-Reviewer-Photo-SOURCESOURCE-Julian-Chokkattu.jpg&w=3840&q=100)
The iPhone 16e Has Killer Battery Life but Questionable Value
The iPhone 16e isn't for me. If you're an avid tech enthusiast and Apple fan, it's probably not for you either. It's for the person holding onto an iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X, ready to upgrade because their more than seven-year-old smartphone isn't working too well nowadays. They want a new phone, and it just needs to be an iPhone.
A part of my brain won't stop thinking about whether this nearly once-in-a-decade upgrade for these folks wouldn't be better served if Apple had included its nice-to-have amenities, like MagSafe or the ultra-wideband chip for improved AirTags tracking. Even lacking these features, the price of the iPhone 16e feels $100 too high considering the many excellent competing phones in this bracket. It also makes the iPhone lineup confusing—it's $170 more than Apple's previous iPhone SE that's no longer available.
I have spent much of my time this past week using the iPhone 16e and thinking about its $599 MSRP, which naturally must mean that something is awry. This may not matter much to people in the US, who favor purchasing through carriers that subsidize the cost, though they're still paying for a $600 (locked) phone spread over a few years. But when the used iPhone marketplace is healthy and thriving, it feels as though anyone considering an iPhone 16e will find better value with an iPhone 15 or iPhone 15 Pro. Cell Boost
The best iPhone 16e feature? Battery life. Considering this is a 6.1-inch iPhone, which historically perform the lowest in battery tests, this is a welcome surprise. With average use over the past week, I struggled to bring the phone below 50 percent. (It usually hovered around 51 or 49 percent by bedtime.) Yes, that means the iPhone 16e has better battery life than the iPhone 16.
On one particular day when I used it for GPS navigation, music streaming, and picture snapping, it was left with around 30 percent before bed. And another busy day, I hit nearly nine hours of screen-on time and had 15 percent in the tank. That's excellent. It's still not the best iPhone battery life in the lineup—that'd be the iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus—but it's enough to keep that battery anxiety at bay when you're out and about.
Apple claims this battery boost is in part thanks to the first-ever Apple-designed C1 modem inside the phone. Apple spent years building this connectivity chip to reduce its reliance on partners like Qualcomm, and it seems to have paid off. I didn't experience any issues with cellular connectivity over the past week with the AT&T eSIM Apple provided, though this also could depend on region. (I'm in New York City.) I ran speed tests via Ookla on various phones alongside the iPhone 16e and did not find anything out of the ordinary. That said, remember Antennagate? We'll have to wait and see how the C1 modem performs in the hands of far more people across the world.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Apple Explains Why It Delayed AI Siri, Confirms It Won't Arrive Until 2026
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. Apple's AI-powered Siri upgrade wasn't part of WWDC 2025, but two of the company's representatives have spoke about the delay and what the future holds for the tool. Apple originally revealed an AI-powered Siri back in June 2024 showing how the assistant could work across your device's apps. The company then confirmed in March that the features were delayed. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple's SVP of software, Craig Federighi, and SVP of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, spoke about the delay. 'We don't want to disappoint customers", said Joswiak. "We never do but it would have been disappointing to ship something that didn't hit our quality standard that had an error rate that we felt was unacceptable." Federighi said later in the conversation that the feature didn't 'work reliably enough to be an Apple product.' He also said he believes no other rival service is currently able to reliably automate processes on devices. In another interview with TechRadar and Tom's Guide, Joswiak confirmed these features won't be launching until 2026. The company had previously said it'd be arriving in the "coming year,' which caused confusion on whether it meant in the next 12 months or at some stage in 2026. That may mean we see these get added in a later version of iOS 26, or they may possibly even come in iOS 27. Federighi said, "We will announce the date when we're ready to seed it." Apple also confirmed its issues with the assistant stemmed from the underlying architecture used to develop it. Federighi said the company was working on two versions simultaneously with one version running on "a deeper end-to-end architecture." Federighi said, "We realized that V1 architecture, we could push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards, and that we had to move to the V2 architecture." Federighi also spoke to YouTuber iJustine where he confirmed Apple plans to ship everything it has previously announced as part of an AI-powered Siri. He shared that there were more features to come, but the company wants to hold fire on announcing anything further until it's ready to launch. The features previously announced include awareness across an iPhone allowing Siri to interact with various apps at the same time. One example used in the original launch showed Siri finding a photo of a driver's license in Apple Photos, taking the ID number from it and adding it into the relevant section on a web form.
