I say the finding of fact will change depending on who you ask , but theiPhone 16eis a dashing hopes to me . I thought we were pass away to get a budget phone with amazingly good specs . Instead , we get a mid - priced telephone set with some surprisingly risky features . And it ’s all Apple Intelligence ’s demerit .
But things could have been so different . Apple ’s AI political program was always run to cast its vestige over this launching , but it seemed possible — likely , even — that it would be one of those nice positively charged shadows . The shadow of a cactus yield solacement to a parched cowboy in the desert , perhaps .
Apple Intelligence is one of Cupertino ’s key business concern precedence at the moment , so ithasto be a success . For strategic intellect , therefore , it ’s imperative that any new iPhones support the platform , which requires high spec of at least 8 GB of RAM and an A18 processor . Those specs seem like a godsend for customer : What a wonderful motivating factor when it come up time to replace the 3rd - gen iPhone SE , which has just 4 GB of RAM and an A15 chipping . Thank you , Apple Intelligence !
It’s no mistake that Apple Intelligence occupies one of the biggest boxes.
As we now cognise , it did n’t mold out like that . Apple did replace the 3rd - gen iPhone SE with a phone equipped with those specs , but it did n’t keep the toll at $ 429 or anywhere near . It annunciate rather that the ledger entry - degree phone would start at … $ 599 . Now , technically we ca n’t discover this as a cost hike , because the novel handset has been explicitly trademark as a phallus of the iPhone 16 contemporaries , and to be fair , it has far more in common with those phones than the deviate SE .
It ’s no error that Apple Intelligence occupies one of the with child boxwood .
Apple
It’s no mistake that Apple Intelligence occupies one of the biggest boxes.
So , rather than determine out to work up an AI - infuse iPhone SE , Apple built the iPhone 16e around the necessary Apple Intelligence specs and then shave off just enough feature article to hit a reasonable damage point . As such , Apple has given up on the budget grocery store entirely , the accurate opposite of what I mean when I wrote recently , and optimistically , about thepower of availability .
It ’s also worth point out that , along with Apple Intelligence , the iPhone 16e has raft of compromises , the sort of compromises we would have expect and have from a $ 429 machine , but which seem oddly ungenerous when it starts at $ 599 . There ’s just one camera on the rear , of track . ( Fun fact ! Apple ’s first phone with two cameras on the tail was the iPhone 7 Plus in2016 . It added a third to the 11 Pro in 2019 . But sure , why ask a $ 599 iPhone in 2025 to have more than one camera ? )
You also miss out on the iPhone 16 ’s Camera Control , you get a notch instead of a Dynamic Island , and there ’s one few Congress of Racial Equality on the 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 , unrelated to the C1 modem ) .
What I ’m get at is that this headphone is somehow both more expensive and less impressive than I was expect , and I ’m not happy . Apple Intelligence is fine , but it does n’t make up for what the iPhone 16e sacrifices . Maybe this will all make mother wit in a class ’s metre , when the iPhone 17e come out , the 16e can get a price cut , and the chain of mountains shamble back to some kind of normality . Maybe I was naively optimistic not to actualize that the inevitable spec bump would be accompany by an inevitable price jump . And perhaps , just possibly , this is yet another thing we can blame on AI .
