iPhone 17e announced with A19 chip, double the storage and MagSafe — price, release date and all the upgrades

The new iPhone 17e is official, featuring a more powerful A19 chipset, making one of the best cheap phones even better. Nicely, Apple has kept the price exactly the same but doubled the storage and, this time around, added MagSafe compatibility.

The iPhone 17e was announced during Apple's March event. It's biggest upgrade is the new A19 chip also featured in the iPhone 17 series and the iPhone Air. You also get a more durable display and a new pink color option.

Like iPhone 16e, you can expect the same 6.1-inch OLED display running iOS 26, a 48MP main camera and plenty of storage. There's a choice of three colors: Black, White and Soft Pink.

Amazingly, considering the RAM crisis, the iPhone 17e will start at $599, the same price as the 16e and the good news is that Apple has now made 256GB the base storage option. The iPhone 17e also comes with 512GB storage for $799.

Pre-orders start at 6.15 am PST on Wednesday, March 4 and full availability will come on March 11.

While durability, performance and base storage may have seen an increase, the camera system is still the same — which may be a bummer for some. Here's what you need to know about the newest e-series iPhone.

iPhone 17e: Specs and design

As you can see from the table above, many of the specs remain identical to last year's version. But Apple says it has made some changes to both connectivity and durability.

Firstly, the iPhone 17e now features the latest-generation C1X cellular modem, which is up to 2x faster than C1 in iPhone 16e. Apple has also added the Ceramic Shield 2 front cover found in the iPhone 17 lineup to the iPhone 17e. The company says this gives the phone 3x better scratch resistance than the iPhone 16e, as well as improved anti-reflection to reduce glare.

MagSafe has been added...

One of the biggest criticisms of the iPhone 16e was that it ditched the MagSafe connection on the rear of the phone. Apple has clearly recognized the misstep and added the feature to the iPhone 17e.

With fast wired charging using USB-C, iPhone 17e can charge up to 50% in around 30 minutes, according to Apple. Meanwhile, using MagSafe and Qi2 for fast wireless charging, iPhone 17e can charge wirelessly up to 15W compared to 7.5W Qi.

Adding MagSafe opens the iPhone 17e up to the wide array of MagSafe accessories, but it does add a little bit of extra weight. The iPhone 17e tips the scales at 5.96 ounces compared to the iPhone 16e's 5.88 ounces.

...But the single camera remains the same

At first glance, Apple appears to have made no hardware improvements to the iPhone 17e's camera system. We'll have to wait to test it out ourselves to see how it performs in the real world, but Apple has kept the single-lens 48MP Fusion camera. Apple says this camera is like a 2-in-1 system because of how it’s supposed to offer 2x zoom with optical-like quality.

A year ago we were impressed with the performance of the 16e's single camera setup, but it remains to be seen if this can go up against the best camera phones in 2026. The iPhone 17e can record in 4K with Dolby Vision up to 60 fps. Since this phone will launch with iOS 26, you'll get cool software features like Audio Mix too.

iPhone 17e Performance

As you can see, not much is different with the new iPhone 17e. It's an incremental update, but one that will offer major benefits in performance and battery life.

Built on the TSMC 3nm process, the A19 is an improvement over the A18 chip in the iPhone 16e. In our testing, the A19 performed faster and was able to handle some heavy-duty mobile games like Diablo Immortal.

It even improved battery life, with the iPhone 17 lasting 12 hours and 47 minutes compared to 12 hours and 13 minutes in the 16. Charging time was also 10 to 20% faster.

Here's the performance you can expect from A19, after benchmarking the iPhone 17:

Meet iPhone 17e: A Powerful iPhone at a Great Price - YouTube

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Of course, the 17e is a slight downgrade from the iPhone 17, so we'll need to do our own testing once we get our hands on the iPhone 17e, but this gives us a decent idea of the performance you can expect.

Otherwise, no other internal components appear to be changing.

The iPhone 17e isn't the best cheap phone we'd recommend but if you're looking for a less expensive iPhone that can still keep up with daily demands, it is one of the best iPhones. Stay tuned for our upcoming iPhone 17e review!

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