maybe it's an expectation problem you guys were expecting the new iPhone 16e
the spiritual successor of the iPhone SE lineup to be killer value at an amazing
low price I was expecting Apple to hold
out on us and charge a lot of money so I
got what I wanted this is the 16e it's
kind of like an iPhone 16 but not quite you could say it's
16e anywh who in terms of included accessor it comes with a USB ctoc cable
only USB 2.0 speeds here though the phone only supports USB 2 so that's not
really going to be an extra problem as well as a Sim removal tool that is as
long as you're in a region where you still get a SIM tray and that is it you
don't even get Apple stickers anymore but if I'm going to praise other
manufacturers for having recyclable packaging I've got to do it here even
this little slip right here appears to be made out of like a glassine paper so
that's really nice to see thank you apple good job of course I'm not sure if
I'm going to be able to say the same thing about the iPhone 16e itself unlike
previous SE models it uses a very
similar ID to Apple's current Flagship products so right here I've got my daily
driver 16 plus and you can see boy is it
ever similar on the bottom we get a speaker Grill and microphone Grill on
this side we get our lock button ah yes
missing however is the camera button though how much I use mine I can't say
that I think that's going to be a problem for you because right over on the other side we've got our SIM tray
maybe as well as our action button and
volume rocker SL camera button that's
right it doesn't have a half press but you can activate the camera with a
button if you really want to which I never do anyway because it makes the
device kind of shake at the top we get a whole lot of nothing and then at the
back we get the first big difference the
camera and by camera I really do mean camera camera just one Apple's using
what they're calling their Fusion camera system here which is supposed to serve
the role of a dual camera system but with a single sensor and single lens and
there's kind of a solid argument to be made for this it's got a 48 megapixel
sensor which is a lot more than we've seen on previous budget oriented iPhones
and for that matter a lot more than we've seen on regular iPhones going back
to the iPhone 14 and before and when you
factor in the much more powerful Hardware including a current gen
state-of-the-art neural processor in this thing I'm expecting the results to
be very compelling oh already oh man oh
man I forgot I do use my camera button I
exclusively use it to launch the camera because I come from Android where you
can double press the power button on many phones in order to launch your
camera oh I would miss that I have to wake my screen then I have to long press
on this also that's not working right now for some reason they always manage
to get so close for me don't they what was I talking about ah yes the camera
let's do a couple quick test shots shall we oh wow oh what uh Apple you doing
okay there bud that is not good see my understanding from the keynote was that
this was like the same camera system but just a single lens is that not the case
dude dude are other people talking about
this is this a thing did I just did I hold it wrong hold on no no no hold on
hold on maybe it's just smudgy okay here we go here we go quick camera test oh
yeah oh buddy no no it's going to nail it that looks like crap look at how much
better the skin tones are on the 16
plus I wouldn't say that it's any worse in terms of clarity though so maybe
maybe this is just I need to take a couple shots and it's a sampling issue
that seems darn near identical other than that this one looks a little bit on
the warmer side it is a smaller sensor okay well that would explain why it's a
little bit noisier and it struggles with color under darker conditions but uh
they also support the same spatial audio recording on this one compared to the
regular 16 family that's pretty cool to
see but it should be noted that because
there is only a single camera element that acts as both your wide and your
telephoto albeit at a lower resolution
you're not going to be able to record any spatial video doesn't look
meaningfully smoother here
yeah it's still an iPhone buddy even with a bit of a smaller sensor okay
how's that telephoto go away what is the point of having oh my
God see this is the kind of thing I'm talking about what does a bar along the
bottom mean Apple Andy you're a lifelong Apple user what does the bar along the
bottom mean in the interface return to home it means return to
home that is what that means don't put
the bar there if the bar doesn't do the
thing so funny watching people argue
with me on Wow when I was saying that iOS 18 is buggy and they're like no
within like two days I had like videos
of bizarre bugs to show them here's another one it happens all the time just
like I segue to our sponsor all the time
dbrand oh good it's dbrand and there's a wall yeah they have a a special surprise
for you everyone says you're short but how short are you dbrand sent over 15
iPhone 16 E's and we're going to command
strip them to the wall and see just how short uh how tall you are now you just
stand there and look pretty cuz we did it took a long time to get all the command strips on these guys so dbrand
went out and bought every single iPhone 16e that anyone bought yes what were
they thinking what the heck are they going to do with these I guess return
them to Apple Store I don't know one 2 3
11 11 12 11 and 1 12 iPhones tall so
what's the vanity URL so people can buy their overpriced stickers well they
spend all this money they don't even have stickers on these embarrassing I I
can't explain that one short.com or what even better 11 ion.com 1
ion.com I don't think 12
counts I also think it's valid valid I
say to pull out my old note 9 because
this is a similar generation device to what many folks are going to be
upgrading from if they have like an old iPhone SE or something like that I mean
yeah that's that's markedly better okay I think it might have just been shotto
shot variance the differences in like skin tone capture and exposure like it's
noisier on the 16e it's more natural this time than this time for some reason
so whatever in conclusion it's no iPhone 16 but it's
better than what you had already and it's not that far off if all you do is
take the occasional picture what about the screen though this is another area
where it falls short of the regular iPhone 16 family instead of being able
to reach lofty Heights like up to 2,000
nits in HDR it is limited to about 1,200
nits in practice though I'm not expecting this to make a huge difference
in content consumption since most HDR content is mastered for around a
thousand nits at least so far today oh
