iPhone 16e

In the flurry of (my own personal) happenings this past week, I completely forgot that Tim Apple posted a teaser about new hardware. Belatedly, I watched the video.

For me, the most exciting thing is probably the bundling of their in-house modem, marketed as “C1”:

USD pricing:

I suppose the “e” means everyone; i.e., the iPhone for everyone. Nice.

Update: I like the Compare feature on the current lineup. Of course, 16e < 16 < 16 Pro. It’s also an excellent compare to the now-discontinued iPhone SE that my mum uses, and my old iPhone 11, which, in hindsight, was a bad purchase.

Update 2: Daring Fireball has some interesting analysis on the 16e:

No MagSafe

So there’s (slow) inductive charging, but no MagSafe. It’s probably cleaner to have no inductive charging whatsoever. It’s probably OK for those that have always plugged their phone into a wired charger since forever; e.g., my mum probably doesn’t know her iPhone SE can be inductively charged.

Battery life is better than iPhone 16

Very nice, I did not notice this.

Doesn’t support Thread networking

As mentioned above, I still have a mostly-abandoned iPhone 11. IF I recall correctly, even that has a Thread radio, but I can count with no (zero!) hands whatsoever the number of times I’ve used this. Matter/the Thread protocol continues to be a joke, so it’s probably fine that the 16e (or more precisely: the c1) doesn’t have it.

Comparison to the iPhone 15

I hadn’t thought of this, but as the iPhone 15 costs $100 more, it’s almost a no-brainer if one were a bargain hunter, and hadn’t upgraded to anything above iPhone 15 Pro.

- Wayne