Apple iPhone 17e benchmark reveals modest improvements over predecessor

Apple's iPhone 17e follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, the iPhone 16e, offering a budget-oriented iPhone experience with a plethora of notable downgrades, such as an inferior display, lack of an ultra-wide camera, lack of an 18 MP selfie camera, and more.

However, one area where the iPhone 17e will not have to face any major disadvantage is performance. The A19 SoC powering Apple's budget offering is almost the same as the one powering the standard iPhone 17. To be precise, the A19 in the 17e features one fewer GPU core, and the exact same CPU layout.

The leaked Geekbench results also tell a similar story - the iPhone 17e scores 3,459 and 8,811 points in single and multicore tests respectively. For reference, the standard iPhone 17 scores 3,627 and 9,249 points in the same tests, making the difference in raw performance between the two smartphones only around 4-5%.

That said, the iPhone 17e will have substantially worse GPU performance, since the A19 powering the smartphone features a 4-core GPU instead of the 5-core GPU found in the full-fat A19 SoC. Going by numbers alone, the graphics performance should be around 20% lower. 

Compared to its predecessor, the iPhone 17e is roughly around 10.4% faster in multicore and 6% faster in single core performance, which is hardly a big difference. The Galaxy S25 FE can frequently be found on Amazon for just a few more dollars (currently $612), and packs a lot of extra features albeit with much inferior performance.