The iPhone 16e is on its way, and ahead of the new phone’s announcement on February 19, I rounded up four classic iPhone features that would seemingly be killed off by Apple’s latest model. Sure, I got the iPhone 16e’s name wrong in that article (iPhone SE 4, who?) but the iPhone 16e has indeed put the final nail in the coffin of some beloved (and not so beloved) pieces of iPhone history.
The Home button, Touch ID, the Lightning port, and sub-6-inch displays have all been consigned to the history books following the iPhone 16e’s arrival, and although the iPhone 16e’s upgrades make it an objectively superior phone to the iPhone SE (2022), you’d be forgiven for feeling nostalgic about the latter’s suite of classic features.
But which iPhone features will you genuinely miss, and which are you glad to see the back of? To find out, I asked the TechRadar WhatsApp channel this very question. A whopping 1,484 of you responded, and the results are pretty conclusive…
As you can see above, the Home button was the most popular answer by some margin. Of 1,484 respondents, 791 said they’d miss the Home button the most, followed by 385 for Touch ID, 191 for small iPhone screens, and 117 for the Lightning charging standard (which makes sense – Lightning sucked!).
Home button-less displays have been a feature of all mainline iPhones since the iPhone X, but Apple’s iPhone SE models – including the now-discontinued iPhone SE (2022) – had stuck by this classic piece of iPhone history in the name of affordability.
As sad as some of you are to see it go, I think we’d all agree that Apple was right to ditch the Home button on the iPhone 16e. The company’s gesture-based navigation is simple, seamless, and no longer the preserve of the very best iPhones. There was a time when many people preferred the simplicity of a physical Home button, but the sheer number of iPhones without one these days makes the iPhones that do have one look and feel incredibly outdated (sorry, SE owners).
The same is true of Touch ID. Yes, it might still work slightly more effectively than Face ID (some say it's faster), but the latter technology has improved immeasurably in recent years, and the components needed to facilitate Touch ID on an iPhone (read: a Home button) just aren’t worth the cost to display size. Would you seriously be happy with a sub-6-inch screen in 2025?
All told, then, the iPhone 16e is – on paper, at least – a massive improvement over the iPhone SE (2022), not least because it brings Apple’s least expensive iPhone offering in line with modern standards.
Sure, we’re all nostalgic for the iPhones of old, but that doesn’t mean they were better products than the supercomputers we have in our pockets nowadays. As Proust said, "remembrance of the past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." Maybe we were all just happier then...
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