Last year when Apple released the iPhone 16, the company also revealed a new version of the Photographic Styles feature. With it, you had a bunch of different controls for giving your photos a different look — like a filter, but with more substance and control.
But while Photographic Styles is available on the four main iPhone 16 devices, it doesn’t seem to have been added to the iPhone 16e.
As spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple’s official comparison page does mention phones with the “latest-generation” Photographic Styles. Meanwhile the listing for the iPhone 16e only mentions Photographic Styles, without emphasizing that it’s the newest version. Suggesting that it’s the older version of Photographic Styles that’s existed since the launch of iPhone 13.
Intelligent changes
The original Photographic Styles was pretty basic, but not quite as basic as your traditional filter. Rather than applying the new look to a compressed image, Photographic Styles modified elements like tone, contrast and warmth while the photo was being taken — and then laying it on top of the original photo.
The benefit was that changes were made intelligently, offering a better altered image, while maintaining the option to reverse everything. So you didn’t have to choose between an original photo or a filter.
iPhone 16 improved that idea by storing all the relevant data for a photo, and allowing users to apply Photographic Styles to pictures they’ve already taken. This also means that you’ve got a lot more options for editing the Style of these photos as well.
Unfortunately it sounds like these advancements won’t be available to iPhone 16e, and it’s not clear why. The phone has a version of the A18 chipset and the 48MP Fusion camera, just like the iPhone 16. In theory, it should be able to do everything the iPhone 16 cameras can. So it has us wondering whether Apple made a conscious decision to remove this feature, to avoid having the slightly cheaper phone potentially eat into iPhone 16 sales.
The iPhone 16e pre-orders are set to start this Friday (February 21) ready for general release on February 28. You can read all about the phone, and what it has to offer, on our iPhone 16e hub.
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