Is it really the best budget phone?

I’ve probably spent more time with an iPhone in my pocket this year than ever before, exploring everything from Apple Intelligence to the Camera Control to the new customization options in iOS 18. And while I’m nowhere close to swapping out my daily Android phone for an iPhone, for the most part, I’ve enjoyed my time on the other side of the fence. However, spending so much time with a flagship iPhone 16 Pro in my pocket has also made me realize something else: It’s been a long time since I’ve used a more affordable iPhone — not since the last iPhone SE launched in 2022.

During that time, I tested several generations of the Google Pixel A series and the Samsung Galaxy A series, and I watched Android’s best budget- to mid-tier phones improve by leaps and bounds. So, when Apple announced its return to the affordable smartphone race with the $600 iPhone 16e, it piqued my interest. I wanted to know if its simplified hardware stood a chance against much-improved Android competitors or if it would be left behind like the last iPhone SE.

Well, I have good news… and I have bad news.

When I reviewed the iPhone SE (2022), I felt its design was its most significant limitation, forcing an otherwise good version of iOS to exist within a tiny 4.7-inch window while I lived out the last of my TouchID dreams. It felt dated from the start, pairing thick bezels that reminded me of the earliest iPhones with a slim, rounded frame that felt more like an iPod Touch than a proper smartphone. Now, though, the iPhone 16e at least feels like some semblance of a modern iPhone, and it makes a world of difference.

Granted, when I say modern, I mean iPhone 12 modern more than iPhone 16 modern. For everything that Apple updated, like switching from the mute switch to the Action Button and trading the Lightning port for USB-C, there’s something else to remind you that this isn’t a true flagship, like skipping the Camera Control or keeping the large notch for Apple’s Face ID sensors. It’s like Apple boiled down its most essential iPhone elements and then got rid of anything you didn’t need to make the price tag just a little bit more approachable. And you know what? Weirdly, I really like it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the most exciting smartphone design, but that’s the point. The iPhone 16e design is more like a vessel for the latest iOS experience, and the phone is just along for the ride. Its pocket-friendly aluminum frame is comfortable to hold, while its matte finish steers comfortably clear of fingerprints, and the same goes for the rear panel of frosted glass. And, if there was any doubt that Apple wanted to keep things simple, the iPhone 16e only comes in the very business-like shades of black and white. I would have loved to see the return of Apple’s Product Red program, as the glossy, cherry-like finish was one of my favorite parts of the iPhone SE (2022).

There is, however, one key difference on the back of the iPhone 16e that sets it apart from most other modern iPhones — there’s no camera bump. Honestly, though, there doesn’t need to be since the affordable flagship only comes with a single 48MP sensor, which I’ll come back to in a moment. The result is an iPhone that looks remarkably clean, if a little bit like a base Galaxy S25, with its minimalist styling. It’s also perhaps a little bit tougher to hold onto as there’s no comfortable ridge upon which to rest your finger, but Apple’s Ceramic Shield glass offers at least a little peace of mind should your phone take a tumble.

That minimalism continues as you work around the frame, with the Action Button and volume rockers on the left side and Apple’s power button on the right. And, as much as Apple probably wishes I missed the Camera Control that would typically sit below it, I really don’t. I haven’t found myself itching for a faster way to open the camera, snap a photo, or tweak a setting, mainly because the iPhone 16e itself is so comfortably compact.

Apple’s notched 6.1-inch OLED panel is similarly compact, matching the base iPhone 16 in size but offering a slightly lower resolution and, to my eye, marginally thicker bezels. Following in those same flagship footsteps, the iPhone 16e is capped at a lowly 60Hz refresh rate and skips always-on support — I can’t say I’m surprised given the lower price point and Apple’s weird insistence that the former is a Pro-only feature. Honestly, in day-to-day life, I haven’t found myself longing for a higher refresh rate, as the iPhone 16e runs just about as smooth as butter when I’m bouncing between social media platforms and trying to capture photos of my foster puppy for his eventual adoption profile. That said, if you put it next to essentially any Android phone these days, it starts to look a bit sluggish.

