Apple iPhone 16e review: An A18 chip and Apple Intelligence for $599

Apple delivered its latest budget handset, the $599 iPhone 16e, without pomp. There was no big event in person, nor was there one online. No journalists scrambled through hoards of colleagues to snap photos of the phone. Instead, CEO Tim Cook tweeted out that new hardware was on the way, days before Apple announced the handset via a press release. Accordingly, the 16e isn’t an exciting device. It’s a safe one. It’s an amalgam of earlier iPhones, in a bid to create a product that’s reliable, while keeping costs down. The handset most closely resembles the iPhone 13 and 14, both in dimensions and the inclusion of the display notch up top. The iPhone 15’s Action button is here, but the 16’s Camera Control is absent. From an innovation standpoint, the iPhone 16e’s most exciting element would have to be its custom C1 modem. That’s not a sentiment you hear too often. Modems are decidedly unsexy. Most consumers only ever acknowledge their existence when theirs goes on the fritz. But it’s no ... Read full article.