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Apple's Siri Struggle: New Report Explains What Went Wrong
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. A lot has been said about Siri in the past year after Apple failed to deliver on its promise of a supercharged voice assistant. Multiple delays and lawsuits later, we now have details on what went wrong at Cupertino. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple rushed the development of its AI features after OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in 2022. Things began falling apart when the team tried merging Siri's old code with the new one. Sources tell Gurman that Apple had no plans to launch Apple Intelligence until ChatGPT arrived. Apple's software chief, Craig Federighi, realized the chatbot's potential a month after its launch when he used it to write code for a personal project. Soon, Federighi, along with Apple's then AI head, John Giannandrea, and a few other executives, started meeting with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies to learn more about these AI models. Federighi also told his team that iOS 18 should infuse as many AI-powered features into an iPhone as possible. Giannandrea then assembled a team and started working on building large language models (LLMs) for AI features. However, as Apple inched closer to Apple Intelligence's public reveal in June 2024, internal tests showed that the chatbot lagged significantly behind ChatGPT, with OpenAI's product delivering 25% better accuracy. The desperate need for AI forced Apple to look for partners. For stronger user privacy, Giannandrea suggested Google, but Apple announced OpenAI as its first AI partner at WWDC 24. Many AI-powered features were announced at the June event, including the ability to summon ChatGPT for requests Siri can't fulfill. A delay pushed that feature to December 2024, but many others that were announced are still MIA, resulting in lawsuits and a new chapter in Apple's ever-growing Siri struggles. Some Apple Intelligence features were too buggy when Federighi started testing them on his personal phone before iOS 18.4. Worse, the communication between Apple's product development and marketing teams was poor. Apple had to pull down TV ads for iPhone 16 features that were nowhere close to being ready. Internally, Giannandrea has absorbed much of the blame for Siri's failure. Several employees claim that Giannandrea lacked urgency for generative AI; another Apple executive says Giannandrea believed consumers don't trust it enough and that AI agents are far away from replacing humans, Bloomberg reports. The exec has blamed overhyped marketing. CEO Tim Cook eventually lost faith in Giannandrea and replaced him with Vision Pro's head, Mike Rockwell, in March. Aside from these issues, Siri's code was seen to have a major technical flaw. To add AI features, Apple engineers split Siri's infrastructure in half. When they tried to merge Siri's new AI features with legacy features, such as setting the alarm, things started falling apart. A team in Zurich is now creating a new software architecture built entirely on an LLM-based engine, called LLM Siri. Their aim is to make Siri more conversational and better at processing information. In the EU, Apple will also let users replace Siri with third-party assistants, according to a source. According to an earlier New York Times report, some of Siri's announced but unreleased features are expected this fall. Meanwhile, Apple is prepping for a huge iOS revamp scheduled for WWDC 25 next month.
Forbes
41 minutes ago
- Forbes
Samsung's Galaxy Update—Get Android 16's Best Feature Now
Change this Samsung setting now. Google Pixels are now upgrading to Android 16, just as Samsung confirms that One UI 8 Beta 2 only just live. In the aftermath of One UI 7 delays, the clock is now ticking for Samsung to power through its beta program and push out Android 16 to Galaxy users. But there's a twist to this Android 15 versus Android 16 story. While most Samsung users have only recently upgraded to One UI 7, it turns out that one of Android 16's best features is (kind of) available to them already. It just needs a quick settings change. While live notification updates are important — who doesn't want to know 'why a burrito seems to be stuck four blocks away,' the real Android 16 highlight is Google's Advanced Protection Mode. This finally narrows the security gap to iPhone, some would argue it goes even further, with a lockdown that doesn't make phones unusable. That has been the criticism of Apple's Lockdown Mode — that it goes too far. But Apple says it is just for 'the very few individuals who might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.' Google's lockdown is more universal, targeting 'at-risk individuals' as well as anyone who 'just prioritizes security.' Maximum Restrictions Google says Advanced Protection Mode protects users from 'online attacks, harmful apps, unsafe websites, scam calls and more… providing greater peace of mind that you're protected against the most sophisticated threats.' While Samsung users need to wait for One UI 8 to get Google's new lockdown, they can get almost all the benefits now. Samsung upgraded Maximum Restrictions with One UI 7 and you can enable it now. Like Advanced Protection Mode, it now blocks risky network connections — including 2G and insecure WiFi, as well as USB data cables. More importantly, Samsung says One UI 7's Safe Install system 'sends a warning when a user attempts to download from an unauthorized source, alerting them of security risks and preventing unintentional sideloading on Galaxy devices worldwide.' That's not as complete as Google's lock — and unlike Google's Advanced Protection, Maximum Restrictions let's you choose what to enable. But it does prevent inadvertent installs. Maximum Restrictions also 'removes location data in shared photos, prevents automatic attachment downloads and blocks hyperlinks, previews and shared albums.' Enable Google's Advanced Protection Mode when you get One UI 8. But in the meantime, Galaxy users should turn on Maximum Restrictions now. It's no surprise this is now the default for all new Galaxy users and will keep you and your phone safer.
