iPhone 16E and the death of the small iPhone

Apple: 

Apple today announced iPhone 16e, a new addition to the iPhone 16 lineup that offers powerful capabilities at a more affordable price. iPhone 16e delivers fast, smooth performance and breakthrough battery life, thanks to the industry-leading efficiency of the A18 chip and the new Apple C1, the first cellular modem designed by Apple. iPhone 16e is also built for Apple Intelligence, the intuitive personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence while taking an extraordinary step forward for privacy in AI.

Wired:

The iPhone 16e isn't for me. If you're an avid tech enthusiast and Apple fan, it's probably not for you either. 

This is why I think a used iPhone 15 Pro is the way to go for an iPhone at this price. You get far more “Pro” features at nearly the same price as the 16e, even in “mint” condition. The iPhone 16e is a perfectly reliable iPhone. It just isn't good value.

Forbes: 

It’s official: the small smartphone is dead — put to rest by Apple and its newly launched iPhone 16e.

In theory, the 16e would have been a strong candidate for the small phone category. Small phones are a risk, and it seems even the world’s most influential phone-maker didn’t think it was worth the squeeze. So instead, we get yet another 6.1-inch device — the same size as the iPhone 16.

The iPhone 16E seems like a nice phone, but in the context of the past and contemporary offerings it really doesn't make any sense. The 16E replaces the SE, a device targeted at people who want small phones with essential feature sets for a cheap price. The Apple experience without the Apple tax. I myself was planning to upgrade to the next SE, which I assumed would have features like FaceID and the old notch, a decent camera (without all the multi-camera fuss of the Pro line), decent performance, for a solid price, like the old one. Though I was ready to bite on a new SE, this 16E doesn't really make sense for me, and I'm just not sure if it makes sense for anyone. It's missing some nice-to-have features (MagSafe, ultra-wide-band chipset, great camera, etc.), which would be fine for the budget-conscious SE buyer, except it's $100-$200 more expensive than the price of the outgoing SE when you factor in reasonable storage. It's the size of a regular iPhone 13 Pro or 14 Pro, which is not a small phone by any means, despite replacing the SE, a dedicated small phone. It uses a novel modem (C1), which is great and all, but I don't think people trying to get a simple Apple experience via an SE replacement will want to beta test Apple's completely untested new hardware. I guess I'm just left wondering who this phone is for. It's not good value, and it has an incomplete feature set for almost any kind of buyer.

Jason Snell (via Michael Tsai):

So much for a “low-cost” iPhone. At $599, the iPhone 16e is the cheapest new iPhone you can buy, but its starting price is 40 percent higher than the $429 iPhone SE. There’s been a lot of talk about the iPhone SE being an important phone for Apple to use in emerging markets that are much more price sensitive, but after this move, it’s hard to imagine that such a strategy is still in effect. 

The size wars are over, and we lost. For a lot of people, the iPhone SE was a proxy for “a smaller iPhone.” But it never was, really—it was just an older phone design, and since all smartphones have gotten larger over time, that meant that the iPhone SE was smaller. Those days are over—the 16e is just the same size as an iPhone 16. As someone who bought and loved an iPhone 13 mini, let me say it: The days of the tiny iPhone ain’t never coming back. I know, I know, but the market has spoken, and it turns out that bigger phones just sell better. Fans of smaller phones are just going to be unhappy, and I’m sorry about it, but that’s where we are.

 

Previously on this blog:

•  Biden declines to veto Apple Watch ban 
•  Build-up to the Apple Watch ban decision 
•  Zero-day Webkit vulnerability (CVE-2023-23529) affecting Apple ecosystem 

Inferring plateau length from the properties of a Type IIP supernova

I am working on a Type IIP supernova, for which I would like to estimate the plateau length. Note that this is a very handwavy analysis; I'm just building expectations and intuition and seriously abusing some models. A Type IIP light curve is powered by the recombination of shocked hydrogen in the ejected envelope of the star. Depending on the amount of hydrogen present, this mechanism can power a distinctive plateau (P) in the light curve for ~100 days.

Light curves of Type IIP and Type IIL supernovae.

What I'm interested in is the following: if we've already settled onto the plateau, can we estimate how long the supernova is likely to maintain its plateau before dropping on the Ni-56 powered tail? Significant work has been invested in the theoretical study of IIP supernovae and their plateaus. In particular I turn to the following paper by Goldberg, Bildsten & Paxton:

arXiv:

We present advances in modeling Type IIP supernovae using MESA for evolution to shock breakout coupled with STELLA for generating light and radial velocity curves. Explosion models and synthetic light curves can be used to translate observable properties of supernovae (such as the luminosity at day 50 and the duration of the plateau, as well as the observable quantity ET, defined as the time-weighted integrated luminosity that would have been generated if there was no 56Ni in the ejecta) into families of explosions which produce the same light curve and velocities on the plateau. These predicted families of explosions provide a useful guide towards modeling observed SNe, and can constrain explosion properties when coupled with other observational or theoretical constraints. For an observed supernova with a measured 56Ni mass, breaking the degeneracies within these families of explosions (ejecta mass, explosion energy, and progenitor radius) requires independent knowledge of one parameter. We expect the most common case to be a progenitor radius measurement for a nearby supernova. We show that ejecta velocities inferred from the Fe IIλ 5169 line measured during the majority of the plateau phase provide little additional information about explosion characteristics. Only during the initial shock cooling phase can photospheric velocity measurements potentially aid in unraveling light curve degeneracies.

 Let's examine Figure 4:

Reproduced from Goldberg et al.

Qualitatively, we can see that the shape of the light curve is significantly impacted by the explosion energy. What we are interested in is the duration of the plateau, t_p as defined in the paper. The explosion energy can cause the expected duration to vary quite significantly (from ~90 d to ~150 d), but is fairly bijective in the luminosity at 50 days (i.e., we should be able to roughly constrain the energy of the explosion fairly well). Based on equation 8, another constraint on the day 50 luminosity is the radius of the progenitor star, 

Let's say we have constraints on the radius from shock cooling, which pins the progenitor radius to ~250 Rsun. We also have a day 50 luminosity of about ~ 6×10³⁴ W ~ 6×10⁴¹ erg/s. From Figure 4, we are likely in something more similar to the right panel, with a small radius.  This is on the low end based on the plot, but we may be affected by our smaller radius. The canonical IIP plateau luminosity (Podov) scales with progenitor radius; since our progenitor radius is ~40% smaller than the estimates here, that could have a significant effect. If we correct for this 40% effect (which is a significant oversimplification) it places us right in the middle of the spread (~1.5×10⁴² erg/s), with a mostly flat but slightly declining light curve (versus the severe dip). If we compare to our 50 day light curve, we don't observe a dip; this is a good sanity check that we're looking at roughly the right parameters. This narrows our range of possible plateau lengths quite a bit--we've gone from 90-150 days to 110-130 days. If we trust the corrected luminosity value too much, we're leaning a bit more to the 110 day models. Based on this, we could expect a plateau on the short side of 110 days; based on the time of peak, I'm anticipating a falloff sometime around the end of March/start of April.

Previously on this blog:

•  Neutron star discovered in center of Supernova 1987A 
•  SN 2023ixf early photometry
•  The Force Explosion Condition is Consistent with Spherically Symmetric CCSN Explosions