Apple secretly put a less powerful A18 chip inside the iPhone 16e, the most affordable member of the iPhone 16 family. Cupertino is using a binned version of the processor with one less GPU core. This is relative to the A18 inside the iPhone 16. Not that it makes a lot of difference, but surely in edge cases—and while running benchmarks—you’ll see a difference, how big or small, we’ll see once Apple starts seeding the device for review purposes.
The iPhone 16e uses a variant of the A18 with the same 6-core CPU and 16-core NPU but the GPU has only four functional cores. This is one less than the A18 chip inside the iPhone 16. The iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max have an even more powerful A18 “pro” variant with a 6-core GPU.
In its marketing materials, Apple has compared the performance of the iPhone 16e with the A13 Bionic-powered iPhone 11 from 2019 with the CPU billed as being up to 80 percent faster and NPU seemingly up to 6x faster at running machine learning (ML) models. Apple doesn’t give any benchmark for graphics, only highlighting that it supports graphically demanding AAA titles and hardware-accelerated ray tracing for more realistic lighting and reflections.
As is usually the case, Apple hasn’t explicitly confirmed the RAM inside the iPhone 16e but since it supports Apple Intelligence, we have reason to believe it has 8GB of RAM at least. We’ll know for sure once we get a hold of the device in person.
The iPhone 16e is the spiritual successor to the iPhone SE 3 from 2022. Launched in India at a starting price of Rs 59,999, the iPhone 16e is a souped-up iPhone 14 with a single 48-megapixel camera and Action Button. While it supports wireless charging, Apple doesn’t allow MagSafe/magnetic charging for some reason. The iPhone 16e is also the first iPhone with Apple’s self-made C1 5G cellular modem though technical details on it are scarce at the time of writing. All we know is that Apple is claiming the best power efficiency on any iPhone ever.
Follow FE Tech Bytes on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
