Goodbye iPhone SE, hello insipid rebranded iPhone SE

I was going with reblanded in the title as a provoking wordplay, but then I was reminded of that special portion of my audience chronically lacking in sense of humour and sending me messages and emails like, There’s a typo in your title etc.

Oh well. What an intro, eh?

In 2019, Samsung launched the Galaxy S10 line; there were two flagship models, the S10 and S10+, a bigger premium S10 5G, and later in 2020 Samsung introduced the S10 Lite, a midrange version of the S10. But this line also featured another model, perhaps the most interesting — the S10e. It wasn’t a ‘lite’ version of the S10, just a more compact variant which didn’t really skimp on features apart from having a slightly-lesser-quality display, a smaller battery, and lacking the telephoto camera. It had personality; it was the S10 for those who wanted a smaller phone. The title of The Verge’s YouTube review of the S10e sums it up pretty nicely — “Smaller, cheaper, better”. It is perhaps the last good small smartphone with a headphone jack.

I don’t know whether that ‘e’ meant something for Samsung. It’s the only occurrence of such suffix in the Galaxy S line. I don’t know why, but this kind of suffix always suggests ‘economy’ to me, in the air travel sense. But while the Samsung S10e did cost less than the other S10 flagships, it wasn’t a ‘cheap’ phone from a hardware quality standpoint.

The iPhone 16e isn’t either.

The Samsung S10e’s essence was probably best encapsulated by Engadget’s title for their video review: Smaller, but not lesser.

What is the iPhone 16e? To me, it’s confusion. I would add ‘aimlessness’, but then I’d have to read several rebukes in my email messages, from people who would tell me that Apple has a plan, a strategy behind it, like the company always has in everything they do. And yes, of course there is strategy here somewhere. But this latest iPhone, this new ‘addition to the family’ — a family made up of many models with too little differentiation — seems rather confusing to me.

And to Luke Miani, who in his first-impressions video on the iPhone 16e, visibly shares the same kind of puzzlement. This is what he concludes, in a breathless exposition tour de force:

You or I [technology enthusiasts] might be able to sit here and go, “iPhone 15 has a mute switch, 16e has an action button, and 16 has an action button and a camera control. The iPhone 15 is on the A16 chip, the iPhone 16e on the A18 chip with one less GPU core than the iPhone 16 on the also A18 chip with an additional GPU core. iPhone 15 has a Dynamic Island, 16e doesn’t; the iPhone 16 does again, but the iPhone 16e without the Dynamic Island has the better battery life of all three phones, better than the 15 and the 16″.

The average consumer is going to be so freaking confused by this. Why is the cheapest phone better and worse than the newer and older more expensive phones? It’s just too much; it’s too much, dude… I don’t really know how to describe it, other than Too Much. The benefit of the iPhone SE was that it was cheap. You didn’t buy it because of features; you bought it because you wanted an iPhone that would get software updates for years to come at the lowest possible price, and the iPhone 16e is not that. It is yet another midrange iPhone with a confusing suffix and a list of features that doesn’t make sense to most people.

It’s not a back-to-basics smartphone that you buy when you don’t know what else to get — it’s just another confusing addition to the middle ground, the $500–800 smartphone range, and frankly I think that this was a bad move. I don’t know, I really want to get my hands on this phone ’cause I think [that] as a phone it will probably be very good, but as a part of Apple’s iPhone lineup, I think it just adds confusion.

Miani speaks of the now-defunct iPhone SE line in pragmatic terms, an iPhone model targeted at pragmatic, budget-conscious customers. But what I liked of the SE line was that, conceptually, it was a standalone line with its own release schedule and its own peculiarities. Whether you liked it or not, it maintained a sort of quaint distinctiveness through its first three generations.

In my October 2024 article on the iPhone SE trajectory, I mused:

Now, imagine a hypothetical fourth-generation iPhone with an A18 Bionic chip (or perhaps a specially-designed A17 Bionic, sort of a nerfed-A18?), the single-camera setup and technology of the iPhone XR, and of course the external design of the iPhone XR, featuring a 6.1‑inch screen (maybe with a slightly updated display technology), Face ID, etc. Let’s say it would replace both the third-generation iPhone SE and the iPhone 14 in Apple’s current offering. Its trade-offs battle would be against the regular iPhone 15. And it would be a tough one. Yes, it would have a better chip, but given how recent performance gains in iPhones have become basically imperceptible in everyday use, would such an iPhone SE 4 be a better proposition over the 15 when all it had would be same or better CPU speed and a lower price? The display would have the same size, the display technology would be worse, it would feature a notch while the iPhone 15 has a dynamic island, it would feature a decidedly worse camera setup… Sure, $429 would be a bargain compared to the $699 of the iPhone 15. But its form factor is too similar and, apart from the CPU, all the rest would be the same stuff but worse in all respects. Unless Apple is planning to do some unexpected changes, like offering a single-camera setup but with a better camera than the XR’s 12-megapixel affair, to make the next iPhone SE more appealing, I don’t see anything particularly special or worth considering in it. […]

But you know what I think would make more sense? I know I come from a biased position, but to me it would make more sense if the design and form factor of the next iPhone SE would be those of the iPhone 12/13 mini. Maybe the 13 mini, since it has a smaller notch on the front and a better battery performance. […]

Overall, it would still feel like a ‘Special Edition’ phone: compared to the mainstream iPhone lineup, it would be different/special enough, appealing enough, modern enough, all the while maintaining that classic, truly iconic design that harks back to the lines of the iPhone 4 and 5. Apple could even sell it at $499 instead of $429.

What Apple managed to assemble is a sandwich of uninterestingness and raise its final price to $599. They discontinued a line of iPhone models that was ‘midrange with personality’, and released something that isn’t distinctive in any way, its price positioning makes it difficult to recommend, and finally its name ties it to a specific iPhone release — so you’re left wondering, Is this 16e a one-off thing, like the Samsung S10e was six years ago, or are we to expect an iPhone 17e, 18e, and so on?

I’m also left wondering, Who is it for? What was the reasoning behind this iPhone? But if there’s a device that best encapsulates the overall state of Apple today, it is, without doubt, this iPhone 16e.