iPhone SE (2020) Review By Rene Ritchie

- Sponsored by Brilliant. Go to brilliant. org/reneritchie to finish your day a little smarter every day. Apple has a brand new iPhone for 2020, a $399 US brand new iPhone SE, which is the least expensive we've seen since, well, the original iPhone SE back in 2016. Like the original, it features a classic design, including the home button and Touch ID. Leveled up with the greatest latest chipset and what Apple claims is their best single camera system ever.

It's the retro future of iPhones, but should have been your next iPhone. I'm Rene Ritchie, and this is my iPhone SE review. The new iPhone SE looks a lot like the old iPhone 8. There are a few design differences and I'll get to those in a hot take minute, but overall it's the same basic size, shape, and configuration. It'll even work with almost all existing iPhone 8 cases and attachments.

For tech nerds like me, who obsess over screen to bezel ratio and debate the relative glory and villainy of notches, hole punches and mechanical tutors. What try to avoid both. That's the huge drawback. Give me a modern iPhone every day of the week and twice on every day of the week for hundreds of millions of other people though, the one still using iPhones from the 6 to the 8, including the original SE, the ones that like the classic design that feel comfortable with it, and just want more of the same, at least for a while still, I think it will prove to be a huge feature. Just like the original SE gave one last hurrah to the smaller box here, more chamfered edge iPhone 5s style.

This new SE is giving all of those who love the iPhone 6 through 8, a new and improved version to keep on loving for at least a few more years. It's smaller and lighter than the more modern looking iPhone 11. And even the roughly same size, but stainless steel bound, iPhone 11 Pro, enough that you can feel it and holding it. I immediately flashed back to my first experience with the original SE four years ago. Again, forgetting just how small and light an iPhone can feel.

Sure this SE isn't as small as the previous one. The truth is once you move into a bigger apartment, you accumulate more stuff and it becomes hard to move back into a smaller one again, same with the iPhone SE. Over time, everything from iOS to the amount of power and thermal envelope, Apples' chipsets needed outgrew that old SE size. So if Apple ever wants to make a new four inch iPhone, again, they'll need new parts to do it. And that would mean it wouldn't come in at 399, which is what Apple really wanted this new iPhone SE to do, especially now that the iPhone 8 design is just fully paid down.

The new SE is made of Apple 7,000 series aluminum and chemically hardened glass, just like the iPhone 8. That's technically not as strong as more recent iPhone glass, but I've scratched all of those and quickly and this one is still holding up fine. I'll keep an eye on that though and report back in a few weeks because I have a feeling it'll change. For the last few years Apples glass has been way better at resisting breaks than it has been scratches, at least for me. And that's good because this iPhone SE is also every bit as slippery as the iPhone 8 and other recent iPhones.

I really do wish Apple would find some way to increase the friction on the glass backs because every time I hear one fall off in even slightly angled table or sofa, my not yet fully cybernetic heart just skips a beat. I haven't lost one yet, but I don't want to keep risking it. On the back Apple has dropped the word iPhone and centered their logo, which I really like. The more minimal the branding, the more powerful the brand. The colors are also great, white, black and product red.

I'm a sucker for red phones, especially with black face plates and that's all the iPhone SE offers for face plates this year, black and it's terrific. I mean, it does contrast more with bright apps, especially reading books or the web in light mode. But for movies, TV and anything in dark mode, it just melts that forehead and chin right away. Again, I know anathema to the full screen waterfall wraparound crowd, but for the non-trivial amount of people who enjoy having a place to rest their fingers, that won't trigger unintentional touch events it just feels like home. Speaking of, which the classic design of the iPhone SE means there's plenty of room for the classic home button front and bottom center.

It's not a mechanical home button like the original, but the virtual kind Apple introduced with the iPhone 7. And I actually prefer them by a long shot. Once you get used to them, they just feel better. You can even customize the pressure level if you really want to, but especially because it never gets loose or stops registering clicks over time, it's one less potential failure point to worry about. The new SE also has Touch ID, which is Apple's biometric fingerprint sensor, the faster second-generation version, which is just a fancy way of saying, if you touch the home button with a registered finger, it'll recognize you and unlock your iPhone or authenticate you for Apple pay, app store purchases, banking apps, stuff like that.

