The iPhone 16e performs nearly as well as the iPhone 16 in many cases, and better in some.
At the end of February, Apple made a bit of history by releasing its first product to use its a cellular chip of its own design. The Apple C1 is a 5G-capable modem that lacks some of the most advanced features (like mmWave support) and should be, on paper, not quite as good as the Qualcomm-made modem in the regular iPhone 16 line. Apple’s focus appears to be on reliability and power efficiency with the C1, with analysts expecting Apple to catch up on performance with the next-generation C2 modem.
In our own limited testing, we found the iPhone 16e to be quite a bit slower than the iPhone 16 in several locations around on metropolitan area on one network, but that only tells part of the story.
Ookla, which creates the popular Speedtest app, published results from user-run tests during the first 12 days of availability in the United States and found that the iPhone 16 had higher overall speeds, but that the iPhone 16e could hold its own or even come out ahead depending on network, location, and network conditions.
