Review: Apple iPhone 16e

The iPhone 16e isn’t for me. If you’re an avid tech enthusiast and Apple fan, it’s probably not for you either. It’s for the person holding on to an iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X, ready to upgrade because their more than seven-year-old smartphone isn’t working too well nowadays. They want a new phone, and it just needs to be an iPhone.

A part of my brain won’t stop thinking about whether this nearly once-in-a-decade upgrade for these folks wouldn’t be better served if Apple had included its nice-to-have amenities, like MagSafe or the ultra-wideband chip for improved AirTags tracking. Even lacking these features, the price of the iPhone 16e feels $100 too high considering the many excellent competing phones in this bracket. It also makes the iPhone lineup confusing—it’s $170 more than Apple’s previous iPhone SE that’s no longer available.

I have spent much of my time this past week using the iPhone 16e and thinking about its $599 MSRP, which naturally must mean that something is awry. This may not matter much to people in the US, who favor purchasing through carriers that subsidize the cost, though they’re still paying for a $600 (locked) phone spread over a few years. But when the used iPhone marketplace is healthy and thriving, it feels as though anyone considering an iPhone 16e will find better value with an iPhone 15 or iPhone 15 Pro.

Cell Boost

The best iPhone 16e feature? Battery life. Considering this is a 6.1-inch iPhone, which historically perform the lowest in battery tests, this is a welcome surprise. With average use over the past week, I struggled to bring the phone below 50 percent. (It usually hovered around 51 or 49 percent by bedtime.) Yes, that means the iPhone 16e has better battery life than the iPhone 16.

On one particular day when I used it for GPS navigation, music streaming, and picture snapping, it was left with around 30 percent before bed. And another busy day, I hit nearly nine hours of screen-on time and had 15 percent in the tank. That’s excellent. It’s still not the best iPhone battery life in the lineup—that’d be the iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus—but it’s enough to keep that battery anxiety at bay when you’re out and about.

Apple claims this battery boost is in part thanks to the first-ever Apple-designed C1 modem inside the phone. Apple spent years building this connectivity chip to reduce its reliance on partners like Qualcomm, and it seems to have paid off. I didn’t experience any issues with cellular connectivity over the past week with the AT&T eSIM Apple provided, though this also could depend on region. (I’m in New York City.) I ran speed tests via Ookla on various phones alongside the iPhone 16e and did not find anything out of the ordinary. That said, remember Antennagate? We’ll have to wait and see how the C1 modem performs in the hands of far more people across the world.