Apple’s new iPhone 16e, a new addition to the iPhone 16 lineup that offers powerful capabilities at a more affordable price, proves that Apple can’t ship junk.
iPhone 16e delivers fast, smooth performance and breakthrough battery life, thanks to the industry-leading efficiency of the A18 chip and the new Apple C1, the first cellular modem designed by Apple. iPhone 16e is also built for Apple Intelligence, the intuitive personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence while taking an extraordinary step forward for privacy in AI. The 48MP Fusion camera takes gorgeous photos and videos, and with an integrated 2x Telephoto, it is like having two cameras in one, so users can zoom in with optical quality. When outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage, Apple’s groundbreaking satellite features — including Emergency SOS, Roadside Assistance, Messages, and Find My via satellite — help iPhone 16e users stay connected and get assistance when it matters most.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Apple Inc.’s revamped low-end iPhone has finally arrived and the most significant development isn’t a new feature or app, but rather the price. It’s $599, which is $170 more than the iPhone SE it replaces.
That change puts the new iPhone 16e model in a whole different category than its predecessor. And it means Apple has effectively abandoned the budget smartphone market, ceding those sales to Samsung Electronics Co., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and the China-based players.
Rather than a truly cheap iPhone, the new model is more of a slightly downscale version of Apple’s flagship lineup.
MacDailyNews Take: Smart buyers in this category will realize that they use their smartphone for 3-4 years and, starting at $599, their new iPhone would cost them $150-$200 per year, a tremendous value for an A18-powered iPhone with a high-quality camera system that’s built for Apple Intelligence.
Not-so-smart buyers in this category will settle for an iPhone knockoff for $100-$200 less, saving themselves a whopping $25-$67 annually over the 3-4 years they’ll be saddled with some POS phone. They deserve 3-4 years of inferior wares due to their poor purchasing abilities. Some of them will learn their lesson. Most will not; they’ll just continue handicapping themselves. Half of the world is, by definition, below average intelligence. Hence, Android, Windows, etc.
Of course, Steve Jobs – who wrote the playbook Tim Cook follows to this very day — concisely explained this long ago:
Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products that we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And, we want to do that at the lowest prices we can, but I have to tell you, there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship; that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends.
And, we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.
So, there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who we are… what you’ll find is that our products are not premium-priced. You go and price out our competitors’ products and you add the features that you have to add to make them useful and you’ll find that in some cases they are more expensive than our products.
The difference is that we don’t offer stripped-down lousy products.
— Steve Jobs, August, 2007
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I still feel Apple is missing a small form factor phone in the landscape. I know many people (besides myself) that prefer a smaller form factor phone. I think the answer would be to offer a mini every other cycle; like maybe every even number upgrade offer a mini. IF Apple offered a smaller sized phone (like the mini), I would have upgraded my 12 mini already.
You are part of a niche market. Too small of a niche.
If there were a large enough market for a small iPhone to make it worth the company’s while, Apple would make a small iPhone.
There is not a large enough market, so there is no “mini” iPhone.
There is no “mini” iPhone, because there is not a large enough market.
Classic Innovators Dilemma assumptions.
“… not large enough market”. Christensen wrote poems about that one.
Not large enough for whom? Calling a market for a smaller form factor phone a ‘niche’ and ignoring it opens the way for a new innovator to capture that lower end of the market. Hundreds of companies have been destroyed by ignoring a competitor who steps in and takes a market segment (almost always low-end) and starts to disrupt the incumbent by appealing to an unserved low-end who no longer desire or care to pay for the overserving technology the incumbent is offereing, while at the same time allowing the disrupter to find new customers that cannot be counted or seen by the incumbent, and who turn a blind eye to the disruptors shift of the new value proposition as they win over new customer segments and customer loyalty as they move along a radically different and lower cost structure than the incumbent.
They learn to succeed with lower profits.
The corporate structure of the incumbent becomes its own worst enemy, demanding inflexible rates of return, hiring only those that ‘fit’ in the existing structure, ignoring new market channels, being threatened by existing customer groups (like operators) and adding features that are not wanted by users while pricing themselves out of more and more markets, pushing themselves into the northeast quadrant of the affordability graph.
Apple needs to watch out as it keeps raising prices, Keeps making bigger phones, and keeps caking on far too many features and complexity that more and more of the market are tired of and who long for something Apple no longer offers.
I would have already replaced my 12 mini if Apple had released a smaller phone, such as the mini.
THe phone might not be junk, but Im afraid the Intelligence just might be.
I’m keeping my SE until it dies and not one day less. You may not ship junk, Apple, but you need to ship “useable” phones that fit in a person’s jeans pocket. No way am I getting a “man purse” just to carry around a mini-tablet slash iphone.
Apple refuses to make “stripped-down lousy products,” which justifies its $599 price tag — far above what the old italian brainrot iPhone SE used to cost.