iPhone 16e review: The most expensive cheap iPhone yet

The iPhone 16e rethinks—and prices up—the basic iPhone.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's not a bad phone by any means. Just cost engineered segmentation for segmentation's sake.

I think they gave up on iphones changing much, which explains the price raise and the software features being constrained. It's an artificial segmentation because they don't expect leaps on the high end. So folds aren't coming.

Me, I'm more upset at the button replacing the slider and the lack of magsafe. The first is upsetting to me personally as a premium feature that's been removed purely for cost savings. Why not a button AND a privacy slider, eh? At least on the PROs? Second, no magsafe means that we can't standardize on magsafe phone holders in the cars or bedside.

Their product lineups are all heavily engineered now with odd feature matrices that need charts. Pencils, magsafe (two versions!), earbuds (two brands!), oddly overengineered ipad cases multiple for no reason, etc.

WIth Apple it's really the cynicism, not the quality or even necessarily the value, that starts to get depressing.

Something like the XS vs. XR at least felt like a good-faith attempt to deliver the core features with some compromises to get the price down. Less RAM; LCD rather than OLED, less complex camera assembly. OK, fine.

16e feels much more like a 16 that has been carefully engineered to avoid potential 16 customers buying it; while trying to shove more users into the scope of whatever Apple's pet 'AI' strategy is and onto larger screens that presumably drive more content revenue than the smaller ones do. Camera seems like a perfectly sensible cut; but messing with peripheral/charger compatibility and rationing physical controls is some S-tier 'because we can' stuff.

It's a long way from the days of the 5c vs. 5s; where the budget model actually looked like it was given a degree of independence to cheerfully be its own thing, in a callback to the old polycarbonate iBook/metal PowerBook arrangement; rather than being a product that exists because there's a SKU-shaped hole too big to ignore but not high-margin enough to actually like.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I still don't understand who should buy this.

If you have an older iPhone, there's little here to entice you to upgrade, unless you have an SE or an iPhone XR or older.

If you are an Android user, there's little here to tempt you to switch platforms,. This is especially true if you are outside the US; the Samsung Galaxy S24 is 100 Euro cheaper than this in Europe, for instance (not the FE, the regular S24, officially on Samsung's website), while the Pixel 8 (not 8a) is the same price. If you are in the US, you're probably already an iOS user or not in the market for a phone this expensive.

Even if you did decide to buy a new-to-you iPhone (maybe you do have a very old iPhone, or your phone just broke, or you did decide to switch to iOS just now), the older iPhones are fierce competition. For instance, the 13 Pro can be had, brand new, for less than this, and is a better phone (ultra-wide and pro cameras, MagSafe, 120 Hz display) unless you strongly care about having the latest chipset or USB-C. Even though Apple isn't reconverting them into SE models, they're still attractive. And there's a whole used/refurbished market too, of course, if you don't care about the latest, greatest and shiniest.

So, this is for... the Goldilocks buyer who absolutely wants a new iPhone now and absolutely won't settle for an older chip and Lightning but absolutely won't spend more for the regular 16?

I'm sure Apple has done its homework, but it's hard not to see this as either a decoy model to make the 16 more attractive and/or as a way to screw over those that don't know better (perhaps walking into a carrier store and just getting the cheapest iPhone they offer with no further consideration, as the review suggests).

I'm not sure if Apple is going to be happy about this; but I suspect that these will be a bit of a hit with corporate IT.

IT procurement doesn't always give you much room to rely on still-in-stock older models(depending on how many you need and how much consistency your org requires: more leeway for the older models that Apple more or less officially keeps around as the cheap seats; less leeway for stuff that is basically not being sold but is still on some shelves if you call around); and iOS offers pretty solid supported lifetimes and an MDM experience that is less...eccentric...than Android(especially if you've got Knox upsell bits floating around).

IT is also under constraints related to standardization; so the somewhat polarizing(and sometimes troublesome for users with poorer vision, limited coordination, or sausage fingers) small phones were never a uniformly viable standard-issue option; but full-fat 16s are...kind of a lot...for something that is basically there to be a blackberry and run an MFA authentication app or two.

The users who treat company phones as free video cameras are going to be sad; but if I put on my shoving-beige-boxes-at-users-so-they-can-get-to-work hat on the iphone 16 just got a price cut.