people who need Apple Intelligence but are happy to accept a single-lens camera? I don’t know, but I can’t imagine there are many of them. In fact the iPhone 16e doesn’t feel like it was designed with anyone in mind–just the strategic imperatives of an AI-obsessed corporation. This is a product that was designed with the wrong motives and, to be honest, it shows.