iPhone 16e review: What’s your acceptable compromise?

I’ve been traveling through time this week. Reviewing the iPhone 16e feels at once like I’m visiting my younger self and also forced to live in olden times, especially since I’ve been using an iPhone 16 Pro for months. No matter the device you’re currently using, getting the iPhone 16e necessitates embracing change. Sure, that’s part and parcel of getting any new phone (and any transition in life), but when it comes to the iPhone 16e, not all change is good. And when you consider the $599 starting price, many of the omissions, ostensibly made in an effort to squeeze Apple Intelligence into the most affordable iPhone, become harder to swallow.

It isn’t surprising that Apple had to make compromises with the iPhone 16e to offer a more affordable entry-level device; what’s unexpected is the decision to not add a second camera or MagSafe. Just the fact that it insists on calling the iPhone 16e’s 48-megapixel camera a “2-in-1 camera system,” makes it clear the company knows two sensors is something people want.

Instead, the iPhone 16e comes with an A18 chip that powers Apple Intelligence, as well as the C1 modem, which is the first designed by the company. You’ll need to be extremely meticulous when poring over the list of similarities and differences between all the currently available iPhones, since there are many tiny factors to consider. What wireless charging speed or standard of Wi-Fi would you need? Do you care about cameras?

Sure, you can compare these specs yourself, but I’m here to tell you exactly what these differences mean in the real world. In my week or so with the iPhone 16e, I felt the drawbacks of the camera the most — I can live without MagSafe and the Dynamic Island. But what the iPhone 16e does offer is fast performance, a clean design, long battery life and, most crucially, cheaper access to Apple’s ecosystem.

Design and display

Let’s be real: Apple was never going to launch another iPhone SE in 2025 with a dated design and no AI support. The iPhone 16e, like its name suggests, is visually very similar to the rest of the iPhone 16 lineup. That is, until you turn the screen on. Once you can see the bezels and the notch up top, the device has a stronger resemblance to an iPhone 14. I was only temporarily distracted by the relatively thick borders, though. Anyone coming to the iPhone 16e from an older iPhone is unlikely to be bothered by this. More importantly, the display is protected by the Ceramic Shield material that was introduced on the iPhone 12. The previous iPhone SE did not have this same protection.

On its back, the iPhone 16e has a plain white (or black) matte surface with a single camera at the top left corner. It was hard to differentiate between the three iPhone 16 models I carried around for testing unless I looked at their rears — that’s how similar they are. In fact, their dimensions are almost identical, with less than a millimeter and 3 grams separating the iPhone 16e and the iPhone 16.

In real life, the only thing I really noticed was the weight. All these phones fit in my pockets and purses, and for once Apple’s cheapest phone doesn’t immediately appear drastically out of place. The iPhone 16e even has the Action Button that debuted on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which I’ll talk more about later.

Even the most discerning reviewer will have a hard time complaining about the iPhone 16e’s 6.1-inch display. Not only does it finally feel like something you can use in 2025 thanks to its size (compared to the 4.7-inch anachronism that is the iPhone SE’s screen), the fact that it’s an OLED panel means it’s brighter and more vibrant. All the better to watch Instagram and TikTok videos on, right?

It’s worth noting, though, that the iPhone 16 gets significantly brighter. Even the iPhone 15, which costs $100 more than the 16e, hits the same numbers as the iPhone 16, though only the latter can get down to 1 nit of brightness. I’ll also point out that many Android phones at this price offer faster refresh rates, which would make doomscrolling a lot smoother. The iPhone 16e is stuck at the same slow 60Hz as the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, while the Pro models get ProMotion speeds of up to 120Hz. Neither the iPhone 16 nor the 16e support Apple’s Always On Display, either.

One final difference on the iPhone 16e is that it’s the last remaining handset across Apple’s lineup to have a notch on its display. The iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 both have the company’s pill-shaped Dynamic Island, which has functional benefits as well as looking better. It lets you keep an eye on live activities, like a timer, sports event ticker, ongoing media playback and more. It’s funny how dependent I’ve become on this feature in the years since it was introduced. On the iPhone 16e, I was slightly confused and annoyed that I couldn’t access quick controls for Spotify in the notch, for example, or that voice recordings wouldn’t appear in the notch as animated waveforms.

