I buy one iPhone, and all of a sudden, everyone at the office here was like, hey, do you wanna take a look at the new iPhone 17e?
Just because I buy one iPhone, all of a sudden I'm expected to know everything
about these devices? Well, to be honest with you, I was actually pretty excited to take a look at this.
Mainly because this phone, I think is going to be perfect for both senior citizens
who just want a phone that just is basic and entry level for the iPhone.
But I also think that a lot of people who just don't really care about their phone,
this might be the perfect device. I am very happy that we got the pink one though.
Man, the pink looks, it's almost too subtle. It's like pastel, pastel pink.
But anyways, we should look at what else is in the box here. You obviously got the iPhone 17e and our cable.
And it's about what, three foot cable? It is type C to C though, USB two.
The iPhone 17e only has a USB two port. It doesn't have a USB three like the Pro or the Pro Max.
Listen, I actually have kind of a hot take on this. I think that the amount of data
that people are transferring over a cable from their phones, they probably don't need anything greater than USB two.
Look, so many people back things up to Google Drive now or iCloud.
Realistically, most people just use it for charging, especially at this level of a device.
And besides, if it's a corner that they have to cut in order to get the price as low as they did,
I think it's a worthwhile corner to cut. Around the device, we have our action button
and our volume rocker there. On the top, you got nothing. On this side, you've got your power button.
And on the bottom is that USB two port and some downspiring speakers there.
Around back, you've got your single camera, which is their 48 megapixel fusion camera.
And that's just their fancy marketing term for zooming.
But kind of like the last year's iPhone 16e,
the iPhone 17e is using the same chip
as the rest of the iPhone 17 family. It's using that A19 chip.
In this case, this one has one less GPU core,
which for some people that might be frustrating if you want a game on it, for example.
But you also don't get the 120 Hertz display
that you would get from the other iPhones. In that case then, you're probably not going to be gaming
at 120 Hertz because A, you don't have the screen for it anyways, and now you have the one less GPU core.
If it translates to better battery savings or just overall better performance of the phone
because it doesn't overheat, whatever it may be, having it be a cut down version of the same chip is nice
because then it's the same chip. So you can expect similar performance
without hopefully breaking the bank. And now that I mentioned battery,
they're claiming it has 26 hours of video playback, which, man, 26 hours of battery is amazing.
Going back to the point I made in the intro about people who maybe just don't really care too much
about what phone they have, that is going to be a ton because those type of people are gonna be the ones
that just pull it up, answer a quick text message, maybe do a quick Google, whatever it may be,
and then don't touch their phone again. That could translate to longer than just a day worth of use.
In my case, I know it's not exactly comparable with the Pro Max here.
I have found myself getting several days worth of battery off this thing.
And so if you have a less powerful device that is probably going to be used less,
I could see the same thing happening. And I think Apple knows that too because right away when you turn this thing on,
you can see there's kind of a healthy bezel around the edge here and even that camera notch,
man, that takes up a significant percentage
of your screen. Other than the refresh rate, which I mentioned earlier,
I don't think Apple has made too many other compromises to the screen.
It still is an OLED. It's still Super Retina XDR.
It's a 6.1 inch screen, 2532 by 1170.
You are getting the same PPI as the iPhone 17,
which means content on the screen is going to look very, very good
for those YouTube videos or those movies you're gonna watch. I do wish they went a little smaller.
When I actually bought my wife an iPhone 17, one of the things she complained about was
I miss my 13 mini. Bring back the mini Apple. That was the best iPhone you've ever made in my opinion.
I actually just went to hit it, but it's not there. You don't get the camera button on the iPhone 17E.
That's something you only get with the 17 or the 17 Pro lineup.
Again, same thing. I don't think that the people buying this phone are gonna be too worried about having
that shutter button to take photos. It's probably a worthwhile cost-cutting measure
to get this a little bit cheaper. We should still look at the camera though. Let's open it up.
All right, let's take a photo. Let's take a photo of our kitchen set.
Then I'm gonna do a 2X and we're gonna kind of zoom in on Lucky over there. And I have to zoom in a lot of very long ways
before I start having issues with the camera quality. Like even that looks impeccable.
There is just something special about iPhone cameras. It's just magic.
I do feel like it might be a little limiting for some people to have just the one camera
that can kind of do everything pretty good versus having your specialized cameras
that might do their specialized focus really, really well. But again, oh, I'm gonna take a picture of little Billy.
I wanna take a selfie because the iPhone 17 has that square sensor
as the selfie camera, right? It seems like a gimmick, but once you've used it, it's pretty cool.
Reese, I need a friend. So go get someone else, please. No.
All right, we're gonna take a photo. Oh, it's just me. Hey buddy. Oh, it doesn't, don't look so sad.
It didn't do the auto scaling. Maybe I need a better friend to help me scale it better.
That's just a little bit of a bummer. I mean, it doesn't mean the photo is bad.
It still looks very good. The type of person that's buying this phone doesn't need the highest quality camera.
So if that's a cost-cutting measure that helps get the price down, I think it's fine.
I also just realized that those photos were on the 24 megapixel setting, which is on by default.
We could also take our photos on the 48 megapixel.
Yeah, most people aren't really gonna care. So I think actually keeping it on the 24 megapixels
by default is probably a good thing because a lot of people are gonna be snapping
a ton of photos with this thing, right? Whether again, it's families
or you're just going out for a walk, whatever it may be. And having only 256 gigs of storage,
you kinda wanna get your mileage out of 256 gigs of storage.
