iPhone 16e Vs Android Phone Benchmark Showdown: Testing Apple’s Mettle

Apple recently put its budget-minded iPhone SE lineup out to pasture while simultaneously increasing the cost floor of its historically $429 entry level smartphone lineup to a loftier $599 price point. The new baseline is the iPhone 16e, and it also marks the first time an iPhone has hit the market with the company’s own 5G modem technology. Of course we had to get our hands on one and put it through our own series of performance tests to see how this new platform performs in not only connectivity testing but in other areas of performance as well. Our results are right here ready for your consumption, but first, let’s set the stage.

Apple iPhone 16e Vs. The Android Ecosystem

At its higher $600 starting price, the iPhone 16e enters a competitive market full of last year’s midrange devices at steep discounts like the OnePlus 12R, the current gen OnePlus 13R and even the Pixel 8a. The iPhone 16e has the same A18 SoC as the “vanilla” iPhone 16, whereas the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max have the A18 Pro. This means the 16e has a six-core CPU with two performance and four efficiency cores. It also has a “quad-core” GPU, down from five resource clusters in the iPhone 16 and six in iPhone 16 Pro models. As a result, from a GPU perspective, it will definitely be the slowest current gen iPhone. However, it does have the 16-core Neural Processor that can handle all of the Apple Intelligence features that Cupertino has been drip-feeding iOS users over the course of the last few months. 

The modem is by far the most interesting part of the iPhone 16e, however. Dubbed C1, it’s the first Apple-produced modem in a smartphone, whereas the company has previously been using Qualcomm modems for a many generations, and still does in its more higher-end iPhones. Of course, it lacks 5G mmWave technology, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to many Android flagships, but then again its a $600 iPhone after all. Regardless, we put it the new iPhone 16e its paces against the $599 OnePlus 13R and the more expensive OnePlus 13 ($899), both of which also do not support mmWave, so the Sub-6 5G bands are what we’re working, and on a level playing field, with respect to our connectivity speed tests you’ll see below.

On the Android side, a couple of phones based on Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chip have arrived – Samsung’s Galaxy S25 family and the OnePlus 13. They all cost considerably more than the iPhone 16e, but those phones have been extremely strong performers in all aspects, including battery life. Second-generation Oryon CPU cores and the latest Adreno graphics are extremely potent, and even the pricey expensive iPhone 16 Pro will have its hands full. 

Speaking of the cheaper OnePlus 13R, that smartphone sports a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which matches last year’s Android flagship devices. That chip was no slouch, so it should put up a pretty hefty fight against the iPhone 16e. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 sports eight cores including one Arm Cortex X4 prime core, five Cortex A720 cores at varying speeds, and a pair of Cortex A520 cores for background and efficiency-minded tasks. There’s also an Adreno 750 GPU that handles graphics tasks well and Qualcomm’s X75 modem.

There are also more premium Android flagships and upper-midrange devices to consider as well, like the OnePlus 13 and Galaxy S25+, both of which are powered by Qualcomm’s current generation Snapdragon 8 Elite and X80 modem. For our modem comparison testing, we chose the OnePlus 13 with Qualcomm’s latest X80 modem for testing versus the iPhone 16e, and again, both devices are limited to Sub-6 connectivity in terms of hardware, but also in the cellular network area we tested in.

Apple iPhone 16e Benchmarks

Not everything we typically run in an Android phone review is available for iOS, so you won’t see (for example) PCMark tests, but what is available we have here. Let’s start with Geekbench 6. 

Geekbench 6 does validate the iPhone 16e’s design choices. First of all, single-threaded performance is very strong, keeping up with our iPhone 16 Pro (which is still my daily driver five months later). The iPhone 16e even edges out thousand-dollar flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S25+ and S25 Ultra with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which is no mean feat. 

On the other hand, Samsung and OnePlus swing back around for a big win overall in the multi-threaded test, as the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s eight-core CPU with its strong second-gen Oryon cores add up to big overall performance. The iPhone 16 Pro looks underwhelming here, but the 16e holds up pretty well, relatively speaking. Losing to a flagship like the OnePlus 13 that costs a couple hundred dollars more is pretty much what we’d expect.

