iPhone 16e – Image Credit: Apple
The iPhone 16e is now available, with shipments of the new budget smartphone starting to arrive on customer doorsteps.
Apple’s reincarnation of the iPhone SE line, the iPhone 16e, was opened for preorders on February 21. One week later, and the smartphone is now actually available.
Customers who preordered the iPhone 16e will start to receive their orders on Friday, or will be able to pick it up from the Apple Store. It will also be available to purchase without preorder from Apple, major retailers, and carriers.
Unusually for an Apple release, it seems there isn’t much of an order backlog to deal with. It is very likely that customers could simply walk into an Apple Store and pick one up from most retail locations.
Curiously, there’s also less excitement about the iPhone 16e’s availability on social media. At time of writing, there’s one YouTube video in Indonesian and one in English from Australia, that show buying and unboxing the iPhone in-store.
Available in a choice of Black or White, the iPhone 16e starts from $599 for 128GB, with 256GB and 512GB capacities also available for $699 and $899 respectively. AppleCare+ is available at $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year.
The update from the iPhone SE 3, the iPhone 16e boasts a new 6.1-inch OLED display. The Home button with Touch ID has been retired in favor of a notch and Face ID.
The back has a new 48-megapixel camera with a virtual 12MP telephoto thanks to selective cropping of the massive sensor.
As it is powered by an A18 chip, the iPhone 16e is also the cheapest smartphone on Apple’s roster with Apple Intelligence support. This gives access to features like Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, summarizations, ChatGPT via Siri, and Visual Intelligence using the Action button.
