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The iPhone 16e rivals Apple's base iPhone 16 in every benchmark except one
Mar 1, 2025
The 16e may be the budget iPhone, but it packs a solid punch
There's a new entry-level iPhone on the scene and it's not an SE.
The iPhone 16e is Apple's new budget-friendly phone, and it features a powerful A18 chipset, a 2-in-1 48MP Fusion camera, and up to 26 hours of video playback battery life.
On paper, the iPhone 16e is a solid competitor for the iPhone 16, as it has similar specs but costs $200 less. But how does the iPhone 16e stack up against the other 16th-generation iPhones? And what about the old iPhone SE3?
Based on our lab benchmarks, even the iPhone 16 Pro faces serious competition — except in one key area.
iPhone 16e benchmarks: Performance
The iPhone 16e features an A18 chip similar to the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, with a 6-core CPU and 4-core GPU. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus have an additional GPU core in their A18 chipset.
The iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max feature the A18 Pro chipset with a 6-core CPU and a 6-core GPU. The iPhone SE 3 features a A15 Bionic chipset with a 6-core CPU and a 4-core GPU.
All six Apple smartphones we've compared to the iPhone 16e come equipped with a 16-core neural engine.
We expected the iPhone 16e to handle similarly to the iPhone 16, and in fact, the iPhone 16e outperforms the iPhone 16 on all of our CPU lab tests. The two phones are pretty close, averaging about a 1% difference on Geekbench 6 single-core and multicore benchmarks. The iPhone 16e is also just 2-3% worse than the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max.
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