Apple, please stop excusing yourself out of basic iPhone features

Something reviewers were quick to point out with Apple’s new iPhone 16e is that despite keeping up with the iPhone 16 in some ways, it’s missing a feature common to most iPhones since the iPhone 12 — MagSafe. There is wireless charging on the 16e, but crippled to a lethargic 7.5W, half of what MagSafe can deliver. By extension, you can’t use any MagSafe mounts or stands without a special case, and you might get less than 7.5W if your 16e’s charging coils aren’t perfectly aligned.

All of this would be understandable, given the iPhone 16e’s entry-level market, except that Apple decided to charge $599 — $170 more than the iPhone SE — and claims that most people in that market don’t use wireless charging, so it doesn’t really care much if MagSafe is missing. Even if there are statistics to back that up, it’s plainly obvious that it was either a profit-driven measure or necessary for the company’s new C1 modem. The company is risking its reputation with these sorts of moves, both in terms of establishing trust and disappointing people when they open the box.

An unfortunate tradition

MagSafe is just the latest example

Sadly, Apple has been trying to excuse missing or flawed iPhone features for well over a decade at this point. Consider the iPhone 4 — while it was otherwise a classic product, one of Steve Jobs’ swan songs, it was initially tarred by the “antennagate” controversy involving sudden signal drops. Rather than admit it had made a design mistake with the antenna, Apple did everything but, initially telling people just to “avoid gripping [the phone] in the lower left corner.” It then moved on to blaming a software error, and Jobs himself announcing free bumper cases for people who wanted them. Some people were still gunshy about iPhones by the time the iPhone 4s shipped the next year.

I could tell a similar story involving the iPhone 6’s “bendgate” controversy, but let’s fast-forward to the iPhone 7, which was the first model to drop a 3.5mm headphone jack in favor of all-digital audio. On stage, Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller championed the move as a display of “courage” — even though many customers owned and preferred 3.5mm audio accessories, something the company was forced to acknowledge by bundling a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter. The jack’s removal was ultimately logical, given the shift towards Bluetooth headphones and the need for more design space, but trying to spin it into a triumph was an unforced PR error, suggesting deafness to customer demands.

Something Apple continues to be mired in is its treatment of USB-C. Despite the fact that USB-C has been present on Macs and Android phones for about a decade, it took until February 2025 — the launch of the iPhone 16e — for the company to completely exorcize Lightning from the iPhone lineup. The company outright ignored frequent complaints about Lightning’s exclusivity and outdated data speeds, presumably hoping to stretch out accessory sales and supply chain savings for as long as possible. Only European Union regulations changed the game. Even today, USB-C support isn’t what it should be — you have to pay for an iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max to get anything better than Lightning’s USB 2.0-level data throughput, and no iPhone offers the 60W-plus charging on some Android phones.

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Time to be honest or deliver the goods

The erosion of good will

Other companies pull this sort of trick too — trying to justify the closure of apps you’ve been using for years, for instance — but that doesn’t excuse Apple. Indeed, people normally hold Apple to a higher standard, since it tends to deliver when it comes to issues like privacy, polish, and support. The company is even sticking to its guns on DEI and environmental initiatives, despite the political points it would score in the US right now. I wish it wasn’t fighting unionization, but hey — credit where credit is due.

Every time Apple camouflages the real reasons for a feature sacrifice or an outright mistake, it gives shoppers reason to doubt promises it makes down the line — I know I’ve become increasingly cynical over the years. While I used to treat every new iPhone as a revelation, disappointments and the slowing pace of smartphone evolution have reduced my enthusiasm to embers. Even before the iPhone 16 launch, I knew that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be nearly the revolution it was sold to be, and so far I’ve been proven right.

Better still would be avoiding Scrooge-like decisions in the first place. It might be true that most entry-level iPhone buyers use wired charging, but that’s probably true of Pro buyers as well, given how much faster USB-C power can be. For $599, it’s a reasonable expectation that you shouldn’t be cut off from the world of MagSafe accessories, particularly when you can buy a used iPhone 15 Pro for nearly the same amount. The 16e seems to exist solely to nudge you towards the regular iPhone 16, making it one of the worst examples of Apple’s “price ladder” strategy. It feels disrespectful to people who can’t afford anything better, given that even Android phones are moving towards the MagSafe-based Qi2 standard.

Is there a chance Apple executives will be more upfront and/or a little less thrifty in the future? Possibly, but probably not anytime soon. CEO Tim Cook doesn’t seem poised to retire, and he has a strong hand throughout the company, particularly when it comes to maintaining profit margins. The goal is to steer people towards “premium” products, and that seems to mean paying lip service to more affordable devices.

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