Buying a smaller iPhone doesn’t have to mean settling for disappointing specifications anymore. With its new iPhone SE, Apple is packing its latest features and technologies into a compact shell to provide those who prefer smaller screens with the very best it has to offer.
The iPhone SE looks almost identical to the iPhone 5s, but it’s an entirely different beast beneath its anodized aluminum exterior. Almost everything except its 4-inch Retina display has been updated and improved, and that starts with the powerful A9 processor.
That’s the same chip packed into iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and it’s up to 70 percent faster than last year’s A8. It also boosts graphics performance by up to 90 percent, and packs the M9 motion coprocessor that’s more power-efficient and enables the always-on “Hey Siri” feature.
Photo: Apple
Other features adopted from the iPhone 6s include the latest Touch ID scanner, NFC connectivity to support Apple Pay, and a 12-megapixel rear-facing iSight camera with advanced pixel technology, Live Photos and the ability to shoot 4K video.
iPhone SE is also packing a 5-megapixel front-facing camera with Retina flash, a 1,440mAh battery, Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity, 802.11 ac Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi Calling, and improved cellular connectivity with faster LTE and VoLTE.
About the only thing that’s missing from iPhone SE — apart from the extra screen space and bigger batteries — is 3D Touch, which remains exclusive to Apple’s latest devices.
iPhone SE maintains the aluminum unibody, flat sides and chamfered edges of iPhone 5s, but there is one subtle improvement. Those edges are now matte as opposed to polished and shiny, so they’re less likely to pick up scratches when you use your iPhone without a case.
Photo: Apple
Many of us expected iPhone SE to look like a smaller iPhone 6s, and some will be disappointed that it doesn’t. But almost four years after this design made its initial debut with the iPhone 5, it still looks incredibly attractive.
In fact, iPhone SE is probably the prettiest smartphone you can get that’s smaller than iPhone 6s — and it’s sure to be popular. Despite no updates in years, Apple’s 4-inch iPhone lineup sold 30 million units last year alone, Tim Cook confirmed today.
You can pre-order your iPhone SE on Thursday, March 24. Prices start at $399 with 16GB of storage, or $17 a month on iPhone Upgrade Plan but there’s also a 64GB option priced at $499. The device will be available in silver, gold, rose gold and space gray.
iPhone SE will make its official debut on Thursday, March 31.
Killian Bell is a freelance writer based in the U.K. He has an interest in all things tech and also covers Android over at CultofAndroid.com. You can follow him on Twitter via @killianbell.
11 responses to “Apple’s new iPhone SE crams the latest specs into a tiny shell”
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. What a waste of an hour.
what a boring event overall.
What else did they talk about?
Read the the full liveblog of the event for more details! http://www.cultofmac.com/418764/liveblog-apple-loops-us-in-with-the-iphone-se-and-9-7-inch-ipad-pro/
Thank you! :)
Hallelujah! My birthday present can’t come quick enough.
Might as well call it the iPhone 5E
Despite the bore fest presentation to say we’ve made a small iPhone 6+ I totally get this device. Aside from the users who just like smaller phones this works in other areas. I now live in the Alps and the 6 series of phones just don’t work in the cold, they constantly cut out and freeze, even in a full leader case they stop working. Several of us have this issue and we’ve come to the conclusion they’re just too thin. I never had this issue with the slightly thicker incarnations of the iPhone.
Also this works for multi device users. Even the 6+ isn’t quite big enough for a device to read from for long periods of time so I often carry my iPhone and iPad. So with a smaller powerful phone I can daisy chain the data to iPad. I know……a slightly ridiculous 1st world problem.
Great news! I have said I wanted a 5S with upgraded internals. And I can use my old 5S case and screen protection. Pity it doesn’t have 128 GB of storage, but otherwise, perfect.
Agreed. I wanted to buy a 64GB 5S when the 6 came out, and Apple discontinued it, leaving us with a choice of the now antiquated-seeming 5S in a useless “16GB” configuration (that was really about 11GB, after deducting space required for its root partition for the OS itself, etc.) and a marginally useful but still too-small 32GB model. BOO, and likewise HISS!
Left me with the option of having to keep using my 16GB 5S, or buying a 6, before they ended up dropping the 6 altogether, letting the 6 Plus be the smallest one, which is what I was half-way expecting them to do.
The 6 already is too damned big, as far as I’m concerned, so I’m very happy they’ve resurrected the 5 form-factor. I feel I better go ahead and upgrade now, since they’re about to do away with the headphone jack, (it’s rumored, on the iPhone 7) which is an absolute deal-breaker for me, meaning this iPhone 5E is likely to be the last one I buy. May have to buy two or three, just so I’ll have one for years to come, in case anything happens to this one.
(Also, I really preferred the straight-sides of the 5 to the curved, E-Z-2-Drop rounded 6 chassis. What a stupid idea. “Hey, look, we can make curved glass!” Congrats. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Never buying another one with curved edges. They suck!)
If Apple is going to eliminate the headphone jack, which as I said, is a deal-breaker, they might at least do the following: eliminate ALL jacks, make it waterproof, (not just splash resistant, make it so that it can go down to like, 165+ feet,) and replace the back-side aluminum with a solar panel. (Look at a Citizen Eco-Drive wristwatch if you want to know how to make it not look ugly.) Then charging can work by sitting it in a cradle in front, basically, of a 100 Watt bulb. (Or, naturally, the LED equivalent thereof.) It would nestle in, and the light would come on when it detected the phone sitting neatly up against it. With that much light directed at it, it would charge in only a few minutes, and if you ever found you were running low on battery, away from the charger, just sit it down, solar-panel face-up, in direct sunlight, and let it charge itself! Then at least, it makes sense to get rid of the headphone jack since you’re doing away with ALL jacks, indeed, ALL holes in the case.
(Buttons on a waterproof phone could work by using strain-gauges or using a small, concave touch-sensor that only activates when 100% of the surface is touched, which if small, would only happen when enough pressure is applied to force the skin touching that spot to conform to the inside of the curvature of the dimple, perhaps 1 or 1.5 mm diameter.) Would not require a physical button at all.)
They could totally do it, if they really wanted. They just have to want to. But I digress. The only downside to the new phone is that I understand they’re using the older, slower fingerprint reader from the 5S and 6/6+, not the faster one from the 6S/6S+, which is okay, I guess, as it’s helping them with shaving money off the price.
See you at the iStore.
I literally (and I do mean literally) fell asleep a few minutes in and had to watch it again to see the good part, (where they talked about the iPhone 5E*). It’s basically an update of the 5S, with 6S internals, which is what they SHOULD have done earlier… I’m almost upset enough at Apple NOT to buy one, but since this is the VERY THING I WAS HOPING TO BUY when I last went looking for an iPhone… I’ll probably buy one. Or two, to have a spare when they discontinue THIS ONE without warning. Like they did to the 5S 64GB, which is what I went to buy last time, not knowing the day they launched the 6, when they’d discontinued THAT without warning, to force people to buy the 6 to get one with enough memory.
Grrrrrrr….
* I know they’re styling it as “SE,” but it’s 5E. Just like it’s Oh Ess Ecks, not “Oh Ess Ten” and it’s iWatch, not “Apple Watch”. I call them what I want to call them, not what Apple wants to, when I know what it should really be called.