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

The iPhone 17E is a better value than the 16E was when it arrived, but that should matter to basically nobody.

The main thing to know about the 17E is that the iPhone 17 exists, it costs $200 more — or maybe more significantly, an extra $9 per month on a two-year payment plan not including whatever discount your carrier offers — and it comes with a long list of upgrades. And if it’s within your means to put down that extra money, you should.

The 17E replaces the 16E in Apple’s lineup. The 16E was the first in a new series: not an older chassis with some refreshed internals for a steep discount, like the iPhone SE was. Instead, the 16E was a full member of its iPhone generation, just a bit worse and ultimately slightly too expensive. Its $600 price tag felt too high for a phone missing one of Apple’s core iPhone features: MagSafe.

Now, Apple has righted the wrongs of that device. The 17E comes with MagSafe, as well as a base storage bump up to 256GB, and it still starts at $600, which is nothing to sneeze at given the memory crisis and all. But Apple did something else in the time between the 16E and the 17E: it released the iPhone 17.

After years of “Eh, the regular iPhone is okay,” the iPhone 17 finally brought the basic iPhone up to a new level of “Yeah, this is the one most people should get.” Mainly, it got a ProMotion display — until last fall, Apple had reserved the 120Hz screen for the Pro models. With that feature, it also got an always-on display, or AOD, which is useful for checking notifications, widgets, and even just the time at a glance. Those may sound like long overdue updates to a $800 phone, especially if you’re used to Android devices. They were, but they finally happened, and a $600 iPhone makes less sense than ever when the $800 one is fully up to speed.

I’m a big fan of an AOD, and it’s one of the top things I’ve missed while using the 17E. I keep glancing at the phone on my desk thinking it should show me the time, or my lock screen widgets. No AOD also means you lose some of the functionality of the bedside clock mode that’s enabled when it’s on a charger, and in day-to-day use you don’t have a way of keeping track of 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 Activities, and Dynamic Island are some of Apple’s best software ideas in recent history, and the fact that they’re implemented either halfway (or not at all) on the 17E is a bit of a letdown.

In better news, I’m not seeing any red flags on the battery front after using the phone out and about for a couple of days. With three to four hours of screen-on time, I’ve had around 50 percent charge left by bedtime. The 17E uses Apple’s second-generation C1X wireless modem, and it maintained a solid connection while streaming video on a train moving between cell towers and through tunnels into downtown Seattle. I haven’t had time to do a lot of thorough testing with it, but so far this is a real “no news is good news” situation.

The rear camera, singular, is the other big downgrade on the 17E. It’s not just the absence of an ultrawide; like the 16E, the 17E’s 48-megapixel main camera sensor is just a little smaller than the one on the regular iPhone 17. A bigger sensor provides a lot of benefits, including better low light images. It’s a difference you’ll see in careful side-by-side comparisons, so it’s not likely to be a deal breaker to everyone. But all things being equal, a bigger image sensor is only going to help image quality, since tiny smartphone sensors are already at a disadvantage compared to the bigger ones in most dedicated cameras.

Sure, you’ve got the 2x crop on the main camera. Apple calls it “optical quality,” which just means that there’s no digital upscaling happening; it’s just using the middle 12 megapixels on the sensor. I’ve been shooting with it quite a bit on the 17E, particularly for portrait mode, and it does the trick. It doesn’t feel like a substitute for a longer, dedicated telephoto lens, but it’s better than nothing. Also missing: the iPhone 17 series’ upgraded selfie camera, which does some neat things like automatically rotate from portrait to landscape to fit a group in the frame. The 17E’s camera system on the whole is fine, but unless you’re extremely indifferent to your phone camera, the upgrades on the 17 feel worth the extra money to me.

Even with these tradeoffs, there are still people who will consider the 17E purely on the basis of “It’s the cheapest new iPhone I can buy.” My husband is one of them. It’s hard for a gadget nerd to fathom, but there are people out there who don’t know or care what MagSafe is. People who only take the occasional photo with their phone and aren’t fussy about the quality. Maybe even people who want to pay out of pocket for their phone and not have to think about it again for as long as they can get away with. The fact that the 17E finally feels like a proper minimum viable product is a relief to me, personally, so I don’t feel like I’m committing professional malpractice if I tell those people to buy it, like I would have for the 16E.

Still, MagSafe in particular felt like an inexcusable omission on the 16E, if only because it seems to be a significant part of Apple’s own definition of an iPhone. I, for one, love thwacking the 17E onto a magnetic wireless charger at the end of the day. MagSafe also opens your phone up to a world of grips and PopSockets that you can change or remove on a whim. It was silly excluding MagSafe from the 16E and I’m glad it’s here now.

This is actually a minimum viable iPhone in a way that the 16E was not. 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 implies, and if you have the means, I think you should take that step. The regular iPhone 17 is still the one to buy.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge