The standard iPhone needs ProMotion more than ever

Apple’s goal with the new iPhone 16E seems to be the same as with the iPhone SE: offer a very good, cheap smartphone to entice price-sensitive shoppers to either leave Android or upgrade from a much older iPhone. From what we’ve seen so far, the company seems to have succeeded — but maybe a little too well: there’s not a whole lot of space differentiating the 16E from the pricier iPhone 16. That’s something Apple will have to remedy the next time its flagship phone updates come around if it wants that model to stand out.

There used to be a large gap between the iPhone SE and the standard model iPhone. The SE had an old design with thick bezels and a home button. It had a small screen, a slower processor, and less storage. If you bought the SE, you knew you weren’t getting the latest and greatest.

The iPhone 16E looks a lot more like a flagship phone at a budget price. It has an OLED display, FaceID, Apple’s latest processor, and even the customizable Action Button — a perfect feature for nerding things up that was once exclusive to iPhone 15 Pro phones. It only has a single camera, but it’s been upgraded to a 48-megapixel affair that Apple bills as a “2-in-1 camera” with a 2x zoom.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 16 has a second rear camera, the Camera Capture button, MagSafe, and effectively the same OLED display, albeit slightly brighter and with the sleeker Dynamic Island design. Is all of that worth paying $200 more?

When the iPhone 17 comes around, Apple is going to need to do more to give buyers a clear reason to choose the standard model phone. And the most obvious upgrade is for Apple to give it a 120Hz ProMotion display — the carrot it’s dangled for years to upsell people to a Pro phone.

It makes a lot less sense for ProMotion to be limited to those phones now, when so many competitors are putting high-refresh screens in their more affordable models. The Google Pixel 8A and the Samsung Galaxy S24 FE each have 120Hz displays and beat Apple’s phones on price; Google’s does especially so — at $499, it’s $100 cheaper than the iPhone 16E.

There are plenty of reasons to want a 120Hz display. The first and most obvious is that it makes scrolling so much smoother — you can actually read a webpage while you swipe through it, something that’s harder on a jittery 60Hz display. ProMotion also enables Apple’s always-on mode, which lets you continuously see the time and widgets. That’s necessary for the screen to turn on automatically when you come near it while it’s in StandBy mode, a feature that turns the iPhone into an ambient smart display when it’s on a charger. It works on regular iPhones, too, but you have to tap the screen to make it appear.

Meanwhile, the Pro phone models have other features that should keep them in a class of their own. That includes a telephoto camera, titanium build, and more capable chip.

Apple seems to be perfectly aware that it needs to make this change, at least if the rumors are true. The company is expected to put high-refresh rate OLEDs in all of its flagships this year, from the iPhone 17 Pro down to the regular iPhone 17 and alleged iPhone 17 Air. That’ll give shoppers a good reason to skip the 16E. But if it doesn’t, the 16E might look like even more of a deal come fall.