The recently unveiled iPhone 16e doesn't have MagSafe, and Apple has already explained that this has nothing to do with the use of its first in-house developed modem. So why did it happen?
Well, Apple says it decided not to equip the iPhone 16e with MagSafe because “most people in the 16e's target audience exclusively charge their phones by plugging them into a charging cable”. This statement allegedly comes from unnamed “Apple representatives” speaking to Daring Fireball's John Gruber.
Those representatives go on to claim that these people, the ones who are going to buy the iPhone 16e, “tend to not use inductive charging at all. How Apple came to this conclusion is unclear. Who Apple thinks these people are – also unclear.
What is pretty clear is that this was a cost-cutting measure, applied to a phone that isn't even cheap, so it was clearly intended to pad the company's bottom line above all else. And now Apple is trying to dress this up as something along the lines of “don't worry, you don't need it anyway, since you weren't going to use it”. That sounds incredibly presumptuous and Big Brother-y to us, in an “Apple knows what's best for you” sort of way.
