New iPhone 16E, a great "budget" iPhone

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I’m liking it. It’s $200 cheaper than the base iPhone 16, but seems almost equal in specs, the main difference being a less max brightness display: 1200 nits -vs- 200 nits. What am I missing?

There’s a good comparison table here:

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We are still happy with our 15’s, so not watching too closely these new models, but I can see it as a great starter for many folks… We’ll see how the numbers flow in this Q…

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Yesterday I did a little research, the differences between the 16e and the 15/16 are the following removals/changes:

  • No Ultra wide camera (and maybe also the lidar ranging device)
  • No Camera control button/slider
  • No newer photographic styles (is this just a SW feature?)
  • No macro photos
  • No spatial photos/videos
  • No cinematic mode
  • One GPU core less (16 has 5 GPU cores, 16e has 4)
  • Less bright display (16e is 800/1200 typ/HDR, 16 is 1000/1600 and up to 2000 outdoors), no low 1 nit brightness
  • No dynamic island in display, has notch instead
  • No magsafe and slower charging (no qi2)
  • No mmWave 5G bands
  • No UWB, no thread, no WiFi 7, no WiFi 6E
  • Battery life: The 16e has 26 hrs of video playback, the 16 has 22 hrs of video playback

For casual users, most of these don’t matter much. But it all depends on what they are used to and what they like. If they like magnetic fast charging, they should probably get the more expensive 16. If they are a big photography enthusiast, they should probably get one of the pro models.

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Thanks for that comprehensive list! I certainly wouldn’t be bothered by the lack of those features, and I hope I’m not alone.

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I still have an iPhone SE (2020), which I originally bought for its low cost and small size. The most compelling advantages of the newer models for me are the faster CPUs and increased battery life. Everything else I could take or leave.

I’ve noticed an occasional slowdown in responsiveness in my SE, as I have with my Intel iMac, but for the most part, it’s been tolerable on both devices. I’m still really holding out for a large screen Apple Silicon iMac, though. I’m more likely to upgrade to a 16e before the iMac. Plus, I upgraded the internal SSD of the iMac from 1 TB to 2 TB, so it has a lot of capacity still left. I can’t do that with the SE.

-awlabrador

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My wife’s old 27" iMac was great, beautiful screen, but it had the old fusion drive and it became unreliable, so we couldn’t hold out any longer, went for the recent 25" iMac, I added an external SSD widget on one of the few ports for backups and Time machine, a bit of velcro and it just purrs along… Rumors of 32" iMacs have faded away…

Still have the 27" but haven’t worked up the courage to open it up, poke a 2 TB SSD in there, and now it’s OS is pretty limited… I think buyourmac only offered $100 for it, so a bit of a quandary, the hassle of shipping, etc… So there it sets, next to my old Mac Pro, and other similar outdated stuff… Too nice to recycle, but…

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