Apple last week unveiled iPhone SE, a powerful new iPhone with exceptional capabilities and performance starting at just $429.
The new iPhone SE features impressive upgrades including the performance of A15 Bionic, which powers advanced camera capabilities and makes nearly every experience better, from photo editing to power-intensive operations like gaming and augmented reality. Along with 5G, longer battery life, and improved durability, iPhone SE comes in three colors: Midnight, Starlight, and (PRODUCT)RED.
Allison Johnson for The Verge:
Everything about the iPhone SE is designed for the next few years except for one very important component: the screen. More specifically, the thick bezels that border the 4.7-inch LCD on the top and bottom. It’s a tired design straight out of 2017 that makes an already-small screen feel even smaller than it could be.
That’s a shame, because otherwise the SE is a fantastic midrange phone. With a starting price of $429, it will give you an excellent return on your investment since it will almost certainly get software updates for years to come. This year’s model also includes 5G, and naturally, Apple’s latest and greatest processor, both of which future-proof the phone for wireless advancements to come in the near future…
[T]here’s still the home button with Touch ID, which some people just prefer over Face ID and gesture navigation. This iPhone SE is for them, or for someone who just wants an iOS device for as little money as possible and doesn’t mind a small screen. But for everyone else, I think this vintage design is just a little too dated and probably best left in the past…
The iPhone 8 chassis that the SE uses may be vintage, but underneath lies Apple’s very latest mobile processor, the A15 Bionic. It’s the same one you’ll find in the top-of-the-line 13 Pro Max. Again, the SE costs less than $500, and the 13 Pro Max costs more than twice that. That’s just plain cool. And in day-to-day use, the SE behaves like a phone with a top-tier processor…There’s not a lot that the SE can’t do that a $1000-plus phone can.
Unfortunately, that cutting edge performance is hampered by the small screen.
MacDailyNews Take: Basically, it’s the Home button anachronism that has to go. The physical dimensions of the iPhone SE 3 can accommodate a much larger display, edge-to-edge, even if it has to sport that damnable notch, and inelegant kludge that we cannot wait to kiss goodbye.
As we wrote back in January, “It seems we’ll have to wait for 2024, at least, to finally see the iOS-interrupting Home button go the way of the dodo, some seven years after the modern iPhone paradigm arrived with Apple’s seminal iPhone X.”
For the iPhone SE to follow this upcoming model, we expect Apple to finally do away with the Home button, being on Face ID and an edge-to-edge display, but that will have to wait until the component pricing is right (which should be the case in 2024 or so when that model’s release arrives). — MacDailyNews, February 4, 2022
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