yeah buddy here we go well it may only be 60 HZ just like the regular versions
of the iPhone 16 which is going to turn off a number of buyers but in terms of
the content enjoyment experience if I'm not running anything that goes higher
than 60 frames per second it looks great
and in our testing managed to reach about the same levels of peak brightness
that Apple advertised it did fall a little bit short but not in a way that
would raise serious alarm bells for us since we're talking about the screen a
lot of folks were disappointed to find out that Apple will not be bringing back
a more mini form factor obviously it's
smaller compared to a plus model but compared to the regular iPhone 16 it's
not a huge difference it's 6.1 in and about the same body size as a regular 16
or 16 Pro I'm holding the pro in my hand
so you can see that uh yeah the bezels are a little bit on the thicker side but
in my opinion that's not the kind of thing that is that important to
day-to-day use like you still get ip68
water resistance you still get Apple's really tough ceramic shield glass I
don't think any of the 16e detractors are going to be too concerned about that
no the big issues are the lack of their Ultra wideband chip which makes it a lot
easier to find missing air tags and I believe it's also supported by the
airpods Pro 2 USBC charging case right yeah yep but what it doesn't have is the
alignment magnets built into it so that you can use mag safe accessories be they
portable battery Banks or Car mounts or
whatever the case may be I mean they're really useful in a production environment just being able to clip your
phone onto a camera rig there are workarounds for this you can get a case
for your phone that has the magnets in it that will allow you to put a 16e onto
a MAG safe compatible device but it won't charge any faster and it is a bit
of a downer that it's not included in the device by default but as someone who
lives my life without magsafe I don't actually find that it is in complete
without being able to stick my phone to things and I think some of the stuff we
get in return is pretty compelling we get silicon and RAM that is on par with
Apple's current Flagship and I posed this question during our podcast and no
one was able to come up with an answer I asked hey look I know it's $600 and it's
missing these features but at this price can you show me another phone that has a
flagship Cutting Edge Flagship s so in it for
$5.99 they were not able to this has a 3
nmet processor in it yeah they cut off one GPU core but when you look at the
performance numbers you're getting almost an iPhone 16 in everything but
gaming where it still performs quite well at what is higher but still the
lowest entry level price for a brand new iPhone what that means is that over the
long term as Apple continues to provide software updates for this family the 16e
is not going to be at a disadvantage it even has has the same amount of system
memory which should allow it to run all the same Apple intelligence features
that you get from the rest of its siblings that doesn't mean there's no
compromises uh while the body is the same as the rest of the family the
dynamic Island goes away and we get the ugly classic Notch I don't use it that
much I do like to be able to access media that's playing in the background
whether it's video or audio but is it that much more work to just open up the
now playing app in the control center I mean I mean it's yeah it is more and
that's kind of a Down I guess I also use it for timers set a
10-minute timer and you can like your your little you know timer will go away
and it'll kind of like be up there that's pretty cool um talking to the
folks here some of them use it for travel as well as for sports updates and
the like it was not life-changing for me though so make of that what you will I
know not everyone's going to agree with me about this but what I think we can
agree on is that the fact that the battery life of the budget iPhone is
about on par with the regular one is an absolute plus now it should be noted
that we had some issues with our battery life testing it seemed to be interrupted
by UNT turnoff notifications and whatnot
so we can't give you an exact number but what we can say is that the inconsistent
numbers that we got were the same between the regular iPhone 16 and the
iPhone 16e at least in the same range
and part of this apple claims is due to the efficiency gains that they found
with their new C1 modem this is the payoff for Apple spending $1 billion
on most of Intel's modem development
efforts back what was it like five or six years ago and the good news is that
the consensus for now is that while it doesn't support millimeter wave so
you're not going to get any of those like ridiculously Benchmark busting
speeds in Den cities the regular
reception is about as good or I think Dave 2D actually got better performance
of the C1 than the traditional Qualcomm modem it doesn't support Wi-Fi 6E or
Wi-Fi 7 which personally I find to be a pretty big deal not because I need to
download a video faster to my phone but because that means no support for 6 GHz
which is way way lower interference and is a much better experience somewhere
like a crowded apartment building but it does support Bluetooth 5.4 just like the
regular 16 family and has Apple's emergency SOS satellite functionality
which is kind of a big deal so bottom line I understand why a lot of people
are upset about the price $600 at the entry level that's a freaking ton of
money but the one thing Apple does
really well regardless of whether it's a flagship device or their entry-level
device is support it via software and when you look at the six to seven years
that you're going to get out of this thing if you buy it right out of the
gate what are you paying for your phone eight bucks a month you know everything
is a subscription world and how much you're going to use this thing it
doesn't seem impossible to justify there are a lot worse values out there like
man it was frustrating hearing from the Android Fanboys guys I you I love you
and everything but like when you tell me yeah this Android is like $450 and it
has like a 4 nmet chip that's like almost as good and it's like yeah but it
isn't and that phone gets three years of
Android updates when we look at total cost of
ownership over the lifetime of the device if you're are a non- Enthusiast
you got to remember who this is targeting you're a non- Enthusiast who's going to used this thing for years and
years and years that software support is more important than saving a couple
bucks today just like uh you're going to save a couple bucks if you subscribe to
ShortCircuit so you don't miss any of our great videos I don't know if you'll
save money by subscribing but you'll like it anyway