Apple is more recent iPhones have Face ID, which does something similar using the camera to scan your facial geometry. That's better if you can't touch your iPhone because it's propped up for Insta live or whatever, or you're wearing gloves. Touch ID though is great if you need to register multiple fingers. You're wearing glasses or goggles that block in for red light or at the time of this review so many of us have to wear face masks that cover our noses. So often, Touch ID is not so great with variances in moisture.

So if you're washing your hands a lot and you should be, make sure you dry them well before trying to use Touch ID. Now, personally, I prefer the new gesture based navigation system to the old home button system. I just find it faster and more fluid, but I recognize that for other people, what they can see beats what they can't and the home button is just so easy to see and feel like a giant neon exit sign right there on the front of the iPhone. So yeah, both Face ID and Touch ID have advantages and disadvantages and different people would just prefer one over the other. I still want to pass a threshold based multi-factor system that's just always taking snippets of face, touch, voice, gait, and other signals, so it's never dependent on actively challenging any specific one.

But for now it's terrific that Apple is offering an up-to-date Touch ID iPhone again. Let me know your preference in the comments. The iPhone SE display is again the same as the iPhone 8, 4.7 inches and 16 by nine. That's not as big or as tall as any of Apple's more recent fuller screen displays, but it's the same ratio is HDTV, so most videos look fine just with a lot of bezel on both sides. Unlike the iPhone 8, which had Apple's pressure sensitive 3D touch technology.

The new iPhone SE has Haptic Touch like the iPhone 10R and the iPhones 11. It uses time rather than pressure, a long press, rather than a firm press. I still prefer 3D Touch because of how fast and tactile it felt, Haptic Touch has gotten better, but I hope Apple can make it better still with future machine learning updates like Google has been doing on Android recently. The iPhone SE display is LCD, not OLED, which means it can't display HDR, high dynamic range videos on screen. It does do DCI-P3 wide-gamut, so greens look deep, reds look rich and colors precise, and it consent HDR to an HDR TV if you hook one up, but it doesn't look anywhere nearly as cinematic as the iPhone 11 Pro.

Now, I really like Apple's LCD displays. I personally prefer the OLED because I personally love everything HDR and Dolby Vision and the deeper blacks and higher peak brightness levels. But Apple's color calibration at the factory and color management throughout the entire imaging pipeline, make the LCDs look so good I still don't think most people can or will care about the differences at least not most of the time. And for people who don't like, OLEDs off access color shifting or pulse with modulation, I think is great Apple is still providing LCD as an option, at least for now fight me in the comments. The iPhone SE has the exact same Apple A13 Bionic system on a chip as the iPhone 11.

That means the same processor, graphics, neural engines, accelerators controllers, and all the other custom components Apple provides is flagship phones, not slowed down, not cut down exactly the same. And since Apple still makes the best performing chips and phones, it means the iPhone SE has the best performance in phones. And sure, I get that, that might not sound so important right now. Most of us never red line the processors in our phones, just like we never red line the engines in our cars. But the difference with phones is over time as new more demanding versions of the operating system, features and apps come out, the higher processor overhead means the iPhone SE will stay feeling snappy, responsive, and powerful for longer.

It's like if the speed limit kept getting raised every year, a few years from now, you'd appreciate all that extra power. And since Apple typically provide software updates for four or more years, having that extra power means the phone retains its value for those four more years, which is probably why resale remains so high. So while good meaning people can argue about which parts of a less expensive iPhone you can compromise on, screen, camera, processor. I think the value of Apple not compromising on the chipset is really only gonna be more and more apparent as time goes on. Again, comment me your thoughts.

The iPhone SE has the latest greatest Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0. So it'll work with all the latest, greatest Wi-Fi routers and accessories with the highest reliability and range available. It's also got dual SIM one real, one eSIM, for people who move between carriers a lot, maybe not so much right now, but one day again. There's no 5G, which is fine for me because there's very little 5G in most of the world. Some might argue that getting 5G now will better future-proof you, but I'd argue 5G technology is still in its infancy.

And the longer you wait to buy a 5G phone, the better of 5G modem you'll get in that phone. I do think sub-6 5G will be a benefit to people in rural and other areas who still don't get good LTE. But even that kind of coverage is gonna take a while still to roll out. In the meantime, the iPhone SE does Gigabit LTE really, really well. I'm getting speeds as good as the iPhone 11.

