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My excitement level for this Apple product: ZERO
It’s not about excitement anymore, it’s about utility which if you think about it pretty much describes every new iPhone now. What can it do marginally better (based on the typical usage of your average consumer) than the iPhone I currently use?
 
1. Camera which does not fit in the body.
2. Notch in the display.
3. Sh*tty keyboards.
4. All that dongle mess.
5. Touchbar.
6. Lightning/USB-C/Thunderbolt cables.
7. Yeah, and the Jack...

Yet iPhone makes money than ever before, and that against android competition that's better than ever, especially on the low end. $300 Android phones are incredibly good.

Camera - that's fine. The latest iPhone camera notch has become a feature, so now you can buy glue-on camera notches for older phones, because it's so cool. People care about cameras. I care about cameras. This is the correct decision.

Notch - I love FaceID. Lasers!! - nuff said. You can't fit lasers in a smaller notch.

Headphone Jack - that totally sucks, but lightning -> audio is OK. If they ever get rid of ligthning I will stop buying these phones.

Wireless headphones are bad. That's a fact. Yes it's convenient to have no cables and the AirPods - which I bought - are Apple's best product as functionality, design, durability is concerned. Product-wise, they are flawless.
Unfortunately, they use wireless technology that gives me a headache after 20 minutes! So health comes first. Also wired headphones sound better and have less of a lag, I really don't understand how people can tolerate the mushy crappy BT sound. It's improved but it's still bad - after > 10 years, how stupid is that? Even the now-ancient wired EarPods have better sound.

Keyboards, touchbar, dongles, USBC - indeed - horrible. I am holding on to my 2012 original retina MBP, extended its life with new battery and screen. Intel hasn't made the processors significantly faster, it just gives them new, faster names each year. i9 with 5Ghz! Look at GeekBench, it's around 12% faster than the low end i5...

I had a company USB-C Macbook Pro for a bit - making it a tiny bit smaller but removing all the ports was a very bad idea. Like all the other MBP owners I was running around with a bunch of fugly adapters and cables. 6 cores was ever so slightly faster than my "legacy" model.
 
you're views are your views.

It is pretty obvious that my views are my views. Do I have to add a fine print on a forum board when I express my views, to say that they are actually my views?

But to call it a boring design (when do things have to change if it works well?) is your view. It doesn't mean it's a fact.

Well, how about this. To say that it is not a boring design when it actually is, is not a fact! See what I did, I can say that too. But the way, I am not a design/fashion expert, but from what I know designs do not change only when they don't work well. Designs do get old too. There is a reason why designs change through the years and you do not wear one type of clothes (the best ones) for years. Because using the repeatedly the same design (doesn't matter how brilliant it is) get old real fast.

As for acceptable, I don't know how much you're staring at your phone, but the thicker bezels disappear for me far more than the notch does.

It is not about staring or bezels disappearing/re-appearing! It is about screen to body ratio. And having a bigger display without increasing the phone size. Notch does serve a very important purpose and FaceID is loved by many users. May I ask, what purpose does a bezel serve in the year 2020? It existed before due to technology limitation on displays but it is not the case anymore. Android manufacturers do have an amazing screen to body ratio phones even on their low budget phones.

I am probably one of the biggest Apple fans around here. But I just hate to see a company with so much potential and resources getting so lazy that they feel they need to resurrect an iPhone design they used for years and years because they can't be bothered coming up with a more up to date design for the budget iPhone. Are there people who will buy it? Sure thing. There are probably people who would buy a phone even if it was made from a potato! Will it be successful and sell a lot? That remains to be seen.
 
At 499$ it will be dead in the water, because.... it's not actually 499$ .
In Europe this translates in 499 euro+ taxes =600+ euro....even at 399$ (399euro+ taxes) its expensive, the only good thing about this phone is the cpu, everything else is sub par like apple this days.
Where is the symmetry, function over form, MacBook with 1 usbc port and 300 dongles?
The SE line could be a major hit for apple but it looks like a chore more than anything, a bezel less 4.7" with on screen fingerprint sensor would do the trick, but no.

$499 seems right. $399 for the lowest storage option and $499 for the other storage option. DOA? It is half the cost of the flagship phones, but has nearly the same performance. It will sell like hotcakes.

I am a current X user, and would trade in my X for this.
 
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$499 seems right. $399 for the lowest storage option and $499 for the other storage option. DOA? It is half the cost of the flagship phones, but has nearly the same performance. It will sell like hotcakes.

I am a current X user, and would trade in my X for this.
Agreed. I had the iPhone 11 Pro for 4 months(got it on release day) before I sold it and went back to my iPhone SE.

Can’t wait for the SE2/9/Mini
 
Three year old components and current SOC with limited RAM to make sure it only good for 3 years. You pay for what you get! Apple alway wins!
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At 499$ it will be dead in the water, because.... it's not actually 499$ .
In Europe this translates in 499 euro+ taxes =600+ euro....even at 399$ (399euro+ taxes) its expensive, the only good thing about this phone is the cpu, everything else is sub par like apple this days.
Where is the symmetry, function over form, MacBook with 1 usbc port and 300 dongles?
The SE line could be a major hit for apple but it looks like a chore more than anything, a bezel less 4.7" with on screen fingerprint sensor would do the trick, but no.
In September Apple iPhone 12 5.4” will be that size without bezels!
 
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I certainly hope that once this SE2 is released, the SE crew will finally stop whining about what a cruel world it is, not having an updated iPhone SE to tuck them in at night. That is wishful thinking though I am sure.
 
I certainly hope that once this SE2 is released, the SE crew will finally stop whining about what a cruel world it is, not having an updated iPhone SE to tuck them in at night. That is wishful thinking though I am sure.

Don’t count on it
 
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Here is a radical idea, Apple:
make SE line a one-handed phone, with reduced feature list.

By reduced I mean I don't need AR games on it, or movie theatre experience, or triple lens camera.
There would be still a ton to innovate on this SE line.
What is Apple supposed to do? Build a gimped phone for you that won't run the same apps as the normal iPhone? Are you trying to hurt developers or do you just not realize what you are saying?
 
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