iPhone 16e review: the no-frills iPhone ideal for first time users

If you’re Apple, how do you make a more affordable iPhone to attract new users, without devaluing or cannibalizing sales of your existing lineup? For many years, this was the iPhone SE lineup — which offered a paired back experience for half the price of the Pro — but this year sees the launch of the iPhone 16e and a change of strategy.

It’s easy to think of the iPhone 16e as a replacement for the iPhone SE, but to do so would be to miss the reason for its existence. It’s not the iPhone SE 2025, rather it’s designed to offer the latest iPhone and just the essentials at a lower price that’s accessible to more people.

It achieves this in a surprisingly good way, although it has a lot of nuances and caveats that you should be aware of. In a few key ways, it’s also better than other iPhones, and it also has an iPhone-exclusive feature for good measure. Here’s why the iPhone 16e is great, but only if you’re a first-time iPhone user.

Apple iPhone 16e: Specs

Apple iPhone 16e: Design

If you’ve used any of Apple’s latest smartphones, the iPhone 16e will be instantly familiar. It follows the same design language as other iPhones, but while it features the same notch as others, it doesn’t have the Dynamic Island feature that its siblings do.

At 167 grams, it’s refreshingly light, even compared to the iPhone 16 which weighs 170 grams. I’m a daily user of the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16e is 0.5mm thinner and 32 grams lighter, and this makes a big difference. We’ve all experienced an iPhone dropping on our faces while lying in bed, and the iPhone 16e hurts considerably less than other iPhones.

Flip the iPhone 16e over and you get a glass back in two color choices, both of which are fairly uninspired, as my colleague Andy Boxall wrote. At the top of the back, you’ll find the single camera; several weeks in, it still looks strange to me having been used to two or three camera iPhones for the past decade.

To the left is the pair of volume keys as well as the Action Button. Yes, I think it’s safe to say that the volume switch is dead, and the Action Button is here to stay. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone 16e doesn’t have the camera control slider/button found on the iPhone 16 Pro series, so mine is set to quickly launch the camera. A point of note is that using the iPhone 16e made me appreciate the camera control on my iPhone 16 Pro more than I had previously, at least as a way to quickly launch the camera.

To the bottom of the iPhone 16e is the USB-C port, the microphones and the loudspeaker. There’s also antenna bands at several points along the aluminum frame, and the camera bump is one of the slimmest in recent memories.

The iPhone 16e is a great blend of new and old. Features like the Action Button keep its design in step with Apple’s current generation of iPhones, but it lacks the flourishes like multiple cameras, the Dynamic Island or the camera control feature found on its siblings. If you’ve used any recent iPhone, the iPhone 16e will feel instantly familiar.

Apple iPhone 16e: That 60Hz Display

The iPhone 16e features a 6.1-inch OLED display that’s essentially the same size one as found on the regular iPhone 16.

The display is mostly a joy to use, and offers vibrant colors, rich contrast and deep blacks even in direct sunlight. It features 1,200 nits peak brightness, which is significantly lower than the 2000 nits featured on the rest of the iPhone 16 series.

The display itself is only 60Hz, and while the animations in iOS do smooth over some of the jarring, it’s noticeably less smooth than the iPhone 16 Pro. It’s not something that bothers you all the time, but it’s something that does bother you when you notice it. This is less likely to be a problem if you’re upgrading to the iPhone 16e from a smaller iPhone, but it may feel jarring at first.

Refresh rate aside, the iPhone 16e feels like a solid iPhone display. Yes, it’s not as bright as others, but it’s still high-quality with great color reproduction like any other iPhone. It’s a joy to use, iOS makes colors pop and Ceramic Shield glass should provide a fair degree of protection.

Apple iPhone 16e: Hardware and Performance

One of the benefits of picking the iPhone 16e is the focus on current-generation performance. It is powered by the same Apple A18 SoC used in the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus — which is built using TSMC’s 3nm process — and delivers excellent performance even under heavy loads.

There’s also 8GB of RAM — the minimum needed for Apple Intelligence — and between 128GB and 512GB of storage. It’s unsurprising that the storage starts at 128GB, but I’ve already used more than half and that’s just with apps and syncing my Photos Library.

For the most part, the iPhone 16 is snappy and performant, although there are small glitches and bugs throughout the experience. There also seems to be some aggressive background task management, with features like FaceID noticeably slower to respond than on the iPhone 16 Pro. It’s noticeably slower if you’re coming from another iPhone, but it’s fast enough nonetheless.

