Apple iPhone 17e coming soon with four big upgrades

Apple is reportedly planning to bring the much-awaited iPhone 17e series later this month.

Citing reliable internal sources, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple is just days away from unveiling the iPhone 17e. Though it will be the most affordable model among the iPhone 17 series, the device is expected to come with big upgrades over the predecessor.

The iPhone 16e successor will come with a slimmer bezel and feature an 18MP centre-stage FaceTime camera. It supports a wider field of view and higher resolution — up to 18MP for photos — to capture more detail. Users will be able to capture photos and videos in portrait or landscape while holding their iPhone vertically.

For group selfies, Centre Stage for photos uses AI to automatically expand the field of view and can rotate from portrait to landscape to include everyone in the frame. However, we are not sure if the device's camera will be able to support ultra-stabilised video in 4K HDR, as we see in the original iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models.

Inside, the iPhone 17e is said to come with Apple A19 processor with a six-core CPU, a five-core GPU (with dedicated Neural Accelerators) and 16-core Neural Engine. This silicon promises faster and more efficient performance upgrade over the predecessor.

Apple iPhone 16e.

Third major improvement one can expect in the iPhone 17e is the MagSafe wireless charging, a first for the budget e series and the previous SE series to date.

Also, the iPhone 17e will come with Apple's proprietary C1X and new N1 chip, which promises improvements in the overall performance and reliability of features like Personal Hotspot, Cellular 5G network and AirDrop.

Despite the surge in prices of semiconductor and memory chipsets, Apple is expected to keep the costs of iPhone 17e the same as the predecessor. In the US, it is likely to be priced at $599 and in India, it may cost Rs 59,900.

Later in the year, Apple has planned to introduce new standard iPad (with A18 silicon), next-generation iPad Air and iPad mini (with OLED display), along with MacBook PCs with incremental upgrades in terms of new Apple M series chipsets.

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