Still, people considering the iPhone 16e are more likely to have never encountered Dynamic Island in their daily lives, so it won’t be a jarring change. It’s unlikely to factor into your consideration when buying a new phone, but this experience certainly shed light on my feelings for a recent feature I’d grown to take for granted.

Camera experience and performance

Since reviewing the iPhone 16e has felt like traveling back in time, I took it to the Met museum to photograph some ancient artifacts, with the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro as testing companions.

For the most part, the iPhone 16e and iPhone 16 delivered about the same level of detail, saturation and vibrancy. It was even hard to tell which of the two devices did better with my low-light shots of a beautiful chandelier suspended above a room from an 18th-century Parisian hotel. Although they have similar 48MP sensors, the iPhone 16’s is larger, which makes the closeness in performance here slightly surprising.

The same goes for selfies, which largely looked almost identical whether I shot them on the iPhone 16 or the 16e. Though both devices pack 12MP TrueDepth cameras up front, each packs a custom sensor and lens that integrate with the software and Apple Silicon. It’s unclear what exactly the differences lie, but suffice it to say that regardless, they took photos of comparable quality.

It’d be nice if I could say the iPhone 16e delivered basically the same camera experience as the iPhone 16 for $200 less. But the lack of a second lens on the rear is limiting in a few key ways.

First, there’s the fact that an ultrawide camera is just more versatile. Not having one presented challenges quite quickly, like when I entered a small room in the British art hall and wanted to capture the entirety of a pair of tall display cases containing dozens of ornate plates. With the iPhone 16e, I had to back up so much that I almost had to leave the space to get the two cases to fit in the frame. On the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, switching over to the 0.5x zoom option enabled me to take the shot without moving much at all.

You’ll also find an older version of Portrait mode on the iPhone 16e, and this is where the majority of my grievances with the camera lie. If you don’t care about pictures with blurred backgrounds and a faux depth of field effect, you’ll be a lot less bothered. But for those like me, it might be frustrating to learn that the iPhone 16e’s Portrait mode only works when it detects a face in the scene. This harkens back to the days of the iPhone 7 Plus, when Portrait Camera was first rolled out. Even then, Apple was able to apply the effect to non-human faces and objects like plants as the dual-camera system enabled the iPhone to calculate depth and add blur based on that.

Setting aside the annoyance I felt at not being able to use Portrait mode on food, animals or other subjects, the fact that the iPhone 16e is using data from one camera for this effect also impacts its results. This was noticeable in my portraits taken of a bust in the museum’s European Sculpture Court. With the pricier phone and its two cameras, Apple delivered more accurate blur, keeping the visage, hair and neck looking crisp. On the iPhone 16e, the sculpture’s neck and chest were blurry upon closer inspection.

I ended up playing a game of “Will it Portrait or Will it Not Portrait” in the museum, pointing the iPhone 16e at random faces in faded tapestries, softly outlined sculptures and oh so many busts. Frequently, even when a face was clearly visible to me, the iPhone 16e wouldn’t recognize that one was in frame and did not allow me to snap a Portrait.

Again, this is frustrating only if you take a lot of pictures in that mode. You might be able to live with a single camera if you don’t mind inferior Portraits compared to higher-end iPhones. However, bear in mind that the solo sensor setup also means you won’t get things like the latest generation of Photographic Styles, the company’s sophisticated color and tone filters which I raved about when I first tested it for my iPhone 16 Pro review. While that’s a more recent feature, it’s hard to ignore that anyone coming from an iPhone 11 or later already has a dual-camera setup and will have to give up an ultrawide camera and a faceless Portrait mode.

The iPhone 16e is also missing camera features like Spatial, Action and Cinematic modes, which are omissions that actually matter less at this price. Though I think having Macro support would be nice, I can understand its absence since it’s for more niche use cases than portraits.

It’s also reasonable that the iPhone 16e doesn’t have Camera Control, which is the dedicated side button that debuted on the rest of the iPhone 16 family last year. I’ve grown to appreciate it as a quick, tactile way to launch the camera app (though I don’t care as much for the touch-sensitive slider controls).