The iPhone 16e does manage to beat all of our Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices, like the OnePlus 13R, outright. It scores a single-threaded margin of victory that is 50% over the older Snapdragon chips. Despite the reduced number of cores in the A18 chip, per-thread performance is good enough to carry it to an advantage over midrange Android devices in multi-core scores as well.

When it comes to AI performance, the iPhone 16e doesn’t do too badly against its direct competition, but let’s pour one out for more expensive iPhone owners who paid much more for the same NPU. The Snapdragon 8 Elite devices like the OnePlus 13 and the two Samsung Galaxy S25 phones are much faster in quantized datatype tests employed Geekbench AI but fall behind in half precision. Quantized models are definitely more common on mobile devices these days, which equates to what users might realize in terms of real world performance.

Once we start to come down the ladder a bit, performance compared to the iPhone 16e starts to balance out. For instance, the OnePlus 13R wins the Quantized datatype test by a few percentage points, where the iPhone kind of crushed all the Snapdragon phones in Half-Precision (which, for those AI enthusiasts keeping score at home, is 16-bit floating point data). 

Let’s move on to some GPU testing with GFXBench. 

Aztec Ruins and Manhattan are both effectively fill-rate tests, since they don’t use much for advanced features. The iPhone 16e kind of fails both of them, though, which is both disappointing and yet still unsurprising.  It barely keeps up with four-year-old devices like the OnePlus 9 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S21. It even loses to the underperforming Google Pixel 9 Pro, which doesn’t even come close to keeping up with contemporary Android devices.

Once you start to compare to modern Snapdragon-powered Android phones, the iPhone 16e really falls off. Snapdragon 8 Elite phones have nearly 3x the performance of the iPhone. And what’s worse for Apple is the extra GPU resources don’t really help in either test; the iPhone 16e is only about 10% behind Apple’s $1000 iPhone 16 Pro, which puts the more expensive phone in a very awkward position. The current flagship Android devices are still twice as fast or more, compared to Apple’s best handset currently. 

But let’s pump it up with 3DMark Wild Life.

Clearly, Apple’s GPUs haven’t kept up with Qualcomm’s in the smartphone space, and the iPhone 16e puts in an especially disappointing showing. The iPhone 16 Pro was already a middling performer, and losing a full 33% of the GPU resources sinks the iPhone 16e to the bottom of the pack. The $599 OnePlus 13R is about 50% faster than the iPhone in this test, and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and OnePlus 13 are closer to twice as fast.

But it gets worse from there, because the iPhone’s performance falls off a cliff for gaming, under continued use. Here’s the Wild Life Unlimited stress test result for the iPhone 16e. 

iPhone 16e 3DMark Wild Life Stress Test Results

In a word, the iPhone 16e’s thermal performance is dismal. Dropping 30% off the first-run score for the remainder of the test makes the above chart a borderline lie. That’s compounded by the fact that when we ran this same test on the OnePlus 13R (which, again, costs the same $599 making for a great comparison point), the drop-off was both more gradual and far less apparent. Here’s that chart for comparison.

OnePlus 13R – 3DMark Wild Life Stress Test Results

If you flip around to the Galaxy S25 series review you can see the Samsung phones drop off more than the OnePlus, but even their worst performance is still right around as good as the iPhone 16e’s first run, and then the iPhone 16e falls off much further from there.

Putting Apple’s C1 Modem To The Test

Alright, so we’ve seen that the CPU in the iPhone 16e’s A18 chip is a solid performer, but the GPU is far from that. How’s the Apple C1 modem? Apple acquired Intel’s 5G modem business for a billion dollars more than five years ago. We can finally see the results of those efforts now, so let’s see how the company fared with these assets.

