So Much More Bang for Your Buck

Not enough. That was the general consensus when Apple released the $600 iPhone 16e a year ago. Fast forward to today, and the new iPhone 17e is a far better value for the same price.

Apple could have added MagSafe to the iPhone 17e and called it a day, but it decided to double the starting storage (256GB), throw in an A19 chip that’s almost as powerful as the one in the $800 iPhone 17, include a faster C1X for 5G connectivity, and give the glass screen Ceramic Shield 2 to increase scratch resistance.

If you’re thinking, “That’s it?” then the iPhone 17e is probably not for you. The iPhone 17e is what you get if you’re on a tighter budget and you simply don’t need all the bells and whistles in the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro.

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Clean and simple design

On the surface, the iPhone 17e looks and feels exactly like the iPhone 16e. Everything from the aluminum frame to the single rear camera to the frosted glass back is the same. Ditto for the screen size (6.1-inch) and type (OLED, Super Retina XDR) and refresh rate (60Hz). The iPhone 17e also retains the customizable Action button and the notch in the display (no Dynamic Island again). There was a beautiful simplicity in the iPhone 16e and I’m really glad that Apple didn’t mess with it for the iPhone 17e.

I’m also happy to see that Apple added a “Rose Pink” color in addition to neutral white and black.

See iPhone 17e at Apple

I can already hear the geeks complaining about how the 60Hz refresh rate is a dealbreaker and how many Android phones in the same price range have 120Hz or faster displays. But I’ll be honest, after settling in with the iPhone 17e as my main phone for nearly a week, I didn’t even miss the 120Hz “ProMotion” on my personal iPhone 16 Pro. My brain and eyes just got used to 60Hz again when it recalibrated to being my new normal.

The stereo speakers with Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos support also sound great. You don’t realize how important having stereo speakers is until you lose the feature, like on the iPhone Air, which only has a tinny mono speaker.

MagSafe magic

The most notable feature addition is MagSafe—for both wireless charging and attaching magnetic accessories. Since its introduction in 2020 on the iPhone 12 series, MagSafe has been indispensable for perfect wireless charging alignment and convenient for attaching a magnetic wallet or an accessory such as a tripod. Not including it on the iPhone 16e felt like Apple had gone too far in cutting features.

With MagSafe, I was able to drop the iPhone 17e on my Belkin 2-in-1 MagSafe and AirPods dock stand every night to juice it up by morning. No waking up to an uncharged iPhone because the iPhone wasn’t aligned correctly with the wireless charging pad’s coils.

MagSafe charging is life-changing as a guy with two cats that love to bite at every dangling cable they can sink their fangs into. The iPhone 17e charges at up to 15W with either an official MagSafe or Qi2 wireless charger. The only catch is that you’ll need to use a 20W or higher-power charger, which isn’t included in the box. Fortunately, you can find many reputable fast chargers from brands like Anker or Ugreen for cheap these days.

It’s also really handy that I can slap on a magnetic card case to the back of the iPhone 17e when I don’t feel like carrying my whole wallet. For creators, MagSafe will be useful for attaching the iPhone 17e to tripods, like this neck-worn one that I often use for recording gadget POV shots.

Top performance

There’s little to say about performance on the iPhone 17e—it’s really fast. Which is no surprise since the A19 is one of the fastest phone chips out there. Just to give you a frame of reference for the A19 chip’s CPU power, I ran Geekbench 6 on the iPhone 17e and compared the results to the same ones from the Tensor G4 chip in the $500 Google Pixel 10a. The iPhone 17e scored 3,271 on the single-core test compared to the Pixel 10a, which scored a measly 1,516, making the iPhone 17e 115% faster. The performance gap is even wider for multi-core: the iPhone 17e scored 8,404 and the Pixel 10a scored 2,197, which works out to the iPhone 17e being about 282% faster.

iOS 26 is buttery smooth, and despite my constant frustration with Liquid Glass rendering app icons, text, and menu bars an optical or legible mess, the software is snappy. I can’t say I noticed any major drops in performance for typical phone things like browsing the web, watching videos, scrolling through social media apps, and sending messages.

Even with one fewer GPU core (four instead of five compared to the A19 chip in the iPhone 17), my go-to 3D mobile game, Asphalt Legends, held up like a champ. The iPhone 17e did get a little toasty when I booted up 3D games or edited large, 4K video clips together in CapCut, but that’s to be expected when throwing GPU-heavy tasks at it.

Apple touts faster speed for using Apple Intelligence features, like “Clean Up,” which removes distracting people or objects in a photo, but it’s not faster AI processing that I want, but better quality processing. Compared to the generative AI image repair tools on other phones and apps, Clean Up still looks the worst.

And although I didn’t take any technical tests to measure the 5G connection from the C1X modem, I can say that cellular connectivity was stable and strong on T-Mobile in my week of using the iPhone 17e in New York City’s Queens and Manhattan boroughs.

Solid cameras

The iPhone 17e’s cameras are right in line with what I expected. That is, the 48-megapixel “Fusion” camera and the 12-megapixel front-facing camera both take good-looking photos. The Fusion camera is a little deceiving at first glance. It’s actually kind of like having two camera lenses: an optical wide and a 2x telephoto with “optical-quality” zoom.

The image quality that you get pales in comparison to the cameras on the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro, but it’s serviceable. I wish the autofocus was faster on the iPhone 17e; I took more blurry shots than I would have liked when shooting my cats or cars. I personally like the closer focusing distance for taking close-up shots on the iPhone 17e versus the other iPhone 17 devices, but that’s just me. You’ll get better low-light photos and videos on Apple’s more expensive iPhones.

Where might you see camera improvements on the iPhone 17e? Apple says Portrait photos will have better separation between the foreground and background, especially around the edges of hair. In practice, I found very little difference in Portrait mode image quality between an iPhone 17e and iPhone 16. You can see a comparison below between the iPhone 17e (left) and the iPhone 16e (right).

While the Fusion camera is solid if you’re shooting mostly outdoors, I do miss a few features from the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro, like Dual Capture for recording from the front and rear cameras simultaneously, Action mode for super-stabilized video, and the next-gen Photography Styles that let you better dial in a specific image look.

Same price, more value

If I were handing out an award for “most improved phone,” the iPhone 17e would be a top contender. It’s like Apple actually listened to the complaints about the iPhone 16e and went down the checklist to tick them all.

Compared to the iPhone 16e, the iPhone 17e is just such a better value. It’ll be great for teenagers who don’t need the latest and greatest, anyone who’s upgrading from an iPhone on its last legs, or seniors. Listen, the elderly want in on iMessage, FaceTime, and AirDrop as much as everyone else, and they don’t care for fancy features like extra camera lenses or a Dynamic Island.

I hesitated to recommend the iPhone 16e to many people last year. It had too many compromises for a $600 phone. I have no hesitation recommending the iPhone 17e. In these concerning times when the cost of everything is skyrocketing and it feels like your dollar gets you so much less than before, it’s nice to see Apple keep pricing the same for the E-series while adding more features.

See iPhone 17e at Apple