The iPhone 16e saw Apple kill off some classic iPhone features – and you told us which one you’ll miss the most
Posted by Oriccabattery01
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22 Feb 2025 02:33:40 am.
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TheiPhone 16eis on its way, and ahead of the new phone’s announcement on February 19, I rounded upfour classic iPhone features that would seemingly be killed off by Apple’s latest model. Sure, I got the iPhone 16e’s name wrong in that article (iPhone SE 4, who?) but the iPhone 16e has indeed put the final nail in the coffin of some beloved (and not so beloved) pieces of iPhone history.
The Home button, Touch ID, the Lightning port, and sub-6-inch displays have all been consigned to the history books following the iPhone 16e’s arrival, and although theiPhone 16e’s upgradesmake it an objectively superior phone to theiPhone SE (2022), you’d be forgiven for feeling nostalgic about the latter’s suite of classic features.
But which iPhone features will you genuinely miss, and which are you glad to see the back of? To find out,I asked the question. A whopping 1,484 of you responded, and the results are pretty conclusive…
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Excuse my Toy Story background
As you can see above, the Home button was the most popular answer by some margin. Of 1,484 respondents, 791 said they’d miss the Home button the most, followed by 385 for Touch ID, 191 for small iPhone screens, and 117 for the Lightning charging standard (which makes sense – Lightning sucked!).
Home button-less displays have been a feature of all mainline iPhones since the iPhone X, but Apple’s iPhone SE models – including the now-discontinued iPhone SE (2022) – had stuck by this classic piece of iPhone history in the name of affordability.
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As sad as some of you are to see it go, I think we’d all agree that Apple was right to ditch the Home button on the iPhone 16e. The company’s gesture-based navigation is simple, seamless, and no longer the preserve of the verybest iPhones. There was a time when many people preferred the simplicity of a physical Home button, but the sheer number of iPhones without one these days makes the iPhones thatdohave one look and feel incredibly outdated (sorry, SE owners).
The same is true of Touch ID. Yes, it might still workslightlymore effectively than Face ID (some say it's faster), but the latter technology has improved immeasurably in recent years, and the components needed to facilitate Touch ID on an iPhone (read: a Home button) just aren’t worth the cost to display size. Would you seriously be happy with a sub-6-inch screen in 2025?
All told, then, the iPhone 16e is – on paper, at least – a massive improvement over the iPhone SE (2022), not least because it brings Apple’s least expensive iPhone offering in line with modern standards.
Sure, we’re all nostalgic for the iPhones of old, but that doesn’t mean they were better products than the supercomputers we have in our pockets nowadays. As Proust said, "remembrance of the past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." Maybe we were all just happier then...
Tags: iPhone 16e
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