One thing I haven’t missed is the Dynamic Island. Sure, there are times when I’m reminded just how large the notch has to be to support Apple’s Face ID hardware, but it’s easy enough to get by with full-screen driving directions in Apple Maps and open Spotify whenever I need to switch a song rather than pressing and holding on a tiny icon at the top of my phone. I haven’t missed the ability to monitor sports scores, either, since life remains difficult as a Chelsea FC supporter. If Apple were to copy Samsung’s Now Bar and put a floating update at the bottom of my lock screen, though, I wouldn’t complain.

Perhaps the strangest of all the decisions Apple made on its iPhone 16e is that it doesn’t support MagSafe. Yes, it supports wireless charging, and the back of the phone is at least slightly magnetic — my Peak Design wallet clings but doesn’t stick — but you can’t pop it on a MagSafe charger or use any helpful accessories without buying a compatible case. If I wanted a $600 phone that needed a special magnetic case, I would have purchased the Galaxy S24 FE or waited for the Pixel 9a to drop.

Oh, and there’s one more clever piece of design at play inside the iPhone 16e: Its new C1 modem. This is the first time Apple has packed an iPhone with its in-house modem, and it’s yet another sign that the company is moving further from its relationship with Qualcomm. If all goes well, you won’t notice the C1 at work under the hood, and that’s largely been my experience so far — at least with regard to mobile service. I’ve had a hiccup with Bluetooth connectivity, though (more on that later).

Of course, as I mentioned above, the purpose of the iPhone 16e isn’t really to be an exciting piece of hardware. Instead, I think it’s mostly here to get more people to use Apple’s latest software a little bit faster — and by that, I mean Apple Intelligence. Although Apple is perfectly happy to roll out the base iOS 18 experience to several generations of iPhone users, its suite of AI-powered tools remains reserved for those willing to spend a bit more. Before the iPhone 16e, you needed either an iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 to try Apple Intelligence, which meant dropping at least $800.

Now, though, you can get your foot in the AI-generated door for closer to $600, which makes Apple Intelligence at least about as accessible as Gemini and Google’s exclusive features on the Pixel A series or Galaxy AI on Samsung’s Galaxy S24 FE. Also, like its closest Android rivals, the iPhone 16e has a familiar set of AI-powered features. For whatever reason, the current state of the AI race is “anything you can do, I can do just about as well.” I hesitate to say “better” because, well, Apple Intelligence isn’t always better.

There are some Apple Intelligence features, like priority notifications, notification summaries, and the ability to type out your questions to Siri, that I’ve used almost every day since picking up the iPhone 16e, while others, like the Clean Up function in Photos, show just how far Apple still has to go. Compared to Photo Assist or Magic Editor, Apple’s artifact-laden Clean Up job feels like the type of effort a bad guy would fire his henchmen over. I tried to remove a hamper from a photo of one of my cats dozing on a chair in the afternoon sun, only to find that Apple’s replacement was chair legs that stretched on forever and a wall that became an empty void. Not great, Apple, not great.

Other bits of Apple Intelligence, like the Image Playground, feel quite a bit further along, but they’re not perfect either. I appreciate that I can use familiar faces from the Photos app as the basis for my creations, throwing photos of my friends into fantasy situations like volcanoes and dressing them up in astronaut costumes. And yet, every time I get a perfect likeness of a pal, Apple has given me just as many generations with dead eyes and weird teeth or simply refused to acknowledge a face. That’s the funny part — you can’t add a face unless Apple recognizes it in photos.

Sticking with image generation, I continue to use Genmoji perhaps more than any other piece of Apple Intelligence. For whatever reason, I’ve become an emoji guy lately, and so being able to create hybrids based on Apple’s much larger library has opened the door to plenty of goofy ideas. I never really loved Apple’s basic human emojis, so my recent quest has been to replace them all with frogs, which seems to be working well so far.

