The best thing about the iPhone 17e is not the chip bump, the modem update, or the extra storage. It is the ring of magnets Apple should have included last year. And you may not even have to buy a new phone to benefit.
When we tore down the 16e, our verdict was pretty blunt: this was not the iPhone upgrade to get excited about. The specs were modest, and the missing MagSafe ring made the whole thing feel strangely unfinished.
Yes, the phone could still charge wirelessly. No, that did not make it fine. Without magnets, wireless charging becomes a little dumb and a little annoying. You have to fiddle with alignment. The charger can slip out of place. Accessories that depend on magnetic attachment, from battery packs to car mounts, do not work as expected. Inaccurate coil alignment also wastes energy and generates excess heat that can wear out your battery faster.
The 17e fixes that. Better still, Apple appears to have made the 17e back panel compatible with the 16e. As soon as 17e back panels are available, 16e owners should be able to add MagSafe by swapping one part.
Of course, that’s not all we found inside.
Keeps the Best Repair Features from the 16e
Our first look came from a Lumafield Neptune CT scan, and it was almost boring. Side by side, the iPhone 16e and 17e look nearly identical inside. The MagSafe assembly is the obvious difference. Beyond that, there is not much to see.
But we were glad to see that all the things we loved about repairability in the 16e are still sticking around. The 17e keeps the dual-entry design, which lets you open the device from either the front or the back. You can replace the battery without first wrestling with the display, and you can replace the display without digging through the rear of the phone. That design has been dropped from the 17 Pro and Pro Max models, so it wasn’t a given that we’d see it here.
A relief, then, to see the back door’s still unlocked. Heat the adhesive, pry a gap, slip in a pick, and cut through softened glue. We keep hoping we’ll see adhesive-free entry in a flagship smartphone (lots of smaller manufacturers have proven it’s possible), but Apple has not left the heat-and-pry era yet.
Still, we continue to love the electrically debonding adhesive under the battery. This is one of our favorite DIY repair innovations of recent years. First, apply power.
We like to use 12V from our FixHub Portable Soldering Station via a VoltClip, but a 9V battery will do. Wait about a minute, and the battery lifts free without force. The battery is rated at 15.556 Wh, and it appears to be the same unit we found in the 16e. Not just “looks the same” or “has the same form factor” but yes, literally the same. Interchangeable. We’ve tested.
And as we dug in, that twin battery pair was our first hint at parts interchangeability.
Almost All Parts Are Swappable Between 16e and 17e
The tech spec changes between the 16e and 17e are modest. The 17e moves from the A18 to the A19, with slight benchmark improvement. It gets Apple’s newer C1X modem, promising better battery life and faster data. Base storage jumps from 128 GB to 256 GB. The display is still 60 Hz. The rear camera is still 48 megapixels. The selfie camera is still 12 megapixels. Fine. Nice. Predictable.
The weird part came when we started swapping parts. Nearly everything inside the 17e appears to be cross-compatible with the 16e. In our testing, you could transplant a 16e logic board into a 17e and let Repair Assistant sort out the new hardware.
And the MagSafe back from the 17e can be popped onto a 16e.
It’s not a 100% identical experience: Your 16e won’t inherit the “thonk” noise and MagSafe animation, and it won’t pop into StandBy mode when you’re MagSafe charging and your phone is on its side.
Your 16e also won’t suddenly become aware of the iPhone 17e’s Qi2 charging standard, which draws a consistent 15W instead of the variable 5-15W of Qi and Qi Magnetic. It should still mean more efficient charging, however. We’d have to do more testing to be sure, but we have observed the 16e with a 17e back glass draw up to 10W, and it seems plausible that a 16e with the MagSafe alignment might even draw closer to 15W. In all, being able to swap in a 17e MagSafe back is essentially giving last year’s phone this year’s upgrade, for a fraction of the price.
How much? Apple hasn’t released 17e parts yet, so we won’t know exactly until then, but you can get other MagSafe iPhone back glass parts for $120 after a return part credit. Many third-party suppliers currently offer an equivalent part for about $20.
This is crazy cool. The budget line of iPhones has always operated on a kind of “parts bin” model, using parts from older phones, presumably to decrease the cost of manufacturing. For instance, the iPhone SE 2020 had a bunch of parts that were the same as in the iPhone 8. You could swap cameras, the SIM tray, and the display assembly, for instance. But the batteries were incompatible, despite looking the same. And there was no Repair Assistant tool to help you calibrate a new screen, so you’d lose TrueTone functionality.
