This Week at Mark Ellis Reviews

👉 More thoughts on the iPhone 16e after a week of stewing, a Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro review (it’s very good!) and an M4 Mac mini update!

And just another reminder to enter my 200k subscriber giveaway if you haven’t already (US and UK only)! There’s an M2 MacBook Air, Apple Watch Series 9, iPad 10th Gen and more up for grabs.

TOP STORY

Samsung Book5 Pro Review: The Best Windows MacBook Pro Alternative?

I’m going to be honest with you here; I can never see myself switching to a Windows laptop because I much prefer MacOS. It’s that simple. But, if I did want to buy a Windows Laptop, it would likely be the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro. Here’s why:

• There’s bags of performance from the Intel Core Ultra 7 and 16GB RAM

• I genuinely love the design. It’s super thin and feels premium

• Great range of ports including HDMI

It’s not perfect, but this is the best Windows laptop I’ve ever used. The biggest problem? Well, that would be the price. At $1,549/£1,499 it equates near enough to an M4 MacBook Pro which is just plainly a better laptop in my opinion.

M4 Mac mini 3 months later: The Good and The Bad

There’s not much left to say about the M4 Mac mini other than it is the best thing Apple has released for a very long time. It hits a value-for-money sweet spot that tech companies very rarely manage to get right. You simply won’t find as powerful computing for this little money anywhere else. It is also ridiculously tiny!

So is there anything I don’t like about it? Not really. You can watch the video to find out more but it boils down to a missing port and my desire for a cheaper alternative to the Studio Display.

Acer Swift 14 AI review: is it worth $1,199?

Not one but two Windows laptop reviews this week! Please, no one accuse me of being an Apple shill ever again. Ok, alright, I didn’t review this laptop, but Max (our website Editor) did! Here are his key takeaways about the Acer Swift 14 AI:

• Snapdragon X Plus chip has enough power for the average user, but buying the X Elite version would future-proof more

• The display is excellent, especially the colour reproduction

• It is about $200 too expensive…you can get an M3 MacBook Air for the same price!

Oh, and there’s a bunch of AI stuff packed in which does what every other AI system can. It’s just not very interesting or very useful.

Essential Tech News

OPINION

The iPhone 16e: a “scrap parts phone”?

It’s been just a few days since I published my thoughts on YouTube about Apple’s iPhone 16e announcement. I’ve got one on order, and it’ll be with me by the time you read this newsletter. I won’t be doing a first impressions video, because that’s utterly pointless for a product like this. Instead, I’ll be taking the iPhone 16e with me to Barcelona for a week of content creation and - hard, obviously - work at Mobile World Congress.

I’m going to do this properly, as well; I’ll transfer my main SIM card to the iPhone 16e from my iPhone 16 Pro Max, along with all of my apps and settings. It will, basically, become my main phone. I’ll then report back after a week of using Apple’s cheapest iPhone.

The iPhone 16e announcement reaction video has received the most comments of any video on my Tech Diary channel. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to chuck all of those comments into ChatGPT and find out what the general sentiment is for Apple’s latest iPhone.

It was more mixed than you might think, although the majority of people, as you might expect, are pretty cheesed off. Overpriced for what it offers (and, certainly, when compared to Android alternatives), not a true iPhone SE successor (that’s a big one for a lot of people), missing key features (yup, MagSafe featured heavily, here), and Apple’s apparent leaning on decoy pricing featured heavily. Perhaps worse, however, was the numerous suggestions that the iPhone 16e is nothing more than a “scrap parts phone”. Ouch.

On the slightly more positive side were folk who could see a use case and market for the iPhone 16e - that being mainly casual users and anyone who’s upgrading from the likes of the iPhone 8 or earlier. They’ve got a point, as have the people who noted that this is still the cheapest iPhone, like it or not.

For a tech reviewer like yours truly, the initial reaction to the iPhone 16e ironically makes it a fascinating device. It’s why I’m looking forward to getting mine and really putting it through its paces. Stay tuned.

TOP FINDS

What I watched on YouTube this week

I’ve been away for most of the week in Abu Dhabi with Ultrahuman testing their Ultrahuman Ring AIR Rare edition in a variety of scenarios. I met a camel. Somehow, I found the time to watch some YouTube:

🎸 Right in the feels: Sam Fender (Justin Hawkins Rides Again) - Oof. Try and watch this without it bringing a tear to your eye. I failed.

🍳 Gordon Ramsay Teaches Matthew McConaughey How to Make the Ultimate Steak & Eggs (Gordon Ramsay) - I don’t know why I watched this, but I did, and it’s hard to stop watching it. And you’ll be hungry afterwards, trust me.

🍗 Sean Evans on Eating Over 3,000 Wings, Mistakes with Hot Sauce & Celebrities Doing Hot Ones (Jimmy Kimmel Live) - A short but interesting interview with the guy who eats increasingly spicy chicken wings with celebrities while asking increasingly spicy questions.

🤔 Why tech reviews kinda suck now (Rene Ritchie) - I hesitated to share this, because I disagree entirely with the sentiment, but it’s worth a watch, because Rene is something of an old-timer in this industry. Warning: his scripting is rather impenetrable, and I think that his opinion of the tech review industry is rather wide of the mark.

‘GRAM OF THE WEEK

Forget the iPhone 16e! The Amazing Vivo V50!

Vivo continues to produce some truly excellent phones.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. Make sure to enter the giveaway and stay tuned next week for my report from MWC where there’ll be a whole bunch of new phones being released!

Until next time,

~ Mark