And yet, I still don’t know if I’d buy an iPhone for the promise of Apple Intelligence just yet. It adds several neat wrinkles, but I haven’t come to rely on them as can’t-miss features yet. I’m glad to have prioritized notifications, but I’m also pretty good at deciding which ones matter for myself. I would, however, buy a new iPhone just to get iOS 18. Outside of its AI features, it’s immensely customizable, allowing you to place widgets and apps wherever you want them, making it feel much more like Android. I’ve finally been able to strip my home screen down to two folders — one for work and one for social media — and I have no reason to look back.

Remember earlier when I said there’s no camera bump on the back of the iPhone 16e because there’s only one camera? Well, it’s time for us to dig deeper into Apple’s 48MP Fusion camera. Yes, I know that Apple claims it’s like having two cameras in one because it can use a sensor crop to punch in for optical 2x zoom, but that doesn’t mean much. Most great Android camera phones can do the same thing, but you don’t see Google claiming that its Pixel 8a actually has three cameras. So, instead, we’ll treat the iPhone 16e like it has one camera because, well, it does.

It’s a pretty good camera for day-to-day life, too, if it is a bit inflexible. The single 48MP shooter is similar to the one on the flagship iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro, albeit with a slightly smaller sensor. It has a decent maximum aperture of ƒ/1.6, meaning that you can get some nice, shallow depth of field in portrait mode, so long as you’re capturing human subjects. Apple’s lone sensor also has pretty much everything you’d expect in terms of stabilization, with PDAF and OIS for photos and videos, as well as 4K recording at up to 60 frames per second. There’s not much else to dig into from a hardware perspective, though, so let’s get to some camera samples.

First is a fairly colorful set of images from one of the sunnier spring days in Baltimore. It might not look like it, but the shot of the sticker-coated sign to the left was meant to be in portrait mode, but there’s no artificial bokeh. This is, of course, because the iPhone 16e doesn’t acknowledge non-human subjects for portrait mode — no animals, no signs, no cups of coffee on a sunny morning, none of it. I’m not sure if this is a hardware-based limitation or a software limitation, but it’s disappointing.

Otherwise, I’m pretty impressed by the natural recreation of the low-light scene I grabbed while walking home from a nighttime run. It’s not artificially blown out or especially dark, and the colors around the window frame to the right are spot-on. I could do with a little less glow around some of the lights, but it’s still not too bad. And then, there’s the shot of my cat. Oh, how I wish I could trust Apple’s Clean Up feature to remove the hamper to the left. Everything else about the photo is just how I like it, with warmth and sunlight and pretty good detail across my cat’s back, but I don’t love looking at my running shorts and socks waiting to be washed. I gave Clean Up its chance, but the results weren’t worth keeping.

Another row of photos, another example of where I’d really, really like Portrait Mode for pets. I managed to get my foster puppy to sit nicely in the middle of a hike, perfectly distracted by a treat, yet I couldn’t get the nice blurry background the shelter so badly wants for profile photos. It’s still a good shot, pairing accurate colors with solid detail through the rocks and leaves, but come on, Apple, the people want portrait mode.

To the left of that shot is one of the more impressive examples of Apple’s punchy colors, with every piece of the mural and the teal flower beds trying to pop off the screen. The mural is pleasantly bold in real life, too, but I think Apple might have gone a little overboard this time. Also, trying to capture various murals around Baltimore reminded me just how helpful ultrawide cameras tend to be, as I had a terrible time trying to fit the entire painting in one standard photo without putting myself right in the middle of the street.

Also, due to Apple’s lone rear camera, the iPhone 16e doesn’t punch in all that far. It might use an optical crop for the 2x zoom shot, but everything else turns digital quickly and relies on post-processing to keep up appearances. The image taken at 10x zoom is perhaps the best example, with a bit too much sharpening across several layers of bricks below the painted sign, while certain rows in the sign itself skip the divisions where one brick ends and another starts. I’d still say that the colors are pretty good, and they’re consistent across all four images, I’m not a fan of Apple’s sharpening.

