iPhones are expensive, right? Not anymore.
Yesterday Apple introduced the $400 iPhone SE. As a father of three that has bought an XR for over $600 for one teen, shopped for refurbished iPhones for others, re-packaged numerous other hand-me-down phones and considered going cheap Android at times, this is really good news.
Affordable, without compromises.
Sure, this phone is in an iPhone 8 skin. But it’s got the guts of an iPhone 11, at least where it counts most.
At $399, the new iPhone SE has the same A13 Bionic processor as the fastest iPhone you can get, the iPhone 11. That is also the fastest processor you can get in a mobile phone, bar none. Apple could have gone with the A12 Bionic from previous generations of iPhones. That would have been cheaper, and it would have been very defensible. After all, the A12 — Apple’s older chip — is still the second-fastest processor you can get in a smartphone.
But Apple went top of the line, with a processor that can do five trillion operations per second.
That’s not just nice to have now.
That’s forward compatibility for a long time with future upgrades to iOS, the operating system that runs iPhones. It’s also forward compatibility for privacy-safe artificial intelligence run on your phone, not the cloud.
“A13 Bionic was built with a focus on machine learning, with a dedicated 8-core Neural Engine capable of 5 trillion operations per second, two Machine Learning Accelerators on the CPU and a new Machine Learning Controller to balance performance and efficiency,” Apple says.
The camera isn’t multi-lens but it is more than serviceable, with 4K video and computation depth perception for bokeh in portrait mode, plus other lighting effects. There’s video stabilization on both front and rear cameras.
And, the base level has 64GB of storage: enough to live with, with options for up to 256GB.
The screen is more than adequate: 4.7”. It won’t have the quality of the 11’s OLED screen, but I have the 11 Pro and my son has the XR, which has a screen likely comparable to the new SE. Frankly, you have to look pretty close to really tell them apart.
Add it all up and you have entry into the iOS ecosystem with a brand-new full-warranty phone for $400.
That’s a great deal, and it will open up more of the smartphone ecosystem to Apple.
