iPhone SE ‘Plus’
Last year Apple released the second iteration of its popular 2016 iPhone SE — a new budget iPhone that mirrored its predecessor in name and concept only, rather than overall design. While the 2016 iPhone SE had been a refresh of the 2013 iPhone 5s, the 2020 iPhone SE similarly took the 2017 iPhone 8 and brought it up to the latest A13 processor, while changing little else.
Meanwhile, the larger iPhone 8 Plus simply fell by the wayside, leaving fans of the older Home button and Touch ID iPhone design with only a single 4.7-inch option.
However, rumours continued throughout 2020 that Apple has a larger iPhone SE Plus in the works as well, and since it’s hard to imagine Apple waiting a year simply to release a larger version, there’s been speculation — and some evidence — that the next-generation of the iPhone SE will likely have more in common with the recent 11-inch iPad Air: an edge-to-edge display — likely still Liquid Retina rather than OLED — plus a Touch ID sensor embedded in the side button.
Our guess is that this may not even be an “iPhone SE Plus” so much as simply the next generation of iPhone SE. An edge-to-edge screen would allow Apple to push the screen size up to around 5.8 inches without changing the physical dimensions — much like it did with the original iPhone and its successors — and it’s extremely unlikely that Apple would split the “SE” lineup with two such radically different models, so we suspect that either this new one replaces the 2020 iPhone SE or it becomes something entirely different, like the “iPhone XE” that we heard being kicked around a couple of years ago. There are also at least some reports that suggest we won’t see it until early 2022, which would seem to make the former scenario — that it replaces the 2020 iPhone SE — seem much more likely.