The other camera that comes standard on Apple’s iPhone 16e is its 12MP selfie shooter, which should feel pretty familiar to iOS users. It offers the same default field of view that Apple has used on previous iPhones, though you can once again toggle a slightly wider angle to fit a friend or two in the shot. As expected, the portrait mode detection is pretty good from Apple’s selfie camera, and I had no problems with its autofocus separating me from the background.

Also, I mentioned above that the iPhone 16e supports video recording in 4K resolution at up to 60fps from its rear camera, and it’s generally pretty good. Due to the single sensor, you won’t be able to capture in Apple’s Spatial Video format for Vision Pro, but I had no real issues with the stabilization or color recreation while recording at 1x or 2x zoom. If you’re serious about using your phone for a lot of video, though, or you think you might need an ultrawide field of view, you’ll be better off with a flagship iPhone 16 or an equivalent Android competitor.

Usually, I’d love to tell you that Apple’s camera software adds a new level of quality to its most affordable iPhone. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. If anything, the iPhone 16e’s simple, straightforward camera experience feels like a throwback to phones I haven’t used in a long time. It skips most of the tricks I really liked about the iPhone 16 series, like Photographic Styles that you could edit and customize to your heart’s content, and there’s the issue I mentioned with portrait mode above. Granted, there are a few camera filters that you can swipe through on the iPhone 16e, but you can’t tweak them to make them bolder or softer after you take your photo.

While I’ve found myself begging for just a little more flexibility out of Apple’s lone 48MP camera once or twice, I can’t say the rest of the iPhone 16e’s performance has ever let me down in quite the same way. In fact, by packing its most affordable iPhone with the flagship-grade 3nm A18 chipset, Apple might have done just enough to make this a phone worth buying. It hasn’t fixed what wasn’t broken — all iPhone 16e configurations come with 8GB of RAM and up to 512GB of fixed storage — but it’s made what could have been an otherwise pared-down experience pretty good.

Of course, to find out just how good Apple’s latest mid-ranger is, I had to put it through our usual slate of benchmarks against what I consider to be its closest rivals. So, I lined up the same CPU and GPU intensive tests that my colleague Rob Triggs and I have fine-tuned over several generations and put the iPhone 16e to work against Google’s Pixel 8a, Samsung’s Galaxy S24 FE, OnePlus 13R, and Apple’s own iPhone 16.

In the end, the results both surprised me, yet made a lot of sense. As expected, the iPhone 16e hung close to its flagship cousin in both the single-core and multi-core portions of our CPU-heavy Geekbench 6 test, easily racing ahead of the likes of Google’s Tensor G3 and Samsung’s in-house Exynos 2400e. On the GPU side, though, the slight difference between the A18 chip in the iPhone 16 and the one in the iPhone 16e became immediately apparent. Apple decided to pack its mid-ranger with a four-core GPU rather than the five-core version on its flagship, which resulted in a similar drop-off after the first run of the Wild Life Extreme test, followed by a leveling off that’s about halfway between the iPhone 16 and the Pixel 8a — a phone not exactly renowned for its performance under pressure.

As usual, though, controlled benchmarks don’t mean a ton when it comes to how a phone feels in everyday life. Although great GeekBench 6 performance is good, a reliable CPU is much more important. And, on that front, the iPhone 16e is excellent. It’s been perfectly smooth through a few weeks of testing that included a week of fostering an 11-month-old puppy, followed by a much slower week of trying to screw my head back on straight. As much as I wish I would have taken the iPhone 16e for some grand adventure, counting on it to get me through a sporting event or taking it on a weekend away, I think that a couple of days of normal usage is exactly what the phone needed.

When it comes to the things that you’ll actually do with your phone, the A18 chipset is all you need. I regularly called upon the iPhone 16e to navigate me to a local trail for a hike with the pup or opened the camera for long stretches of 15 or 20 minutes simply because I didn’t want to miss a photo that might get my furry friend adopted. And, since I never really found a reliable way to introduce my temporary foster to the cats I’ve had for more than a year, I also spent nearly two straight days streaming calming cat music over Spotify. As much as the iPhone 16e probably thought I was losing my mind, it never really blinked. It occasionally got pretty warm after sustained use, but I never noticed a slow-down or a stutter.

