Apple’s 4-inch iPhone SE is never coming back, but its spirit should live on in a new, more affordable iPhone, Jason Cross writes for Macworld:
Apple makes the best phones it can, prices them such that the company makes a healthy profit, and if that’s too expensive, you can just buy last year’s model…or the one before that.
There’s a constant simmering furor from those who lament the passing of the iPhone SE. A large contingent of prospective iPhone buyers would be happy for a new SE, that follows the same formula: cram last-year’s hardware into some old design, preferably as small as possible, and sell it at a discounted price. Some may argue that the iPhone XR (and whatever this year’s replacement will be) makes the SE obsolete, but at a starting price of $749 and with a screen size over six inches, I think there’s plenty of room in the lineup for a new iPhone that sits well beneath it.
MacDailyNews Take: According to none other than Ming-Chi Kuo, in 2020, Apple will sell three new 5G iPhones featuring 5.4-, 6.1-, and 6.7-inch OLED displays. That 5.4-inch display should fit in quite the compact iPhone body, satisfying many who’d like a smaller one-handed iPhone than even the current 5.8-inch iPhone XS. Although we expect the 2020 5.4-inch iPhone will be premium-priced.
As Apple follows their playbook of selling older models at a discount, the 5.4-inch unit will become this “mid-range iPhone” in 2021. For the intervening time period, we’ll have to wait to see how Apple prices this and next year’s batch of iPhones.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]