After months of speculation that peaked last week with a teaser post on X, Apple has finally unveiled its next iPhone.
However, while pre-release rumours suggested it would be called the iPhone SE 4, proving its spirit animal is a cat for yet another year, Apple chose to call it the iPhone 16e instead.
And on paper, it looks pretty interesting for tech heads. Highlights include a new design that looks like a halfway house between the iPhone 14 and the current generation iPhone 16, with an upgraded A18 chipset that adds a host of Apple Intelligence upgrades and a swish-looking 6.1-inch OLED screen.
So why aren’t I breaking out the confetti? Two reasons. First, because it only unveiled the new iPhone 16e.
Despite rumours to the contrary, the little disc graphic on the teaser invite and announcement had me hoping for at least one surprise alongside the new smartphone – ideally a new HomePod Mini 2 wireless speaker.
Second, because Apple has once again made no mention of any sonic upgrades, or discussed audio quality in general in its announcement. Instead, it focussed purely on the camera and AI features. Cool, yes. But not really what gets me and the team at What Hi-Fi? up in the morning.
As a result, I have some big questions about the 16e’s audio and if it can live up to Apple’s strong track record of delivering excellent-sounding smartphones for serious music fans – a list currently headlined by the iPhone 16 Pro, which not only secured a perfect five-star rating from our testers, but also earned a What Hi-Fi? Award for its stellar sound quality last year.
First is the question around its actual hardware. Pre-release rumours suggested the phone would be heavily based on the iPhone 14 rather than iPhone 16. So we don’t know what specific circuitry, DAC etc it’s actually using.
If it is the iPhone 14 it's based on, that’s not necessarily a deal breaker given its £599 / $599 starting price. The iPhone 14 still sounds a lot better than many Android phones. We know that as we put it head to head with many of the recent mid-range handsets we've reviewed.
But, it’s nowhere near the level of the iPhone 16 Pro – which is one of the best-sounding handsets we’ve reviewed. So there could be a big difference in audio performance between the 16e and base 16 family of phones at a technical level.
Second, as we’ve said before, tuning plays a huge part in audio performance. So even if we had a full specifications sheet for the iPhone 16e, it wouldn’t tell us the whole story.
We’ve heard huge differences in audio quality between phones in the same family before and that means there could, and almost certainly will be differences between the 16e and other 16-series iPhones, even if they have similar hardware at their core.
That’s why we always run handsets through comparative testing, seeing directly how their sound performs when we review them using uniform test headphones and test tracks and sources.
Hopefully we’ll get to do the same with the iPhone 16e in the near future and answer my questions about its audio performance.
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