Also, since I live alone and spent most of my last few weeks worried about entertaining a puppy, I didn’t have much chance to play games on the iPhone 16e. Normally, I’d dip into titles like Warhammer 40,000 Tacticus or Pokemon TCG Pocket, but I spent enough time walking and documenting and walking again that the most energy I had by the time I got home was to catch up on highlights from the UEFA Champions League and Conference League — and then often had to rewatch the same highlights because I fell asleep.

Before we get to the iPhone 16e’s overall battery life, though, I’ve noticed one odd performance quirk over my few weeks with the phone — its Bluetooth playback seems to have limits. I tend to keep most of my devices tethered to more than one accessory at a time, in this case, Garmin’s Instinct 3 and the Shokz OpenRun Pro, and I noticed that my music playback stuttered quite a few times while I was out for a run. It was never more than a second or two, and I never felt like I lost part of the audio, but it was a similar sensation to when the radio cuts out under a bridge. The issues might be due to Apple’s new C1 modem, but I can’t say for sure, all I know is I’m not the only one experiencing these issues. Here’s hoping a fix is on the way.

Unfortunately, I also wasn’t the only one with a hit-or-miss battery during my time with the iPhone 16e. Despite Apple’s boasting that it has the best battery life of any 6.1-inch iPhone to date, I’ve been less than impressed with the roughly 4,000mAh cell packed into the iPhone 16e. Some days, it’s been great, and I’ve been able to keep it off the charger for more than 24 hours, while other days, it feels like I’m walking a careful tightrope to make it to the end of the day. And, when I’m falling asleep early due to dog duty, it’s not always easy to guarantee that I’ll charge my phone overnight.

Our controlled battery drain test largely mirrors my own observations, with the iPhone 16e performing like a rockstar in some categories while bringing up the rear in others. It put in an excellent shift while recording 4K video, only to barely edge the Galaxy S24 FE in playing back other high-resolution content. More surprisingly, the iPhone 16e fell behind Apple’s base iPhone 16 in almost every category, making me doubt that this is the best 6.1-inch iPhone for battery life despite its much larger cell. Overall, though, my experience with the iPhone 16e’s battery life was fine, just not necessarily excellent or super reliable for more than a day away from home.

When I finally emptied the battery on my iPhone 16e, I admit that I had pretty low expectations for its charging setup. I’m used to iPhones trickling their way back to a full cell, so I came to expect more of the same from Apple’s first mid-range offering in a few years. And, when Apple downgraded its wireless charging option to no longer include MagSafe, I figured I was about to have quite a few complaints. Thankfully, I was wrong — not massively so, but still wrong.

Put up against the same competitors I used above, I was shocked to find out the iPhone 16e charged second fastest. I knew that Apple would probably keep a pretty strict cap of around 21W wired speeds on its mid-ranger, and I figured the larger battery meant that it would have to take longer to get back on its feet, yet it crossed the finish line a few minutes ahead of the Pixel 8a and easily beat the iPhone 16 by more than 10 minutes. More importantly, this is the closest I’ve come to charging an iPhone in under 90 minutes in a long, long time, and if Apple wants to compete with the best affordable Android phones, it has to get that number even lower.

On the bright side, Apple’s charging requirements aren’t nearly as strict as those of many of its Android foes. You won’t need a USB PD PPS charger to reach top speeds — Apple actually says you can hit 50% in just 30 minutes with a 20W charger, and the lack of MagSafe means that your existing Qi chargers should be good enough.

In a vacuum, I like the iPhone 16e. I’d go so far as to say that it’s kind of the most fun I’ve had with an iPhone in a long time. I’ve enjoyed that it boils the entire iOS experience down into a simple phone with a simple purpose — to do phone things. Apple isn’t trying to make its iPhone 16e the be-all, end-all iPhone that breaks the bank; it’s making it the straightforward iPhone for the people in your life who don’t need fancy. It’s the iPhone for your parents who don’t care about the Camera Control or for your kids who don’t need things like a telephoto sensor or a Dynamic Island (if they need an iPhone at all).