This almost universal degree of parts swappability is still unusual, even in the budget line, and Repair Assistant makes calibration dead simple.
(Can you tell which of the images in the slider above is the 16e and which is the 17e, without cheating to check against the mirrored image above?)
The only exception to the near-perfect swappability was the TrueDepth system. The selfie camera still worked: you can put a 17e camera in a 16e and vice versa, and still take photos.
However, Face ID won’t work, and Repair Assistant will fail to calibrate the front-facing camera. That’s likely a biometric protection, and truthfully, it’s a limitation we were surprised not to see when we took apart the MacBook Neo earlier this week and found TouchID modules to be swappable.
To be clear, repairability and upgradeability aren’t the same thing: A device is not easier to fix just because next year’s parts fit into last year’s shell.
However, what it does do is strengthen the parts ecosystem around both phones. If the 16e and 17e can share a broad pool of components, then repair shops, refurbishers, and owners all get more options. Parts reuse becomes easier. Salvage value goes up. Some repairs may get cheaper. The line between replacement stock and donor stock gets a little more flexible.
And if you are a 16e owner who mostly wanted MagSafe, it opens the door to one unusually practical upgrade.
MagSafe Makes Wireless Charging Less Annoying
MagSafe gets talked about like it is a luxury feature, which misses the point.
Wireless charging without magnets is fussy. You set the phone down, then nudge it around on the pad until charging starts. If you pick it up to check a notification, you have to line it up all over again. A small bump can be enough to break the connection. It works, but it feels clumsy.
Magnets fix that. They pull the charger into place and keep it there. We’ve demonstrated in our testing that alignment improves charging efficiency, and more importantly, it makes the whole thing feel reliable. You can grab the phone while it charges. You can use a battery pack without a cable dangling off the bottom. You can slap the phone onto a car mount and know it will land where it should.
As Charlie outlined in a post last month, MagSafe isn’t good just for charging. Once you have a standard magnetic ring, you get more than a charger. You get a mounting system. You get a clean attachment point for stands, wallets, grips, battery packs, and all the weird little hacks people come up with once a physical standard exists.
That utility matters on an iPhone. MagSafe is partly about charging, sure. It is also about turning the back of the phone into something more than a smooth slab of glass. The 16e left that out. The 17e puts it back.
The USB-C Port Is Still Buried Too Deep
Then we get to the part where Apple loses patience with us. The USB-C port is still a pain to reach.
That matters because charge ports wear out. This is not some obscure failure mode. If you keep a phone long enough, you have probably watched a port start its decline. The cable only works at one angle. Charging cuts in and out. The phone has to be propped up just so on the nightstand.
That kind of part should be easy to replace. Instead, the 17e makes you essentially gut the phone to reach it. The entire logic board has to come out. A plastic spacer has to come out. Several awkward screws have to come out. Delicate glued ribbon cables have to be peeled back. A tiny MEMS microphone sits nearby, ready to punish sloppy hands. Only after all that do you get to the long screws holding the port in place.
The most annoying part is that Apple already improved this in the iPhone 16. The company moved the SIM tray higher in the disassembly order and made the port area easier to access. That improvement did not make it to the e-series. So one of the most failure-prone parts in the phone is still buried underneath components that are less likely to need replacement first.
This is where the iPhone 17e’s provisional repairability score takes a hit.
You Don’t Have to Buy a 17e to Get Its Best Parts
The iPhone 17e is not a dramatic new phone. It is the 16e with a newer processor, a newer modem, more base storage, and the missing magnets restored.
The repair story is mixed but improved in familiar ways. Dual entry is good. The battery adhesive is good. Public manuals on day one are good. The USB-C port design is still frustrating. All of this earns the 17e the same provisional repairability score as its predecessor, a respectable 7 out of 10 (pending the expected release of spare parts).
The upgrade story is stranger. Apple has created a budget iPhone with an unusually flexible parts pool.
They took a budget iPhone that felt artificially limited, gave it back a feature people actually use, and appear to have left the door open for more parts reuse than usual. That is good news for 17e buyers. It may be even better news for 16e owners, repair shops, and anyone who would rather upgrade a part than throw out a phone.
If your phone’s ready for a fix…
Take a peek at our iPhone parts.