And I've placed a ton of regular and FaceTime calls on the Rogers network here in Montreal and they've all sounded crisp and clear to both sides of the conversation. That's with the earpiece and the speakers, which are stereo and not Dolby Atmos, like the iPhones 11, which I'm sad about and with the AirPods. All that without the added cost and money or power that comes with 5G to it. I've only been using the iPhone SE as my main phone for around a week. So it's impossible to give a realistic assessment of battery life yet.

Apple pegs a new iPhone SE around the same as the old iPhone 7 and 8 and original iPhone SE up to 13 hours of video playback, that compares up to 16 hours for the iPhone 10R and up to 17 hours for the iPhone 11. I'm more interested in how long it lasts for Instagram and TikTok, texting and gaming, which is a much wider range, but also things I think most of us do most of the time. For my usual stress test, I loaded up the Pokemon Go Incense Event this weekend on the iPhone SE an original iPhone SE and iPhone 10R and On iPhone 11 and just let them run all with 100% battery health all at max brightness. I always use Pokemon Go for my tests because it's something real people do in the real world now. And I've never found anything that hits a battery as hard with simultaneous GPS, data, screen, radios, basically everything.

And between that and Apple's video numbers I think it gives a really good indication of the potential drain range from minimum to maximum. So the original iPhone SE died first within two hours. The new iPhone SE died second within three hours, the iPhone 10R went next within four hours, at which point the iPhone 11 still had 12% power left. In general use the new iPhone SE lasted me most of the way through the day, all be it in low power mode towards the end. The iPhone 10R and 11 by contrast can go all day and overnight if they have to the max a day and a half easily.

Like the iPhone 8, you can charge wirelessly on any chip compatible pad, but it's still not as efficient as plugging in to the lightning port. And yeah, because it's lightening, it'll work with all your existing iPhone cables and accessories going back more than half a decade now. Sadly, Apple only includes the tiny five what, USB-A charger in the box like the iPhone 11 and not the bigger USB-C charger like the iPhone 11 Pro, but you can buy the bigger one if you want to charge faster. I know some people will say the smaller charger is better for overall battery health or that it fits more easily into pockets and fanny packs or that it keeps costs down. But I still think it's beyond time for all the adapters to get an upgrade.

Hit like below if you agree. For tethering, it works great, but it also doesn't have the bigger battery reserve of the more recent iPhones including the similarly sized iPhone 11 Pro. So you'll chew through power faster if that's something you do a lot. I've also charged the SE and left it unplugged overnight, just to see what the standby drain looked like. And it's been at 97 to 99% each morning, so far so great.

But I'll keep testing and give you more results in my follow-up. The iPhone SEs' main camera is a hybrid, a Kymera. It has the same sensor and lens system as the iPhone 8, but uses the image signal processor, the ISP of the A13. That means it can turn out images that are much closer to the iPhone 11 than the Adam's alone would allow. Apple calls it their best single camera system ever.

So on paper, it should shoot better than an iPhone 8 and even an iPhone 10R, which has better physical hardware. To test it out I shot a series of comparisons between the original iPhone SE the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, iPhone 8, iPhone 10R and iPhone 11, a few times with the 11 Pro as well and as a control also with Google's Pixel 4, which I assume will have a similar, if not the same main camera as the upcoming, less expensive Pixel 4a as well. And yeah, the new iPhone SE more than holds its own. Almost any camera can do well in full daylight. So I focus more on challenging situations, backlight, closer backlight, sunset, indoor, low light.

To my eyes it does in fact shoot slightly better than the 10R in most situations. The exception being low light, where I think the better ISP on the SE and the better sensor on the 10R make for a tie. But it's so close between all the newer iPhones that I'd have to pixel peep in most situations to see the difference, which is not something normal humans do. With bright light second-generation smart HDR does a great job resolving highlights without overexposing shadows, something the previous version had trouble with. Apple is using semantic rendering, which means the ISP can understand not just faces, but parts of faces also rocks, ropes, clouds, and other aspects of a scene, and then do its best to preserve accurate colors and textures for each, it's part of the whole transition from big glass and big sensor to big compute.

