The ‘iPhone SE 4’

Either way, the new M4 MacBook Air lineup will be relatively pedestrian compared to some of the other things Apple has in store. The “iPhone SE 4” is still on track for a March or April release, codenamed V59. That’s expected to get a big redesign — at least for an iPhone SE. Leaving the bezelled home button style behind, the new iPhone SE should look nearly identical to an iPhone 14, except that it will feature a single camera on the back and a USB-C port on the bottom, plus an A18 chip and 8 GB of RAM inside to support Apple Intelligence.

None of this is too surprising as it follows Apple’s playbook for the first two generations of iPhone SE, each of which took a 2.5-year-old design and modernized it with the latest-generation silicon — the 2016 iPhone SE was essentially a 2013 iPhone 5s with a 2015 A9 chip, and the 2020 iPhone SE was a replica of the 2017 iPhone 8 with the 2019 A13 chip. The 2022 iPhone SE was an outlier here, with virtually no design changes on the outside, merely an upgrade to the 2021 A15 chip and a 5G modem. However, many feel this one was an interim release designed entirely to bring 5G to the budget iPhone.

So, a 2025 iPhone SE that uses the 2022 iPhone 14 design and the 2024 A18 chip is perfectly in line with the tradition of Apple’s budget phones. Unlike its predecessor, this one won’t look exactly the same due to the single camera, but it’s expected to be pretty close. Reports that it would go with a Dynamic Island and have an iPhone 16 Action button have since been quashed, which makes us skeptical of a recent report that Apple will call it the “iPhone 16E.”