Apple's Long-Awaited Overhaul of iPhone SE Nears Release (bloomberg.com) 66
Apple plans to unveil a long-anticipated overhaul of the iPhone SE in the coming days, a move that will modernize its lower-cost model in a bid to spur growth and entice consumers to switch from other brands. Bloomberg: The company expects to announce the device as early as next week, ahead of it going on sale later in the month, according to people with knowledge of the matter. [...] The new device, code-named V59, also will be Apple's first with an in-house cellular modem, replacing a component from Qualcomm, Bloomberg News has reported. It will have a larger screen with Face ID and also include a speedier A18 chip, which will help support Apple Intelligence. The removal of the home button from the iPhone SE means that Apple will have fully phased out the iconic interface, which debuted on the first iPhone in 2007.
SE? (Score:3)
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Tim Cook gave a big fat donation to the guy who is trying his damnedest to implement Project 2025. He's one notch above Peter Thiel in the "self-loathing gay man" department.
(posting anon because I'm not burning karma on this off-topic reply to a troll)
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Re: Many Thanks To Tim Cook (Score:1)
Race*S*, surely?
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I also don't think you're actually rsilvergun, I think you're someone using that fark.com sig deceptively.
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Yup, which is why 99.99% of the engineering effort will be devoted to making sure it doesn't compete in any way with any existing model and the remaining 0.01% will be what colour to make the case.
Apple fashion mockery recognized, the iPhone SE is an Apple product “competing” with other like Apple products on price. Because that’s pretty much all they have to compete against.
The Chevy salesman doesn’t worry about the Chevy addict choosing a Kia. They only worry about which Chevy model that addict can afford.
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Does it come with an ADB mouse and keyboard, and a built in hard drive?
No, the "S" is for "sucks". [hrwiki.org]
It's the iPhone that exists so budget prepaid carriers can offer an iPhone that doesn't make their customers run off screaming when they hear the price. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the rumors are wrong and it doesn't get Apple Intelligence.
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You forgot the 'E' for excrement.
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Does it come with an ADB mouse and keyboard, and a built in hard drive?
Sadly the keyboard is not included, but it does have a 1.44MB SuperDrive and expansion slot.
Free beta testers (Score:3)
>> The new device, code-named V59, also will be Apple's first with an in-house cellular modem
So apple is going to save money from not having to buy from Qualcomm, any guesses if savings are going to be passed on to consumers?
Re:Free beta testers (Score:5, Insightful)
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They're pretty much killing the only reason I changed from Android to Apple - no decent smaller phones running Android these days.
The iPhone 13 Mini was the last truly compact modern phone Apple sold. The SE is just a large phone with a lousy screen-to-body ratio.
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Yeah why even call it the SE? It's just a low cost normal iphone. Seems to betray the purpose of the brand.
Re:Free beta testers (Score:5, Funny)
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The iPhone 13 Mini was the last truly compact modern phone Apple sold. The SE is just a large phone with a lousy screen-to-body ratio.
The iPhone 5s was the last phone Apple sold that was comfortable for me to use one-handed. Even my 6s was too big, and the 13 Mini has an even bigger screen than that.
I tolerate my 15 Pro, but I mostly find it a pain in the a** to use, because it pretty much requires two hands to do anything. I would like it a *lot* better if it were a foldable phone with an outer screen the size of the one on the 5s or even the 4s, unfolding it only when I need that extra screen real estate.
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My old SE died just before christmas (the battery would often drain to 1% straight away after unplugging from the charger, so it made it rather unreliable).
When I went into the second-hand phone shop, they looked at it like it was some sort of artefact, and when I asked for the smallest iPhone they had, I got looked at like an artefact!
Phones nowadays have become ridiculously big. If you don't live your whole life on it / run your influencing business from it, there's really no need for them to be so big -
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I'll be sticking with my old-school SE until it croaks, I guess.
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I'm still using an SE 1st gen as well. One, because it was free (a family hand-me-down), and two, because it's small. My son purchased a new iPhone about 6 months ago. You might as well call it a mini iPad. It's huge! I certainly don't want anything close to that size. I used to own a phone called the ENV that was designed like a small laptop. You opened it up and, GASP, had a manual keyboard you could use. It was small, lightweight, and the battery lasted for damn near a week between charges (and could be
Re:Free beta testers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe Apple charges too much for their products then buy your phones from someone else. If enough people do that then Apple will have to lower prices to match their features, add features to match their prices, or go out of business.
I remember hearing many times farmers that would scoff at the cost of a John Deere tractor, claiming the extra cost is just to pay for a layer of green paint. Farmers are very practical people, they don't pay extra for a paint job. I see much the same with iPhone, not everyone is willing to pay extra to have the outline of a piece of fruit stamped on the exterior, there must be a lot of people seeing value beyond a logo to sell so much product to so many people.
Brand recognition works for luxury items as that's a means of conspicuous consumption. Utility items, like phones, tablet computers, and laptops, will have an aspect of conspicuous consumption but that won't carry a brand to wide adoption. If there's wide adoption of a brand then the "elitism" of the brand is gone and it's not conspicuous consumption any more, it's what practical people buy.
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I got my iphone 6S at the small shop downstairs from where I live with a battery at 85% capacity compared to brand new for 100$. It lokks brand new. I barely use smartphones, no apps, no nothing is installed on it, I manually turn on GPS, bluethooth, wifi and cell data only when one is needed so the phone keeps its charge much longer that way and offer some kind of extra protection regarding personal data that way I guess. The phone still currently gets security updates from Apple. Perfect for me.