But the obvious area where the iPhone SE totally falls down is night mode. That's still exclusive to the iPhone 11, which have both the latest image signal processors and the latest camera hardware, which it requires. I'm hoping Apple can figure out a more software centric solution for that though, like Google's done in the past, unlike Apple themselves are now doing for portrait mode on the front facing cameras. Ironically, I do find Apple software, only portrait mode, a little too much like the pixels now. The segmentation masking, which means cutting the subject out from the background before you blur it has gotten much, much better, but for me, it's a little too cardboard cutout, instead of the subtler effect, you more often get with the multi-camera systems.

The new monocular version on the front-facing camera works far better than I expected it to. And even though you can't use face tracking and emoji and Memoji because no real depth data, you can still play around with them, sticker effects. The nice thing about portrait mode is that you can adjust it using depth control even long after you've taken it. So if it does look too strong to you, you can soften it out or even turn it off entirely. You can also switch between all the portrait lighting effects, including High-Key Mono, which is something the 10R simply couldn't do.

Editing in general has gotten much better in the current version of iOS as well, especially the video editing, which has many of the same features as photos. And Apple is still doing video better than just about anyone else on the planet and the new iPhone SE is no exception. It can go up to 4k 60 frames per second, not with interleaved extended dynamic range, like the iPhone 11 can, but it can do extended dynamic range up to 4k 30, which is still impressive. All of that though is just a lot of jargon to say it takes very crisp video with excellent color consistency, even as you move in and out of bright areas and shadows in a way that still makes it apparent you're moving without making anyone seasick at the same time. It'll even do quick video for those times when you decide your life photos should really be a TikTok instead.

So sure it's not the iPhone 11 camera and night mode is still the biggest miss for me, but it's also not $699 it's just $399. And that brings me to pricing. I know the international prices are higher, which sucks. Though sometimes that includes taxes like VAT or surcharges, like bringing them into the country. Still, even with currencies fluctuating all over the place these days, it'd be nice to see everything track closer to the US costs more often.

But at 399 US for 64 Gigabytes and just $50 more for 128 Gigabytes with AppleCare plus for just $79 and all the free as in free, not as in your data apps like iWork, iMovie, GarageBand and free services like today at Apple at home, which is taking the place of the excellent also free in store training Apple's offered for years now, yes, there are absolutely compromises here. The older design, the older camera hardware, the smaller display, you can find individual specs that are much better sometimes even for less from phones. But in terms of the overall package, from what you get now to the updates Apple provides for years, the iPhone SE is just jam packed with real value for real people. So if you have an older iPhone SE or 5s or 6 or 6s even 7 maybe 8, and you like the home button and Touch ID, the iPhone SE could be a compelling upgrade for you. If you want most of the cutting edge tech in a current generation iPhone, but you want it as a secondary phone for development or to test out the iOS waters or just to use for content creation because photos, video and social apps just run better in iOS, the iPhone SE could be a compelling backup phone for you.

But if you just don't want to pay more than 399 or 449, which is the model I personally recommend, but you still want an iPhone with killer performance and a really good camera and don't care one Whit about the rest, well, but the iPhone SE is priced for you. At that price you can even try and win, an Apple watch three, a pair of AirPods or Brilliant. Brilliance got this new introduction to neural networks course. The technology Apple is using to do everything from Face ID to night mode. It shows that the idea of learning through feedback underlies most cutting edge artificial neural networks, that you can wire up just 15 neurons.

And using that type of feedback, build a network that's capable of classifying handwritten digits, for example, or faces or clouds. When you extrapolate it to world scale, you can see how this stuff starts to touch everything we'll be doing in the future. And that's true, whether you're a student looking to get ahead while school is out, a professional who wants to brush up on the latest and most important topics or someone who just wants to learn how the world is starting to work. To learn more, literally go to brilliant. org/reneritchie and sign up for free.

Be one of the first 200 people and you can also level up with 20% off the annual premium subscription. Thanks Brilliant and thanks to all of you for your support. So that's my first review after almost a week with the new iPhone SE, but I'll be back with more. Now, I wanna hear from you though. Hit like, hit subscribe if you haven't already ring that bell so YouTube will actually tell you when you episodes go live and then hit up the comments and let me know.

Is the iPhone se the next iPhone for you? Why or why not? Thanks for watching, See you in the next video.

Source : Rene Ritchie