I thought I’d miss it when having to test the iPhone 16e, since I was going to be repeatedly opening its camera all day. But I managed to mostly substitute that by configuring the Action button to launch the camera. The Action button’s location near the top of the right edge isn’t ideal, since it’s more of a reach, but it’s better than having to pull out the iPhone, tap its screen and long press or swipe the camera shortcut.

The Action Button as a gateway to Apple Intelligence

You can also set the Action button to switch between audio profiles or focus modes, turn on the Flashlight or even start any app or series of actions you can customize via Apple’s Shortcuts. Crucially, you can set the button to launch Visual Intelligence, as well. This represents the first time Visual Intelligence has been accessible via something other than Camera Control since its introduction with the iPhone 16 series last year. The capability is also coming to iPhone 15 Pro models via an iOS 18.4 update. At the moment, without long-pressing a physical button, you can’t use your iPhone’s camera to look up things around you.

When I set the iPhone 16e’s Action button to launch Visual Intelligence, I got basically the same experience as I did on the iPhone 16 Pro. I pointed it at nearby plants and the very fashionable and hip sneakers I had on. Though Siri (with ChatGPT’s help) did not correctly identify the brand of my shoes, it did suggest some similar styles. Google’s image search, which is the other of the two built-in options to get answers from your iPhone’s camera, delivered slightly more helpful results for the wooden table I was looking at and where I could buy something similar.

Apple Intelligence

Visual Intelligence is just one part of the entire Apple Intelligence package, which permeates the iPhone 16 lineup. I won’t dwell too long on the individual features here, since we’ve already covered them fairly extensively since the company started rolling them out last year. I will just say that I was able to fairly smoothly use Image Playground to create a background for an event I was coordinating in Apple Invites, get my haphazardly written notes proofread and summarize a Wikipedia entry on Zero Day TV series via Writing Tools. The iPhone 16e is a capable Apple Intelligence machine, if AI is your thing.

Performance, the Apple C1 modem and battery life

All of that is powered by the A18 chip sitting inside the iPhone 16e, and the fact that it’s in a phone that doesn’t cost $700 to start is surprising. It may have one less GPU core than the iPhone 16, but that didn’t hinder my escape from the hordes of ghouls chasing me down in Vampire Survivor. That’s a fairly simple game to run, computationally speaking, and I’ve yet to really push the iPhone 16e with more demanding options. But if you’re looking for a phone that will handle titles like Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile or League of Legends: Wild Rift without hiccups, you’ll have to spend hundreds more.

In daily use, the iPhone 16e was smooth and zippy, and the only slowdowns I encountered were in situations that also challenged powerhouses like the iPhone 16 Pro. That included waiting for Apple Intelligence to make a Genmoji of a “video shoot,” for example, or for Image Playground to return results based on the same prompt. Sometimes Cleanup in the Photos app would not respond despite my repeated drawing on things I wanted to erase from an image, but that feels more like an Apple Intelligence issue than a slow processor. I noticed the slightest delay compared to the iPhone 16 when waiting for Night mode to complete capturing a photo in low light, with the iPhone 16e taking a second or so longer.

With its bigger battery and new C1 modem, the iPhone 16e is supposed to last a few hours longer than the iPhone 16 when playing video. Though I was unable to run a full-on battery test, in general the iPhone 16e had no problem lasting well longer than 24 hours. I pulled it off the charger on Sunday at about 10am and on Tuesday morning I still had 60 percent left after a day of camera testing. Granted, this is still a very new device that I’ve been using as a secondary phone, so runtimes will likely drop a bit with greater use. But compared to my experience with a brand new review unit of the iPhone 16 Pro, the iPhone 16e certainly gave me far less battery anxiety.

As for that custom modem, it’s hard to tell after just one week of use whether people will run into any significant issues or interference. But during my time with the iPhone 16e on an AT&T eSIM, I’ve found little problems with the network. I’m a T-Mobile user, and often lose signal when I’m at places like underground train stations or Moynihan Train Hall in Penn Station. When I couldn’t send a message on my iPhone 16 Pro with T-Mobile, I was able to connect over AT&T with the iPhone 16e. This has less to do with Apple’s hardware and more to do with each carrier’s coverage, of course.

