Apple announced a new iPad and iPhone today; the budget iPhone 17e and an updated iPad Air, both upgrades to models released last year. The devices are each available for preorder on March 4 and will go up for sale on March 11.
The iPhone 17e gets some key upgrades over the 16e that came before it, including the addition of MagSafe wireless charging at 15W – the 16e had wireless charging but no magnets, and topped out at 7.5W – and a new pink color (joining the black and white of last year’s model). The phone also gets an upgraded version of Apple’s in-house designed C1 cellular modem, this time called the C1X.
Otherwise, the iPhone 17e is a spec bump, with an A19 chip instead of A18, and double the entry-level storage at 256GB. That's not a bad thing, though; internally, the 17e will be very similar to the iPhone 17, which we think is the best iPhone for most people. It'll just be missing a few features like true dual cameras and the Dynamic Island cutout, and although it has an OLED display, it'll be 60Hz instead of 120Hz. Incredibly, in this time of rapidly inflating tech prices, the phone still starts at $599.
Then there’s the new iPad Air, a more straightforward spec bump that outfits it with an M4 chip and Apple’s new N1 networking chip – which handles the iPad Air’s Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread connectivity – and C1X cellular modem. The company says the tablet, despite having the same processor core counts (8-core CPU, 9-core GPU, 16-core NPU), will be “up to 30 percent faster” than the M3 iPad Air, which is already one of the best tablets you can buy, and a whopping 2.3 times faster than the M1 version released in 2022. The new iPad Air will also have 12GB of RAM and, as before, will come in 11- and- 13-inch versions. It also starts at $599.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn't be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