On all of those fronts, the iPhone 16e delivers. I’ve generally been impressed by its single 48MP Fusion camera, I’ve mostly been okay with its battery life from day to day, and I appreciate that iOS 18 feels more and more like Android with each passing update — whether or not I use Apple Intelligence to the extent Apple wants me to. Even the A18 chipset reminds me that Apple knows a thing or two about in-house silicon, though it’s running a bit warmer than the iPhones I’ve used in the past.

However, the iPhone 16e doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it exists in one of the most competitive, most interesting segments of any smartphone right now. And, when you put it against any of the best affordable Android alternatives right now, I’m not sure how anyone could feel that the iPhone 16e comes out on top. Sure, it’s your most affordable gateway to things like iMessage and FaceTime, but once you venture beyond those locked-down software features, it’s much easier to recommend any number of alternatives.

First and foremost in my mind is the Google Pixel 8a ($499 at Amazon) for several reasons — not least of which is that it’s $100 more affordable. For starters, it’s the closest in size to the iPhone 16e, making it easy to fit in a pocket and use with one hand. But, more importantly, Google’s most affordable Pixel adds much more flexibility with a 13MP ultrawide camera on the back, a bigger battery, and Gemini features that have had significantly longer to develop. You could probably still debate whether or not the Tensor G3 is worth the price of admission now that Google has moved onto a more powerful Tensor G4 chipset, but it’s essential to the clever image processing tricks that often keep us coming back to Google’s ecosystem. Besides, now that iOS 18 feels more like Android, it’s much easier to bring whatever iPhone setup you’re used to over to Pixel UI.

Of course, there are pretty strong rumors the Pixel 9a will be popping up very soon, so you might also want to hold out to see what Google’s next generation A series phone looks like before you buy the 8a (or see if the latter goes on sale!).

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 FE ($552.54 at Amazon) is another excellent option, and it brings the mid-range segment even closer to the full flagship level. As we saw above, its in-house Exynos 2400e chipset benchmarks ahead of the A18 on almost all fronts, hanging onto better graphics numbers across the board and winning in terms of battery life, too. The Galaxy S24 FE also takes its camera flexibility further than the Pixel 8a, adding a telephoto lens for reliable zoom beyond Apple’s limited 10x. Of course, it’s hard to argue that One UI is as light or fast as iOS, but you might find that Samsung’s added customization makes it even easier to make your phone feel like your own.

Even OnePlus has a worthy rival to the most affordable iPhone in its OnePlus 13R ($599.99 at OnePlus). It might not come out as the first pick in your mind, mainly because OnePlus only sells its phones unlocked, but the 13R is essentially a 2024 flagship set up for 2025. It packs Qualcomm’s powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset under the hood and pairs it with 12GB of RAM — more than any other phone mentioned. OnePlus’s mid-ranger is also the largest at 6.78 inches, packs the fastest wired charging (a very casual 80W), and has a sharp 50MP telephoto sensor for all your zoom needs. Can you tell that Apple’s single-camera setup gets less impressive each time it’s compared to something?

But if you’re truly determined to try iOS, I still don’t think I’d go with the iPhone 16e. Instead, I’d either look for the iPhone 16 ($799 at Amazon) or hunt down an iPhone 15 Pro ($999 at Amazon), which you can either get new from a carrier or refurbished from one of several sites. Either way, you’ll still get a 6.1-inch display, access to Apple Intelligence, and the same top-tier commitment to future updates that you’d get from the iPhone 16e. On top of those basics, though, both the iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro offer better camera flexibility, either in the form of an ultrawide camera or an ultrawide camera and a telephoto camera, and Apple’s Pro model brings titanium to the table for added durability.

Of course, you can pick up the iPhone 16e down below if you want to, I’d probably take a good long look at something else first.