The most hyped iPhone launch of 2026 is Apple’s first foldable, whose screen may have just been glimpsed at CES in Las Vegas. But far more relevant to the average customer will be the next iteration of the company’s “e” line of mid-market smartphones, and based on a new report, it could arrive as soon as next month.
In a new posting this week, a leaker on Chinese social media going by the name of Smart Pikachu says the iPhone 17e is “about” to enter mass production “following CES,” which ends on January 9. The device, the leaker says, is “aiming to compete with lower-priced flagship phones.”
(These quotes, and indeed the leaker’s handle, come from the Chinese post via Google Translate, so some elements could be lost in translation. Indeed, the handle itself can alternatively be translated as “Wisdom Pikachu,” as AppleInsider notes.)
That’s a remarkably close schedule to the iPhone 16e, which went into mass production on January 8, 2025. And therefore, given that the 16e was subsequently unveiled to the public on February 19 and went on sale on February 28, it stands to reason that the 17e is also on track for a February launch, unless Apple wants to hold the device back for a spring event alongside other products.
As ever with information derived from anonymous sources on social media, this report should be considered unproven until we get corroboration. But while Smart Pikachu does not have much of a track record when it comes to Apple product rumors, they are regarded as an accurate source for Android leaks.
The projected timing also makes sense. Admittedly the iPhone 16e was the first of its line, so we don’t have any historical launch patterns to extrapolate from, but there’s a logic to making it an annual refresh. The iPhone SE had a less frequent and more unpredictable cadence (2016, 2020, 2022) but the iPhone 16e is aiming at the mid-market rather than budget buyers–as Smart Pikachu says, the market for “lower-priced flagship phones”–and therefore needs to be kept more up to date in order to justify its price tag. Most of us would baulk at spending $599 for a phone that’s four years old, and wasn’t exactly state of the art when it came out.
Speaking of which, the report also offers some hints about the iPhone 17e’s specs and feature set. Smart Pikachu predicts it will have a 6.1-inch display with a Dynamic Island (that would be an upgrade from the notched 6.1-inch screen of the 16e), but no 120Hz ProMotion. Perhaps the latter was always too optimistic, given that ProMotion was only added to the standard $799 iPhone last year. Lastly, the 17e is predicted to get a “downclocked” A19 processor. A previous report in The Information also predicted the phone will get MagSafe support, one of the odd omissions in the 1st-gen model.
For all the latest news and rumors about this important product launch, bookmark our regularly updated iPhone 17e superguide.