The same goes for the modem’s general performance — I consistently saw the iPhone 16e (with C1) significantly outperform my iPhone 16 Pro on Speedtest and Fast.com tests, but much of that has to do with individual network speeds. It also depends on whether you’re using a phone that supports ultrawideband 5G, which would see huge boosts to performance. The C1 modem doesn’t support that, so if you’ve been relying on mmWave 5G (mostly via Verizon in the US), you’ll have to sacrifice it if you buy the iPhone 16e.

How does the iPhone 16e compare to the iPhone 16 and the iPhone SE?

There are numerous other little differences between the iPhone 16e and the iPhone 16, and I’ll list some of the more significant ones here. Probably the most noteworthy is that it doesn’t support Apple’s MagSafe, which would let it magnetically attach to stands, grips and other accessories. As someone who plops her iPhone on a MagSafe charging stand only when there is no other USB cable available, the lack of MagSafe didn’t actually meaningfully impact my experience. But if you rely on such an accessory, the iPhone 16e isn’t for you.

While you could add MagSafe compatibility to the 16e with cases or adapters, you’ll still be stuck with pokey, last-generation 7.5W wireless charging speeds (per the Qi standard). Other iPhones support faster speeds — the iPhone 15 goes up to 15W while the iPhone 16 can hit 25W.

If we’re going to get down to the nitty gritty, I should also point out that the iPhone 16e supports Wi-Fi 6, not Wi-Fi 7 like the iPhone 16. The iPhone 16e is also lacking compatibility with the Thread smart home networking standard and while its camera does offer optical image stabilization, it’s not the “Sensor-shift” OIS that the iPhone 16 (and the iPhone 15) provide. Finally, and this is far from the last omission from the iPhone 16e, the device doesn’t support ultra-wideband, meaning if you’re locating your devices via Find My, you will rely on Bluetooth and won’t get the more precise tracking on AirTags and phones that have UWB.

All this spec-sheet scrutiny is getting at is that as an investment, the iPhone 16e is likely to get outdated again sooner than the iPhone 16. Still, it’s a nice upgrade from the iPhone SE (2022), thanks to the addition of USB-C charging, a sharper camera, an actual zoom option, a beefier processor, satellite communications for emergencies and a bigger, better screen. Regardless of how you (or I) feel about Apple Intelligence, there’s no denying that its inclusion makes for a phone that’s more modern, too. Also, Genmoji is just fun.

Considering how far behind the iPhone SE was compared to the iPhone 13, the fact that the iPhone 16e is so close to the rest of the iPhone 16 portfolio is impressive. I guess I would have preferred a cheaper entry-level iPhone with a few other compromises, rather than one that’s so similar (in both specs and price) to the next version up.

And as much as I’d like to compare the iPhone 16e to its peers on the Android side of the smartphone market, I have to acknowledge that most people considering an iPhone are likely already happily stuck in the Apple walled garden. They probably don’t want an Android phone, no matter how many cameras it has, how quickly its screen refreshes or how fast it can charge. When you can be a blue bubble texter, who cares about how much smoother a game plays or how rapidly Instagram posts zoom past my eyes, right? (Sarcasm, in case it wasn’t obvious.) If you did want to learn more though, check out our post on how the iPhone 16e compares to the competition.

Wrap-up

It’s easy for me to get caught up in outrage, ranting at Apple’s decisions to exclude MagSafe or raise prices. But for people who don’t use magnetic accessories or who finance their smartphones over a two-year period, those might be non-issues. What bothered me most as I was reviewing the iPhone 16e wasn’t its slow wireless charging speed or the notch atop the display — it was ultimately the solo camera sensor. Anyone coming from the iPhone 11 and up will likely miss the ultrawide option, even if the iPhone 16e’s 48MP sensor is a genuine improvement.

Whether the iPhone 16e is a good purchase for you ultimately depends on how much those limitations bother you. If you don’t care about MagSafe, taking photos or the principle that you could save hundreds of dollars on a better Android phone, the iPhone 16e makes sense.

In fact, for people who want to buy their first iPhone or someone who’s less tech-enthusiastic, the iPhone 16e is a capable, good-looking handset. Those who, like me, can’t do without a second camera, can consider the iPhone 15, which costs just $100 more. You won’t get Apple Intelligence or the Action button, but I doubt many will miss those features.

Ultimately, though, unless you really can’t fork over the $200 difference (which works out to a few dollars a month over two years), the iPhone 16 is a better buy for most people.