iPhone 17e hands-on: nothing more, nothing less

Apple announced the $599 iPhone 17e earlier this week, and we just got a chance to play with one for a few minutes at the company’s “experience” for media in New York City.

The 17e is more or less exactly what you’d expect – a cheaper, simpler riff on the iPhone 17 that replaces the similarly stripped down iPhone 16e in Apple’s lineup. It comes in black, white, and pink, and the main compromise is really the display: it’s a very basic 6.1-inch display 60Hz screen that doesn’t have the Dynamic Island or ProMotion or anything. The only real upgrade to the screen is that is now has Apple’s Ceramic Shield 2 coating for improved scratch resistance and glare. It’s all fine for the entry-level phone – but at this point Apple has far more interesting displays elsewhere.

There’s but a single 48-megapixel camera on the back which generally produces 24-megapixel photos. You can shoot in the full 48 if you want, and the sensor can be cropped in for a 2x telephoto which Apple insistently calls “optical-quality” in its ongoing attempt to redefine camera words in fantastical new ways. We’ll see how all that looks when we get a chance to actually review this thing, but for now it all felt like a familiar iPhone camera situation, apart from the lack of a Camera Control button and the slight downgrade to a 12-megapixel front camera from the 18-megapixel shooters found across the rest of the lineup.

The big news is on the back, where Apple’s added MagSafe to its entry-level phone for the first time. You can wirelessly charge at up to 15W (down from 25W for the rest of the lineup) and it supports the Qi2 standard for those who like to party cross-platform.

Inside, the base storage has been bumped up 256GB and you’ve got an A19 processor alongside Apple’s new C1X modem, which the company claims is twice as fast – a nice idea belied by the reality of 5G in 2026. But still: nice.

That’s about it, really – as you’d expect, the iPhone 17e is a nice thing to hold and Apple’s fit and finish make for a very sharp little package. But there’s nothing mindblowing here – which is probably exactly right for a $599 phone that most people will buy on sale or get for free on contract.