To properly test the iPhone 16e, we put it through two benchmarks to test the CPU and GPU performance. They revealed that while it’s still an A18 processor inside the iPhone 16e, it is noticeably less performant than the “same” processor inside the regular iPhone 16.

The iPhone 16e GeekBench 6 results above were the best across five different tests, and reinforce that this isn’t the fastest iPhone, but it’s designed for longevity and battery life.

The other test we run is 3DMark Solar Bay, a cross-platform benchmark for devices that support hardware-based ray tracing, which is one of the perks of the latest A18 chip inside the iPhone 16e. Solar Bay is designed to test the overall graphics performance of a phone, and much like the performance, the iPhone 16e delivers an experience that’s limited compared to the rest of its siblings.

The Apple C1 modem

One of the downsides to the extra power and features in the rest of the lineup is the effect on battery life, which is where this phone excels. The iPhone 16e offers the best battery life on an iPhone and this is due to a combination of a larger battery capacity, and the new Apple C1 modem.

The iPhone 16e is unique as it’s the first iPhone to use Apple’s C1 modem — which it developed in-house — while the rest of the iPhone 16 series uses a Qualcomm modem. The road to this point was full of roadblocks and delays, and Apple Silicon revolutionized processors for computing thanks to vastly superior performance and efficiency, and Apple is hoping the same will apply to the C1 modem in the iPhone.

I’ve tested it extensively alongside the iPhone 16 Pro on the same network while traveling and there has been no difference in performance between the two. Signal strength does seem to be a little lower on the iPhone 16e than the iPhone 16 Pro, but in terms of actual numbers, there’s little to separate them.

The first generation of the iPhone 16e doesn’t support mmWave so there are times when the iPhone 16 Pro series will reach higher peak speeds, but there’s little actual difference in real-world performance. There is one key benefit that makes all the difference.

Apple iPhone 16e: Battery and Charging

Apple’s focus on the essential features — and likely a desire to not make the iPhone 16e drastically lighter or thinner than the rest of the iPhone 16 lineup — meant the iPhone 16e has a bigger battery than even the iPhone 16 Pro. Coupled with the efficiencies from the iPhone 16e modem, this means the iPhone 16e offers incredible multi-day battery life that’s truly all-day and more.

I’ve long been a fan of Apple’s smaller non-Pro and non-Plus phones, but the smaller batteries mean that you often have to charge during the day. The iPhone 16e and Apple’s C1 modem fixes this, by offering true multi-day battery life. On more than one occasion, it lasted through the night and considerably into the following day.

At 4,005mAh, the iPhone 16e battery is approximately 12% larger than the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro, but about 15% smaller than the iPhone 16 Plus and iPhone 16 Pro Max. It fills the gap between the two and offers the efficiency of the larger iPhones, but in a much smaller form factor.

In terms of raw numbers, the best battery life I experienced was 39 hours of runtime and 10 hours of screen on time. This is outstanding battery life, and on par with — if not better than — the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Like many of its siblings and extended family, the iPhone 16e isn’t the fastest to charge to full. Apple hasn’t confirmed the exact charging speed, but it promises fast charging with a 20W adapter or higher. In my testing, the iPhone 16e takes 30 minutes to charge to 50% but a further hour to charge the remaining 50%. Most iPhones are only designed to be charged to 80% to extend battery life, which takes just under an hour.

By far the biggest disappointment is MagSafe, or the lack of it. Initially, I thought it wouldn’t bother me, but I’ve found that I do miss having it, especially when trying to use some of the best iPhone accessories. Yes, the iPhone 16e supports 7.5W wireless charging, but it feels like the one part missing from this experience; MagSafe is a brand in and of itself, and the lack of it does make the iPhone 16e feel less like a current-generation flagship.

Apple iPhone 16e: iOS and Apple Intelligence

One of the benefits of using current generation hardware is that you get the maximum longevity and support. Apple doesn’t make claims of how many years support it will offer, but historical data suggests that you can expect the iPhone 16e to last for at least five years.

Out of the box, the iPhone 16e runs iOS 18 and the latest build available is iOS 18.3.2 which features ChatGPT integration in Apple Intelligence. iOS 18 brings a host of improvements and new features and in many ways, the biggest change to iOS in years.

There’s a redesigned control center that adopts a multi-page design giving you quick access to even more shortcuts, a new connectivity panel and more context around what’s playing. There’s a new theming and home screen engine that allows you to change your home screen and app icons colors at will. You can even rearrange your home screen in a more freer way, and Apple has also made it effortless to resize widgets.