So by in turn, lowering the quality of the photos,
you can have more photos. And 256 gigs, I quickly glossed over that.
I think that's awesome as an entry-level phone, right? Before the 16e had 128 gigabytes.
Now we're at 256. And in a world where DRAM prices are going absolutely insane,
the fact that Apple chose not to gouge that out of us
on the entry-level model, I think is kind of awesome.
I think it shows respect for consumers and their space. What doesn't show respect is 60 Hertz, damn it.
It's such a weird thing. When you compare this to other entry-level phones,
whether it's Samsung's A56 or Google's Pixel 10a,
those phones have 120 Hertz screens. Why can't Apple, damn it?
But it's an entry-level phone. I've always thought that 120 Hertz screens
on entry-level phones seemed kinda weird anyways. At least your iPhone 17 has 120 Hertz now.
But once again, going back to who the target market is for this thing, they don't care about 120 Hertz.
I don't know, man. In a world where tech has become kinda shitty lately,
I feel like Apple's done kind of a lot of cool things right. I know this isn't the MacBook Neo video.
That's a prime example right there. Sorry, enough Apple glazing. Let's watch a YouTube video.
Man, this looks good. Other than the big fuck off notch.
Sorry, part of my language. That takes up so much of the screen real estate.
You kinda can't watch it in full screen. It gets pretty bright though. 800 nits, 1200 nits in peak brightness for HDR stuff.
It looks great. It's an Apple display. It's basically the same display
as the other 17 lineup right now, right? So it looks fantastic.
This is where it gets weird. I just complained that I wanted a smaller phone, but when I'm watching content on it,
it feels really small. Man, consumers really don't know what they want, right?
Anyways, we need to listen to the speakers on this bad boy.
Smaller devices mean worse speakers, typically.
Oh, I hope you're a bass head.
I can hear the bass pretty aggressively on this device. It sounds really good.
It's just very bass heavy. And for being such a small device,
I'm surprised at how loud it gets. I'm gonna go back down to 50% volume here.
Oh, even that, I can hear the bass like crazy. Yeah, they sound good other than the bass.
Well, I have to wait for a game to download. I might as well talk about some of the other specs that come with this phone.
It has Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and it has Apple's new C1X modem,
which is the exact same modem that was in the iPhone Air.
And the iPhone 16e had the C1, right?
That was the first time that they had moved over to Apple's in-house developed modems.
A lot of people attributed the great battery life of the 16e to that modem.
We should probably see similar results
in terms of battery longevity with this one, if it's using similar architecture and similar design.
We don't have those full numbers today because we just got the phone, I think, basically today.
So we didn't quite run battery tests just yet. I'm sure that once they're done though,
they can be up on the lab site. In some of our stress tests, mainly in Geekbench and 3DMark,
it performed basically exactly where you'd expect this to line up.
Better than last year's 16e and worse than the iPhone 17.
So at least it's not over-punching or under-punching, and it is an upgrade from last year.
That's exactly where I'd expect it to land. So I don't know why I'm surprised
or even talking about it this long. They're still using the ceramic shield two glass
that the iPhone 17 uses. It's very interesting to me that they managed to get this device
just a couple hundred bucks cheaper than the base model 17.
And on a lot of cases, make it feel the exact same.
I do think that some of the cost-cutting measures that they did actually were smart.
Whether you want 120 Hertz or not, I think if cutting it down to 60 Hertz
is what makes it cheaper, and let's go for it. I mean, I'm in game right now.
And at 60 Hertz on this size screen while playing,
this feels fine. Where's the lock? There it is, found it.
It's still got MagSafe, that's awesome. So hypothetical here.
You're giving your kids a new iPhone for their Christmas. You already have been a long-time iPhone user.
You have built up your MagSafe army. They can use it now. I think it's kind of cool
that they still managed to get MagSafe built in unlike the 16E, which I guess if I'm talking about price,
it's finally time to mention it. It's 599 US, which is more expensive
than a lot of other phones entry-level devices.
Like I mentioned earlier, that Samsung A56 or even the Pixel 10a, for an entry-level phone,
it's expensive. For an entry-level iPhone, it's cheap.
And I think that's where this is going again, right? This is going for your family members
that you want to have on iPhone because maybe your family's already an iPhone family.
Or maybe you just don't want to give them an Android because there's some things you don't like about it.
It might be a little complicated for your relative. Whatever it may be, this is the device
that's gonna be perfect for that. Perfect for kids' Christmas gifts. I think that the compromises that the iPhone 17E makes
is worth it to get it down to that price. I wish they could go a little bit cheaper.
Maybe if they made it a mini. Less material, eh?
Cheaper? I think right now in a world where devices feel
like they're getting more and more expensive, things are kind of terrible in the tech space.
I am giving Apple a gold star here. It's still expensive as a budget phone,
but between everything that they announced in the last couple of weeks here,
who would have thought that Apple's RAM pricing and SSD pricing ahead of the curve, baby.
But let me know what you guys think down below. If you guys enjoyed this video,
go check out the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the S26 Ultra that I just unboxed on ShortCircuit.
I tried to compare it to my flagship iPhone and it's a phone.
I think Samsung made more compromises on that than Apple did on this spoiler alert.