The iPhone 16e is still under pre-orders, which means no one really knows about its internals except for the features already revealed by the company a few days ago. It appears that despite the embargos, someone has tested the iPhone 16e with a benchmark and spilled the beans on its specifications.
As you may know, Apple’s iPhone 16e isn’t supposed to land on official store shelves until February 28th, but eager enthusiasts at MySmartPrice found it in a Benchmark listing already. They didn’t wait a second to expose the phone’s true colors and, in the process, mentioned some hardware details that haven’t been listed officially.
We already know about its reduced graphics computing since the A18 chip used for iPhone 16e has one less core than the original iPhone 16. The lesser core count does away with at least a 15% graphics performance reduction over the original Apple A18 5-core GPU. There’s no choice but to admit the iPhone 16e is inferior in performance and sits at the bottom of the iPhone 16 family.
There is a silver lining, though. Since the Apple A18 chip is so powerful already because of the incremental upgrades over the years, you won’t notice much of a gap in performance for your day-to-day activities. It’s still a flagship experience you are getting here.
Since it was the Geekbench platform used for the performance test, we got all the usual hardware details, like the RAM, SoC, and OS version; some of the specifics you know already, such as the Apple A18 SoC and iOS 18.3. But we didn’t know until now that the Apple new iPhone model has 8 GB RAM. It’s a helpful clue.
Apple Intelligence needs higher RAM capacity for operation. iPhone 16e’s upgrade to 8 GB RAM is a clue that Apple Intelligence will run natively on the device, at least for basic tasks, and SIRI’s integration with local apps. Another big reveal came from a Chinese regulator, saying the iPhone 16e supports 29W input.
This hardware setup is the main reason this iPhone 16e is so efficient, even though it’s the same size as an iPhone 14. From how Apple advertised this device, the iPhone 16e will last 6 hours longer than the iPhone 11 and about 12 hours longer than the older iPhone SE. We won’t know the full story vis-à-vis the actual battery capacity until the phone is deployed for retail.