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>wide adoption = practical
argumentum ad populum in a thread of posts that already demonstrated reality and "value" have divorced
the logo's value has been found to activate the same regions of the brain among You People that religious iconography does; your arguments would paint sensibility and justifications and practicality onto their organizations of wide adoption too
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Every door needs both a door-skin, and a skin under whatever you're removing; non-removable batteries don't need a shell inside the battery area, and can fill a non-square area.
You could make a removable battery in which you have a pouch cell glued to a sliding cover that's at the bottom of the device and slides out the bottom. That design requires only additional space for the tab that sticks under the rest of the back to latch it in place, but otherwise is exactly as big as the case otherwise would be, to the micrometer. Users would obviously need a case for carrying around spare batteries if they wanted to do that, but merely making it removable is really, really easy.
I'm rea
Re: Free beta testers (Score:2)
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Sure. And I think that slice is irrelevant, given Apple's profitability.
A company does not need to be all things to all people.
Look at Ferrari. Their stock is at an all time high. They're giving $15,000 bonuses to all employees. Does Ferrari make a budget car? Nope. Their products carry high prices and they do just fine ignoring the low end, low margin world of automobile manufacturing. Apple seems to as well.
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Except Apple doesn't ignore 'the low end' and hasn't for a very long time.
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What do you call it? Right now, any random hick can walk into a Walmart with $100 and walk out with an iPhone and a pack of cigarettes. I've seen them as 'free' upgrade options from carriers and as giveaways and BOGOs in promos for switching. If that's not 'low end' I don't know what is.
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that slice is irrelevant/p>
No one cares what you think and you're wrong. American corporations want to own it all. They want 100% of the market share. Greed is good.
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>> The new device, code-named V59, also will be Apple's first with an in-house cellular modem
So apple is going to save money from not having to buy from Qualcomm, any guesses if savings are going to be passed on to consumers?
If you’re looking at the iPhone SE model, you’re already looking at the one that’s gonna save you money.
Hell, you just just saved hundreds by simply not buying the iPhone Pro Max Plus Premium Platinum Princess model.
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So apple is going to save money from not having to buy from Qualcomm, any guesses if savings are going to be passed on to consumers?
What savings? How is giving Qualcomm a few dollars cheaper than spending millions on R&D developing an inhouse modem after spending billions to acquire a modem division?
Expect all savings to be passed on to you, the RRP of the iPhone SE is $1,015,000,799 with everything passed to you. ;-)
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Absolutely agree. I doubt this is in any way cheaper for Apple. I'm pretty sure (from what I've read about their chip) that the issue is that the performance is not as good as a QualComm modem, hence why they are putting it in their budget model. I doubt the performance issues are enough that most people would notice, but in head to head performance tests it would come across badly.
I'd expect they will try to go for lower power or something so they can put the chip into their wearables etc first. Whether we
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Costs are not prices.
Wobbly Future (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm on a iPhone 13 that I bought new a year ago. I just found the cost of the latest models a bit crazy. It was genuinely confusing trying to remember what the differences between each model were, and I just didn't feel the value matrix was very strong, so I just got the cheapest one. It's really good and will last me a long time.
It's pretty obvious that Apple has been doing increasingly dubious business practices to try to maintain margin (the storage upgrade costs, the whole 8GB entry level thing, the stupid tiers of iCloud storage). They are entitled to do what they want, but during the Jobs era, one thing I think he got absolutely right was 'don't confuse the customer'. You just went and bought the 'iPhone' and knew you had the product that they had shown you on the stage. No guessing about whether you need the max or pro max or last year's pro max. I mean, the peak crazy for this was the iPad lineup, but they seem to have gotten that cleaned up a bit now (though, what is the difference between the iPad and iPad Air?).
I do like Apple products precisely because i deal with computers all day, and I like that they 'just work' for stuff I do at home. But I do get the sense they will use more and more opaque business practices to try to keep profits up. Sadly, the pretex to all of this, is that they are just not innovating anymore.
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I'm on a iPhone 13 that I bought new a year ago. I just found the cost of the latest models a bit crazy.
Setting aside any value judgment (ha) about whether iPhones are worth the price, that statement doesn't make a ton of sense. The only iPhone 16 model more expensive than the equivalent iPhone 13 model is the Pro Max, and the $100 nominal price difference doesn't cover four years of inflation. Accounting for inflation, the iPhone 16 lineup is cheaper than the 13 lineup.
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I didn't pay the original retail price. Apple discounts it's older phones to serve as entry level products. I think I paid about half what it was when first released, and it had a bit of an extra discount as well from the retailer.
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> "...is that they are just not innovating anymore."
Innovations don't have a schedule.
Modem (Score:1)
I wonder if it'll allow quick switching between sim cards. Actually, I wonder if it'll allow multiple sim cards. I guess maybe via esim? /512GB which I've had since late 2019...it takes several seconds to switch between sim cards. Faster, please.
It's the biggest complaint about my Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G
I wonder how multiple sim works...is there only one modem? Maybe there needs to be two modems to make it quicker. It'd be excellent to have the two data connections at once, and be able to configure routing...
Welp, there goes that. (Score:2)
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Please lord, let it be ... (Score:2)