Then there’’s a host of new security and privacy features, which is key to the iOS 18 offering. You can lock and hide apps behind FaceID, TouchID or a passcode so that only you can access them. You can also hide an app from your home screen inside a hidden app folder that’s protected. There’s also major changes to the Photos app, a new Passwords manager, and a host of other changes throughout the experience.

iOS 18 has its fair share of bugs and things that don’t work as well as expected, but it’s a great overall OS and runs fairly well on the iPhone 16e. The latest hardware also means that it’s able to run a host of new AI-powered features, which is one of the reasons you may be considering it.

Apple Intelligence and AI-powered features

Apple’s journey to AI on the iPhone hasn’t been the smoothest, and the launch of Apple Intelligence at WWDC last year was prefaced with the expectation that many features would roll out over the past year. As it turns out, some of these features have launched, but Apple has also announced that the new context-aware Siri — which can intelligently understand what’s on your screen — could take a further year to launch.

Aside from the delays, Apple Intelligence is available on the iPhone 16e in a few different ways. Visual Intelligence provides a Google-lens experience that allows Apple Intelligence to interact with the world around you through your phone’s camera, while AI features are also built into most of Apple’s apps.

Notes has had a huge upgrade thanks to Apple Intelligence, including being able to record and transcribe live audio in a note, a host of new formatting options, and help solving complex math equations instantly with Math’s Note. You can also now record calls, get AI-powered summaries of any email in the Mail app and get summaries of articles in Siri.

My favorite Apple Intelligence feature is Notification Summaries, which I use daily to help triage my life. Notification Summaries has vastly improved as a feature, and while you’ll still get funny summaries that make little sense, it is far more useful as a feature now than it was six months ago.

Apple iPhone 16e: Just One Camera

The biggest surprise in this phone is that the iPhone 16e camera is better than I expected. That said, there are some caveats that are worth keeping in mind, and while Apple has managed to make a single camera good in some situations, it still can’t beat the benefits of multiple cameras.

The iPhone 16e features a single 48MP camera with f/1.6 aperture, phase detection autofocus and OIS. There’s only one camera but it captures high quality images, and combines pixels into a larger one to help capture better photos in low light conditions. It takes all the learnings from the iPhone 16 Pro’s main camera and brings it to the most affordable current-gen iPhone.

For some people, one camera won’t be enough, but for others, it may be worth the compromise, especially if you don’t take many photos or you’d rather have the lighter weight and better battery life.

There’s no ultrawide or telephoto camera, but the iPhone 16e does offer 2x telephoto zoom using in-sensor cropping. The in-sensor crop works fairly well, although there is a slight reduction in resolution and quality. Beyond 2x, there’s a noticeable reduction in quality.

There’s also the entire range of studio effects in portrait mode, and the ability to use both 1x and 2x focal lengths. The effect of the latter is particularly jarring as the cropping leads to a much tighter image than you might expect.

If you’re considering the iPhone 16e from another phone — especially one that has multiple cameras that you use — then you will probably end up disappointed by the iPhone 16e camera. However, if the camera doesn’t matter to you, but you’d like a good one there just in case, the iPhone 16e is a great choice.

Apple iPhone 16e: price and availability

The most contentious part of the iPhone 16e is not its single camera, but its price. Starting at $599, it’s only $200 cheaper than the iPhone 16 which has a few key upgrades including a dual-lens camera array.

For that, you get 128GB of storage and a choice of either Black or White color ways. If you want more storage, the 256GB and 512GB models cost $100 and $200 more respectively. AppleCare+ costs $10 per month or $100 per year, and there are a host of trade-in deals available to offset the overall cost.

Should you buy the Apple iPhone 16e?

If you’ve never experienced an iPhone before and are upgrading to the iPhone 16e from a simpler phone (smartphone or otherwise), you will enjoy the iPhone 16e. It’s the quintessential Apple smartphone experience at a cheaper price, and it offers everything you probably want.

The iPhone 16e is a true battery life champion, and if you value longevity over all else, it’s the iPhone to pick. However, there are better iPhones on the market if you take a lot of photos or need snappier performance. You could buy the iPhone 16 or last year’s iPhone 15 Pro series. These are all priced similarly, and they both have significant advantages over the iPhone 16e.

The iPhone 16e is the iPhone to pick if you just want the essentials like a good display, solid performance and great battery life. The e doesn’t mean it’s for everyone, but it’s definitely the right phone for someone.