all right what's up MKBHD here and here it is this is the new 2022 iPhone SE now on paper SE stands for special edition still according to an old philler quote but the truth is this is the least special phone that Apple makes so I propose a new name for this one unofficially let's just call it the simple Edition cuz that's what it is the iPhone SE formula is and has been simple new chip old body low price so the ingredients this year are the a15 bionic same chip that's in the iPhone 13s in the body of an iPhone 8 again with its uh old design and home button and everything and $429 price tag now last generation this formula I said it was a hit right but now it's 2 years later and competition's sort of catching up a little bit more it's not as obvious of a huge winner as it's been in the past especially because the price did go up a little bit but in a world of the budget phone with the high refresh rate display versus the budget phone with the big battery or the budget phone with a stylus or the one with quad cameras this one has got something all the rest of them don't have which is it's the budget phone that's an iPhone here's my take though this is and always has been a very unbalanced phone like this has got parts that would humiliate other $400 phones but then other parts that are are starting to fall behind those phones like putting an a15 bionic in the iPhone SE means that this $400 phone has a more powerful chip than the $1,300 Galaxy s22 Ultra basically it has the most powerful chip in any phone right now alongside the flagship iPhone 13 and 13 Pro that is clearly more power than the typical iPhone SE buyer is going to need and it flies through iOS on a 720p display with no hiccups that's no surprise it feels like putting way too much engine in a tiny car but the reason for doing this is the same as it always has been which is it's got head room for days this phone is going to perform the same way it does today as it does in 2 years as it does in four five maybe six years and that is a priority for an iPhone SE buyer which is the longevity the software updates this is probably the longest lasting $400 phone period and then of course there's a bunch of other benefits to adding this newest chip this phone has 5G now not millimeter wave but sub 65g which is the most common kind and probably will be for a couple years and then just better overall efficiency although I'll get to this phone's battery life in a second and it now also has the New Image signal processor in the a15 so it can get a little more out of the exact same camera hardware and by the way there is one more gig of ram in here than the last SC so 4 gigs of RAM it's basically an iPhone 13 as far as performance goes but then let's talk about that camera on the back right cuz that's the one other thing that is just it's in a league of its own it's miles ahead of other $400 phones so it's it's just a single camera on the back 12 megapixels as far as I can tell it's the exact same camera Hardware again as the iPhone 8 and the last SE and the fact is it's just straight up the best single camera in this range it's the most consistent it's the best with color and noise management it doesn't have as much a natural background blur as the others with bigger sensors but it also doesn't have as much fringing and then the a15 bionic is giving you deep Fusion in medium dim lighting and smart HDR 4 in high dynamic range situations you have the new photographic Styles feature that builds the different looks straight into the image processing pipeline so basically if you thought the iPhone 8 photos were good this will also be good now you know when I'm shooting with it yeah I do miss not having an ultra wide sometimes and there are some instances where I really wish I could hit like a 2X button and just get a little bit of optical zoom going but at the same time I have to remember almost nobody getting this phone will have ever experienced that stuff in the past so they won't really know what they're missing oh also this is the best video camera in any $400 phone hands down it bumps up to 4K 60 this time great autofocus all the same great color and stuff I was talking about the one thing that's missing from this camera still night mode you would think with an a15 bionic they could finally get night mode into an iPhone SE camera but that's still not here but the point is you can see where I'm going with this right world class chip with excellent performance and Longevity and an amazing camera probably the best in any budget phone alongside the pixel 5A and then everything else about this phone is from the iPhone 8 that that phone came out in 2017 so it's uh looking a little long in the tooth as they say like it's just not very balanced now it's not that there's things that are bad about this phone it's just that they're so locked into this formula this exact formula like the newer iPhone 13 mini is smaller than this phone but it has a 5.4 in display right this iPhone 8 body is pretty small and trim by today's standards but when you turn it around you got those bezels and the chin and you just crunch down to a much smaller 4.7 in display and that display is like I said barely above 720p resolution it's 60 HZ it maxes out at a not very bright 600 nits so the whole front of this phone just feels so incredibly outdated you know you look at the other $400 phones now and they're trying to give you much larger displays thinner bezels lots of them are doing 90 or 