The iPhone 17E is good, but you probably shouldn’t buy it

The iPhone 17E is better value than the 16E when it arrived, but that shouldn’t matter to anyone.

The main thing to know about the 17E is that the iPhone 17 exists, costs $200 more — or perhaps more importantly, $9 more per month on a two-year payment plan that doesn’t include any discount offered by your carrier — and comes with a long list of upgrades. If it’s possible to save that extra money, you should.

Replaces 17E 16E in Apple’s lineup. The 16E was the first in a new series: it wasn’t an old body with some updated internals for a deep discount, as was the case with the iPhone SE. Instead, the 16E was a full-fledged member of its iPhone generation, a bit worse off and a bit more expensive in the end. Its $600 price was too high for a phone that’s missing one of Apple’s core iPhone features: MagSafe.

Now Apple has corrected the errors of this device. The 17E comes with MagSafe, as well as 256GB of base storage, and still starts at $600, which is nothing to sneeze at given the memory crunch and all. But Apple did something else between 16E and 17E: it released the iPhone 17.

After years of “eh, the regular iPhone is Okay“, iPhone 17 finally raises the basic iPhone to a new level of “yeah, This is the thing most people should get“Basically, you get a ProMotion display — until last fall, Apple had reserved the 120Hz display for the Pro models. With that feature, you also get an always-on display, or AOD, which is useful for checking notifications, widgets, and even the time at a glance. These may seem like long-awaited updates for an $800 phone, especially if you’re used to Android hardware. It happened, but it’s finally happening, and a $600 iPhone makes less sense than ever when it’s a The $800 iPhone is fully up to speed.

I’m a big fan of AOD, and it’s one of the biggest things I missed while using the 17E. I keep glancing at the phone on my desk thinking it must be showing me the time, or my lock screen widgets. The lack of AOD also means you lose some of the functionality of the bedside watch mode that’s enabled when it’s on the charger, and in day-to-day use you have no way to track live activities (like the status of your Starbucks order) without tapping the lock screen — and there’s no dynamic island to house those updates, either. StandBy, Live Activity, and Dynamic Island are some of Apple’s best software ideas in recent history, and the fact that they were either implemented halfway (or not at all) on the 17E is a huge disappointment.

In better news, I don’t see any red marks on the battery front after using the phone for several days. With three to four hours of screen on, I have about 50 percent charge left by bedtime. The 17E uses Apple’s 2nd generation C1X wireless modem, and maintains a strong connection while streaming video on a train moving between cell towers and through tunnels into downtown Seattle. I haven’t had time to do much extensive testing on it, but so far this is a true “no news is good news” situation.

back camera, Singularis the other big reduction in 17E. It’s not just the absence of ultra-wide range; Like the 16E, the 48MP main camera sensor on the 17E is slightly smaller than the one on the regular iPhone 17. The larger sensor offers a lot of benefits, including better low-light photos. It’s a difference you’ll see in careful side-by-side comparisons, so it’s unlikely to be a deal-breaker for everyone. But all things being equal, a larger image sensor will only improve image quality, since small smartphone sensors are already at a disadvantage compared to the larger sensors in most dedicated cameras.

Sure, you have a 2x crop on the main camera. Apple calls it “optical quality,” which means there’s no digital upscaling; It only uses the middle 12MP on the sensor. I shoot with it a lot on the 17E, especially for portrait mode, and it gets the job done. It doesn’t feel like a replacement for a longer dedicated telephoto lens, but it’s better than nothing. Also missing: the iPhone 17 series’ upgraded selfie camera, which does some cool stuff like automatically rotating from portrait to landscape mode to fit the group in the frame. The 17E’s camera system overall is just that finebut unless you’re completely indifferent to your phone’s camera, the upgrades in version 17 seem worth the extra money to me.

Even with these trade-offs, there are still people who will consider the 17E on the basis of, “It’s the cheapest new iPhone I can buy.” My husband is one of them. It’s hard for gadget nerds to understand, but there are people who don’t know or care what MagSafe is. People who only take occasional photos with their phones and don’t care about quality. Maybe even people who want to pay out of pocket for their phones and not have to think about it again for as long as possible. The fact that the 17E finally feels like a decent minimum viable product is a relief to me personally, so I don’t feel like I’m committing professional malpractice if I ask these people to buy it, as I would have done with the 16E.

However, MagSafe in particular seemed like an inexcusable omission in the 16E, if only because it seems to be an important part of Apple’s own definition of the iPhone. Personally, I like to plug the 17E into a magnetic wireless charger at the end of the day. MagSafe also opens up your phone to a world of grips and PopSockets that you can change or remove on a whim. It was silly to leave MagSafe out of the 16E and I’m glad it’s there now.

This is actually the minimum viable iPhone in a way that the 16E wasn’t. But the benefits gained by stepping up to the regular 17 — starting with a better, more useful screen, and a more versatile camera — are more significant than the $200 price difference suggests, and if you have the means, I think you should make the move. The regular iPhone 17 is still the one you can buy.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge