Apple Officially Launches the New iPhone SE: 7 New Features

Despite several rumours that Apple’s new entry-level iPhone would be arriving earlier this month, it seems that the one dissenting report of an April 15 launch was spot on — Apple today has launched the new budget iPhone model, and as the several other eleventh-hour reports shared, it has in fact gone with the simple name iPhone SE.

It’s an interesting choice of name, since it takes away any obvious distinction from its 2016 predecessor, which carried the same name with a radically different design. Many expected that it would be called iPhone 9, since it follows so closely on the design of the iPhone 8, or that Apple would at least distinguish it with a moniker like “iPhone SE 2” — as awkward as that may sound.

However, the reality is that the original iPhone SE has been discontinued for long enough that Apple doesn’t really need to differentiate the newest iPhone SE for marketing purposes, and so it can comfortably follow the same trend that has long been established with the iPad, which hasn’t had an actual numeric name since the 2011 iPad 2. Of course, people are still likely to refer to the new iPhone SE as the “iPhone SE 2,” but the official name for support purposes will likely just be “iPhone SE (second-generation)” or “2020 iPhone SE.”

Pre-orders for the iPhone SE will open on Apple’s online store this Friday, April 17, at 5 a.m. PDT, and the iPhone SE is expected to be arriving in stores and in people’s hands by next Friday, April 24. Pricing starts at $399 for the 64GB model, up to $549 for the 256GB capacity, although users who have an iPhone to trade-in could pick up the entry-level 64GB model for as low as $229.

By now there aren’t a lot of other surprises in the new iPhone SE, which follows the same strategy of the original — taking a 2.5-year-old predecessor and upgrading the internals while leaving most of the other specs and the overall design unchanged. Read on for 7 new features in the 2020 iPhone SE.