120 HZ refresh rates now no problem but hey that's not Apple's formula they stick with the iPhone 8 body exactly and what can fit in this body exactly you know almost all of the competitive phones in this price have multiple cameras at least an ultrawide right that's not the iPhone su's formula the iPhone 8 had one camera the last iphone SE had one camera so yeah this one also is going to have one camera and on top of that you know lots of competitive budget phones are jamming impressively massive batteries in there 4, 4500 literally 5,000 milliamp hours plus sometimes and the single biggest concern with the last iphone SE was battery life right so Apple did hear that a little bit they did take improved battery chemistry and fit a slightly higher capacity battery in this same body but generally it still behaves pretty much the same way so we know a15 bionic is a very efficient chip it did great in this phone with standby time and those efficiency cores really go to work when you're doing that lightweight stuff the web browsing messaging reading the stuff most iPhone SE users do plenty of but if you do fire up a high brightness navigation app or if you jump into a game or just use the phone a lot then this is it's still a flagship chip you can still burn through battery really quickly with all that power so I could get to the end of the day like knowing what I was doing but I still did notice like when I fired this up and navigated to work 30-minute Drive with way on 10% battery gone like if I just used if I was in a game like asphalt for a little while I could notice it turning down battery and I killed this phone more than once by 900 p.m.
And then because of this formula this phone still maxes out at 20 WS of fast charging so it'll fill up 0 to 100 in like an hour and it still only has 7 and 1 12 Watts Max of wireless charging I would actually recommend leaving on Smart data mode on this phone which will automatically turn off 5G when you don't need it because that can help save a little bit of juice but overall yeah this phone's battery life is still not great it's barely average so yeah world class is the chip the camera and the haptics and then below average is everything else so that's it's very similar to the last year or the 2020 iPhone SE which by the way I held up next to this phone you can barely tell the difference other than a slightly different color we got a bit of a deeper red this year and then also instead of black and white it's Starlight and midnight this time but basic the number one thing I found myself wondering when using this phone is what if they weren't so locked into this formula like this phone starts at 429 bucks I'm guessing the price is a little higher because of 5G but let's call it $400 right uh $50 extra gives you 128 gigs of storage because this only starts at 64 and we know that they can make a phone this cheap because they're using this exact same body that they have been able to mass produce for so long that the price has gone down but if they wanted to change something about it like adding a camera hole or changing something about it that would mean new research new tooling new manufacturing processes spinning up and that would bump up the price but by how much cuz I kind of still want to see it like I would argue that a a crappy 120 HZ display which you see in all kinds of other budget phones would make this iPhone feel faster for the life of the phone but they're not going to do that cuz they've still got this panel that they've gotten since the beginning of time and we also know that those those obnoxiously thick 4 5,000 Mah batteries would obviously make this phone last much longer but you'd have to make the phone thicker and that would increase the price but by how much like clearly they could use more battery or even tossing it an ultra wide just because every other phone seems to have that Ultra wide camera I missed it I think other people who are shopping with other phones will notice this doesn't have one but that would mean cutting another camera hole and that's a whole new design that costs more money but how much more maybe you can still do it but really I'm just going to have to wonder that forever because this seems to be the only way Apple knows how to make a cheaper phone it's boring it's predictable but it's simple and you know exactly what you're getting and not getting because basically it's happened before now all that being said this is still actually a very easy iPhone to recommend because it's the cheapest new iPhone and it's going to get the software updates for the longest time the natural considerations that kept coming up we talked about this at the studio is what about iPhone 11 right and iPhone 11 it won't have 5G but it will have a bigger display thinner bezels face ID better battery life and it'll be about a 100 bucks more and there's also iPhone 13 mini which is going to be a bigger display thinner bezels face ID better battery life and has 5G and the newest chip but it's like $300 more but neither of those have something this phone has which is the home button and that sounds crazy and it might be a surprise but a lot of people still really just want a home button never underestimate the power of the home button so at the end of the day I'm glad the iPhone SE just got any update at all cuz that's better for people getting this phone now into the future old dog new trick thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace [Music]
