The iPhone SE was about addition, the 16E is about subtraction

It's just the worst iPhone

Apple announced the iPhone 16E this week, seemingly marking the end of the iPhone SE line that first launched nine years ago.

That original SE was essentially an iPhone 6S in the body of an iPhone 5S, serving both as a $400 entry point to the iPhone and a credible modern option for people who preferred the older design. The next SE did much the same for the iPhone 8 design in the post-iPhone X age.

SE phones were about adding new things to ostensibly outdated builds. If you liked the old form factor, this was the best it’d ever be. Maybe you loved the first SE for its compact size, or the second SE for preserving the home button.

I always loved John Gruber’s review of the first iPhone SE — it’s a wonderful distillation of the heart-versus-head tradeoffs inherent to the choices we all make on technology and design. Yes, the inevitable iPhone 7 would be the better phone a few months down the line, Gruber knew. But would he feel the same way when he held it?

None of that really comes into play with the iPhone 16E, because it’s just a current-style iPhone with less stuff, worse stuff or both. Even the screen size is identical to the basic iPhone 16, unless you count the area lost to the notch.

The result is a phone that will probably sell just fine and that carriers will love to “give away”, but one with no advantage over any competitor other than being the cheapest iPhone. There’s something to be said for that, of course — lots of companies still issue the SE as work phones for a reason — but it marks the end of an era in which the entry-level iPhone had something unique to recommend it.

And at $600, this one isn’t even cheap.