Apple’s Newest Budget Phone Brings Accessibility in more ways than one

Apple this week announced the iPhone 16e. The company put out a press release on it, but it also posted a video to YouTube. I chose to indulge in the latter medium for entertainment value. Wednesday’s news came after CEO Tim Cook took to X to tease what he coyly characterized as introducing the “newest member” of the Apple family.

The entry level iPhone, which Apple says costs $599 and ships on February 28, replaces the iPhone SE as the “low end” of the iPhone product line. There’s a certain fortuitousness with the launch of the 16e, as it comes soon after Forbes let me loose late last month after a four-year stint as part of its contributor network. My first story for my dearly departed column, posted in April 2020, was about the then-new iPhone SE. What’s more, the release of the SE model the 16e is supplanting, released in 2022, was the subject of my first-ever embargoed iPhone review—also published to my column.

After a day or so of digesting the iPhone 16e news, I believe it largely compels from an accessibility angle. iPhones, regardless of their place in Apple’s pecking order, are unabashedly premium, top-tier smartphones. They’re unquestionably expensive. By and large, lots of disabled people cannot afford anything but the budget-conscious iPhone. Whatever niggles the nerds have about the 16e’s feature set—more on that below—the bird’s eye take in an accessibility context is the 16e holds a tremendous value proposition. To wit, not only can a disabled person get an iPhone and all the prestige and capability that comes with it, they gain access to what’s arguably the industry’s best all-around suite of accessibility features. This isn’t a trivial matter; I, what with my highest-end iPhone 16 Pro Max, live and breathe through my phone. It is, without question, my most important and oft-used computer. My life is on there.

The bottom line: if all you have to spend is $600 and you want an iPhone, the 16e is it.

Now for the particulars, beginning with the most important metric of all: price. At $599, the 16e is significantly costlier than the aforementioned $429 iPhone SE that was put out to pasture. That difference is nearly $200, which is a lot of money to many folks. It’s highly plausible a disabled person eyeing an iPhone may need to look elsewhere—perhaps the refurbished market or somewhere like Amazon or Best Buy. There’s no shame in shopping the secondary market—I’ve seen reports of iPhone 15 Pro devices on Amazon for roughly the same cost as a brand-new 16e—many people find it comforting to buy new from the vendor for the same reason Linus loves carrying around his blanket everywhere. Especially from a quality assurance perspective, it can be a crapshoot at times in knowing the actual working condition of secondhand electronics.

Now onto the technical attributes. Most curious to me amongst Apple’s choices in building the iPhone 16e is to leave the Dynamic Island and MagSafe on the proverbial cutting room floor. To the former, the company just a few short months ago crowed about the base iPhone 16 getting the Dynamic Island. In the almost three years of its existence, I’ve found the Dynamic Island to be a greatly accessible way to keep tabs on information like kitchen timers and, catering to my avowed fanaticism of all things sports, game updates from Apple Sports. Component costs notwithstanding, I’d imagine a person with low vision contemplating the 16e could be disappointed by its lack of the Dynamic Island—causing them to look elsewhere for a similarly priced iPhone with the feature. I remember speaking with Alan Dye, who helps lead Apple’s industrial design group, following the iPhone 14 media event in September 2022. He was enamored with my brief comments on how the Dynamic Island could impact accessibility for the disability community, telling me it was a priority for his team.

As for the latter, the absence of MagSafe in the 16e is conspicuous as all hell. I’ve gone on the record innumerable times over time in which I extol the virtues of magnets in tech like MagSafe and the iPad’s Smart Covers. While the 16 does support Qi charging, MagSafe is better because, by virtue of physics, the magnetic attraction makes it such that a person needn’t fiddle with alignment to get the phone in the right spot to begin charging. Qi charging does have accessibility merit of its own—namely, a disabled person with questionable hand-eye coordination is saved from plugging in a cable into the iPhone’s USB-C port—but MagSafe talks the general concept a step further by using magnets to expedite the process. Like I said about the Dynamic Island, the omission of MagSafe in the 16e is yet another addition to the con column that could cause a disabled person to look elsewhere—and for a perfectly legitimate reason.

Lastly, some (more) thoughts on ProMotion. The 16e has an ostensibly lowly 60Hz display compared to the standard 120Hz on its more beefed-up brethren. The nerd set and the mainstream tech media like to say it’s bad Apple continues to sell phones with 60Hz displays, but I say the consternation is somewhat overwrought. This is a hill I’ve died on many times over the last several years; I wholly support technological progress and thus bumping the baseline to 90Hz. My problem with the community’s collective stance on high refresh rate screens is they make it sound like it’s table stakes for computers to be 120Hz. In other words, to have 60Hz on, for instance, the 16e will make for a demonstrably worse user experience. I just don’t buy it. What the press and YouTubers fail to realize is not everyone has the ability to really appreciate smoother scrolling and more fluid animations. It isn’t a matter of taking away ProMotion from people who like it; it’s a matter of understanding literally not everyone benefits. It’s disingenuous (and dare I say, privileged) to bemoan the “there’s still 60Hz in 2025” when the reality is it isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Let me be crystal clear in saying, sure, Apple should boost the baseline to 90Hz in the name of progress in the same way they finally moved to 16GB of RAM in MacBooks. At the end of the day, however, ProMotion is not a make-or-break feature; tech enthusiasts would do well to temper their expectations. While I intellectually acknowledge ProMotion is on my 16 Pro Max, my low vision is so bad that ProMotion effectively doesn’t exist in practice. It may as well be the basic 60Hz. Is my usage made worse by this? Not one iota, I promise you.

Anyway, the iPhone 16e certainly looks the part of an eminently capable, modern budget iPhone. It’s perplexing in places, but remains an iPhone. That counts for a lot.