I suppose the verdict will vary depending on who you ask, but the iPhone 16e is a disappointment to me. I thought we should get a budget phone with surprisingly good specifications. Instead, we got a mid-price 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 would always throw its shadow over this launch, but it seemed possible – probably even – that it would be one of the lovely positive shadows. The shade of a cactus that gives comfort to a parched cowboy in the desert, maybe.
Apple Intelligence is one of Cupertino’s most important business priorities at the moment so that hair to be a success. For strategic reasons, it is therefore imperative that any new iPhones support the platform, which requires high specifications of at least 8 GB of RAM and an A18 processor. These specifications act as a gift for customers: what a wonderfully motivating factor when it was time to replace the 3rd Gen iPhone SE, which has only 4 GB of RAM and an A15 chip. Thanks, Apple Intelligence!
As we know now, it didn’t work like that. Apple replaced the 3rd Gen iPhone SE with a phone equipped with these specifications, but it did not hold the price of $ 429 or anywhere near. Instead, it announced that the phone at Entry -Level would start at … $ 599. Now we can technically describe this as a price increase because the new handset has explicitly been labeled as a member of the iPhone 16 generation and to Being righteous has it far more in common with these phones than the deceased see.
It’s no mistake that Apple Intelligence occupies one of the biggest boxes.
Apple
So rather than going out to build an AI-Infunded iPhone SE, the Apple iPhone 16E built around the necessary Apple Intelligence Specifications and then shaved just enough features to hit a reasonable price point. As such, Apple has given up on the budget market completely, the opposite of what I meant when I recently wrote and optimistic about the power of accessibility.
It is also worth pointing out that the iPhone 16E, along with Apple Intelligence, has lots of compromises, the kind of compromises we would have expected and accepted from a device of $ 429, but which seems strangely sneaky when it starts at $ 599. Of course, is just a camera at the back. (Fun Fact! Apple’s first phone with two cameras on the back 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 the iPhone 16’s camera control, you get a notch instead of a dynamic island and there is a fewer core at 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 that are not related to the C1 modem).
What I get on is that this phone is somehow both more expensive and less impressive than I expected and I’m not happy. Apple Intelligence is fine, but it does not compensate for what the iPhone 16E is sacrificing. Maybe this will all make sense in a year’s time when the iPhone 17E comes out, 16E can get a price cut, and the range is mixed 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 another thing we can blame on AI.