** Please note: For testing, we used the Ookla Speedtest app from Google Play and the Apple App Store on Google Fi. Both the iPhone 16e and the OnePlus 13 were configured via eSIM for cellular data access on Google Fi, which carrier hops but is tied to T-Mobile in Boston and the surrounding areas, for Sub-6 5G connectivity. We stood in the same place and pressed the Go button in the app on both devices at the same time. 

Apple iPhone 16e 5G Sub-6 Performance on Google Fi / T-Mobile in Boston, MA area

Both of the download figures are faster than most folks’ home internet connections, but the Qualcomm X80 modem in the OnePlus 13 has a sizable performance lead over Apple’s C1 modem in the iPhone 16e, as the OnePlus phone was more than 50% faster than the iPhone in download speed. Both had much lower upload speeds, but again the OnePlus 13 was faster, this time on the order of around 33%. 

These aren’t one-off tests, either, as they are representative of multiple tests. Apple’s 5G modem works well on T-Mobile’s Sub-6 5G network, but Qualcomm’s design came through as the clear winner in our testing, in terms of both maintaining a more robust 5G connection and in overall throughput speeds. 

Apple iPhone 16e Vs Midrange Phones: Our Key Take-Aways

These tests aren’t exhaustive, of course, but let’s try to sum up the performance of Apple’s new midrange iPhone. Yes, mid-range. Let’s be honest here; the $599 iPhone 16e is now priced out of “budget” territory by a couple hundred bucks. And as far as midrange phones go, it’s fine. The Snapdragon 8 Elite devices we’ve tested, which are the Samsung Galaxy S25 family and the OnePlus 13, all cost hundreds more, but they’re also a whole lot faster on the whole. While Apple could pull out a slim victory in Geekbench 6’s single-threaded test, the latest Android phones buried it everywhere else. You get what you pay for to a certain degree. 

What about a direct comparison against something priced similarly, like the $599 OnePlus 13R? Apple’s new phone really doesn’t fare particularly well in that comparison either. While its CPU performance shown in Geekbench is solid, its GPU is hobbled by a reduced resource count and the 5G modem just isn’t quite as fast as Qualcomm’s latest. Add to that the fact that the iPhone 16e is saddled with a 60Hz display with its notch and a single 48MP camera, and it’s just not as compelling at this price point as the OnePlus 13R. The fact Apple requires buyers to spend $1000 to get to 120 Hz is very frustrating to even the most ardent iOS fanboy (which is me), and a bitter pill for the general public to swallow. 

It’s not all bad for Apple, though, as the iPhone 16e has its software and services stack going for it. If you’ve already bought into the Apple ecosystem with an older iPhone, a Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, and so on, this is the cheapest way to get into iOS and Apple Intelligence. It’s just really hard to recommend with some of these drawbacks, especially considering the iPhone 16 is on sale pretty frequently for not much more.

One thing iPhone 16s does, however, is invalidate Apple’s decision to keep the iPhone 15 hanging around at $699. It doesn’t support Apple Intelligence and it’s not as fast as the cheaper phone — why does this thing still get a spot in Apple’s lineup? We’d guess if you need that wide-angle camera and mmWave support it kind of makes sense, but we’d recommend you look at an iPhone 16 instead. 

Bottom line, if you’re more into performance or can appreciate what the Android ecosystem has to offer as well, the iPhone 16e is not going to sway you, and while we’re at it the iPhone 16 Pro doesn’t look all that great either. The cheaper iPhone’s solid CPU, merely basic graphics and 5G performance give two out of three check marks versus comparable Android phones at its price point, like the OnePlus 13R. The more upscale OnePlus 13 also makes a very good case for spending a couple Benjamins more, too. In the end, the right choice is often not based solely on performance.

However, if performance is an important factor in the decision, you’ll might want to look elsewhere. And if you’re on the fence about iPhone or Android, with all the choices in the Android ecosystem, there’s likely something to make even the most discerning smartphone buyer happy. Meanwhile Apple simply needs to play a bit of catch-up at this price range, as it’s not exactly a bad phone, but definitely not a good fit for the price.