When Apple discontinued the tiny iPhone SE back in the fall of 2018, it left people who wanted a smaller, less expensive iPhone without many options and was seen as part of a larger strategy to push people toward more expensive phones and drive iPhone profits even higher. Now the iPhone SE is back.
Apple just launched what it’s calling the second-generation iPhone SE. It’s supposed to check off three boxes in the iPhone lineup—smaller, cheaper, and still performant—but the “smaller” part is what’s changed. Back when the original iPhone SE launched, a 4-inch diagonal display was the most popular iPhone screen size. Now, as people have gotten accustomed to larger phones, that average has gotten bigger. So this new iPhone SE has a 4.7-inch display and looks identical to the iPhone 8.
It starts at $399 for a model with 64 gigabytes of internal storage and goes up from there (128 GB and 256 GB versions are also available). Preorders start April 17, and it starts shipping a week later.
The new iPhone SE is a spitting image of Apple’s iPhone 8, with newer components.
Photograph: AppleThe most significant technological feature in this new iPhone is its chip system. Apple has decked out the second-generation iPhone SE with the same chipset that’s in its top-of-the-line 2019 iPhone 11 Pro phones. That’s the A13 Bionic, which has an eight-core neural engine and both a CPU and GPU that is significantly faster than the chip in the original little iPhone SE. This chipset is also a large part of what will make photos captured on the iPhone SE look pretty good. But otherwise, this iPhone SE is a little glass-and-aluminum bundle of older tech—and Apple is wagering that a lot of people won’t mind, given the low price.
Some of the cost-saving elements of this phone are obvious. It has a 4.7-inch LCD, something Apple calls its Retina display, which is not quite as brilliant as the OLED displays on flagship phones. It has an old-school Home button with TouchID but no other bio-authentication features—although the return of the Home button isn’t necessarily a bad thing for people who miss the tactile feel of it on phones. It also has haptic touch, a newish feature that launched with the iPhone XR in 2018. This lets you touch and hold an app to access more menu options for that app, and it was considered by some to be a lower-tech replac
