First iPhone SE Teardown Reveals Mix of iPhone 5s, 6, and 6s Components

[Mac 128]

Not saying that there is no demand for smaller phones. I'm saying that I would have paid a premium for a 4.3" model in a iPhone 6S body with smaller bezels that included every feature that the iPhone 4.7" model has including 3D Touch/vibrator, screen resolution, better front camera and faster Touch ID; AKA a no compromised iPhone. Not a Frankenstein phone using parts from a 5S, 6 and 6S. The damn phone looks exactly like a 5S.
But as it stands the phone is a good deal if you own a iPhone 6 and below. A current generation iPhone 6S owner would be making a mistake.

A premium 4.3" phone in a 6s body may have been good for you, but not necessarily Apple. Why would they invest in the R&D to create a premium phone that will look like last year's model in 6 months?

And your expectations are somewhat unreasonable as well. Are you an engineer? Otherwise, what makes you think Apple could make even a 4.3" model with 100% of the features and performance of the 4.7" 6s, without any compromise? If such a thing were possible, shouldn't the 6s have the same optical image stabilization camera as the 6s Plus? And equivalent battery life? Not everything can be miniaturized to solve space limitations, which means compromises have to be made. Do you really think Apple wanted the camera budge sticking out of the iPhone 6 series phones?

 

[CFreymarc]

Sill annoyed that this phone doesn't have a barometer.

Research has found that barometers are not that much of a perceived value for the masses. Barometer, temperature, humidity, various chemical "sniffers" and higher grade motion sensor has been desired for a by a smaller demographic for a while.

 

[macduke]

weight of iPhone SE = 3.99 ounces

32,000 ounces = 1 ton

8,020 iPhone SE's = 1 ton

Yeah, I'd say Apple will sell a ton of these too.

Sorry, I meant to say "metric shitton." Could you convert that to imperial shittons, and then tell me how many schmeckles Apple will make? Thanks.

 

[CFreymarc]

Looks like a classic supply chain consolidation for a lower price model. Good move keeping the 4" screen size going with mostly existing stock parts.

 

[kdarling]

A flight of stairs in a commercial modern building is 12 feet. No data that I am aware of, and I have looked for a while, has shown that a barometer can be accurate to such a tiny change in elevation.

Chips in smartphones are easily capable of 0.1 millbar resolution, which is under three feet. Some are even better.

Moreover, a barometer would then not be able to tell the difference between you climbing a few sets of stairs, or the weather changing above you head, or the differecne between stairs and an escalator.

The weather does not change that fast, and the accelerometer helps filter out things like escalators.

None of which matters in the SE, since the chip is missing. Its absence indicates to me that Apple's R&D efforts around indoor navigation might still be far from bearing fruit.

 

[Gudi]

Smartphones were selling just fine before the iPhone came along.

No they didn't. Like with everything some nerds bought into the fantasy of smartphones long before it became a reality. Just as Steve Jobs described them on stage, these so-called smartphones were only a little smarter but way harder to use. The user interface and workflow wasn't ready yet.

When the Brothers Wright invented their airplane, wing profiles and light aircraft engines already existed. All they added to the system was a steering method. Symbian, Palm, Blackberry they all failed, because they didn't have what it needs. I know the iPhone springboard seems stupidly simple, but that's what makes it all work.

Not to mention a bunch of other free app sites, and even accessory-specific sites.

The app store is itself an app, not a website. And that is part of the difference between a real smartphone and a so-called smartphone.

 

[SeaFox]

Sill annoyed that this phone doesn't have a barometer.

You should get the word out and maybe Apple will be pressured to in the next version.

 

[kdarling]

No they didn't. Like with everything some nerds bought into the fantasy of smartphones long before it became a reality. Just as Steve Jobs described them on stage, these so-called smartphones were only a little smarter but way harder to use. The user interface and workflow wasn't ready yet.

Steve Jobs was a salesman. He carefully avoided showing any touch smartphones on stage, instead only showing ones that were totally keyboard dependent.

The smartphones of the time were not failures at all. In fact, sales were headed up, and the iPhone barely changed the trajectory (except perhaps to flatten it a bit). What DID enormously boost sales was the introduction of reasonably priced Android smartphones.

The app store is itself an app, not a website. And that is part of the difference between a real smartphone and a so-called smartphone.

A definition in your own head. However, as I mentioned before, there were also store apps on phones. Where do you think Apple got the idea?

Apple didn't invent smartphones. On the contrary, their R&D time was enormously cut short by following most of the design ideas that had been hammered out for decades, from general candy bar shape, to what kind of apps people liked to use on their smartphones.

Most importantly, Apple rode the coat tails of all the smartphone makers who had spent billions of dollars and many years helping to create a worldwide infrastructure for data and customers. Plus the broadband and other mobile chips developed for all the smartphones that had come before. Without all that much more expensive and time costly R&D from others, Apple would've had zero product or market to sell to.

 

[grimgreybeard]

Today I was in Apple Store to replace my 5S with dead battery to brand new SE... I finished up keeping my good old 5S with dead battery. That SE is an absolute joke, first of all I coudn't restore it from my iCloud backup, there appeared someone else's Apple ID while restoring, and the device itself seemed to me not even a bit faster than my old 5S. Maybe some particular benchmarks show a bit better results, but user will never notice any improvements. Not worth to waste money for the same "5S" which is just called "SE". I'd rather replace my 5S's battery.

 

[CFreymarc]

No they didn't. Like with everything some nerds bought into the fantasy of smartphones long before it became a reality. Just as Steve Jobs described them on stage, these so-called smartphones were only a little smarter but way harder to use. The user interface and workflow wasn't ready yet.

....

Symbian, Palm, Blackberry they all failed, because they didn't have what it needs. I know the iPhone springboard seems stupidly simple, but that's what makes it all work.
The app store is itself an app, not a website. And that is part of the difference between a real smartphone and a so-called smartphone.

You have that right. Really want to see a clunky smartphone interface, the IBM Simon phone was both decades ahead and decades behind when this thing saw the light of day in the early 90's. At that time, I lived in Cupertino and got wind of Steve Jobs throwing Newtons from an upper balcony into the main lobby in Infinite Loop. One thing that never happened with the Newton due to then conflicting interest was making a Newton into a smart-phone. Steve killed that along with the entire Newton line.

In general, an intuitive and great UI design is easy to think about once presented. The issue is to get to that point before anyone can visualize it. The scrolling which is intuitively obvious, was very hard to conceive before it happened. Some apps on the Palm Trēo during it's swan song had a scrolling interface like the iPhone.
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What DID enormously boost sales was the introduction of reasonably priced Android smartphones.

Create the Ferrari and someone else will make a cheaper and lower quality imitation in time.

 

[Shadar]

For what use ? It's just a gimmick.

Actually, the barometer sensor is useful for those of us who participate in an experimental weather forecasting project that wants to use millions of phones with barometric sensors to augment the NOAA and the personal weather stations. It turns out that raw baro info, when altitude and position are also reported, and coming from a large grid of otherwise anonymous mobile measurements, can theoretically be used to develop much better and more fine-grained forecasting.

Once enough phones in the field have the capability, and the security issues are satisfactorily addressed, then this could revolutionize the way the weather models are initialized, as well as highlight very early when the forecast is breaking down and regenerate it with the new data. Real time weather forecasting from millions of sensors.

But apparently the SE won't be in that pool.

 

[69650]

Regardless of what some people might think, I stand by my view that you would be foolish to buy an iPhone SE. It's a 4 year old design that looks dated and is going to look even more dated in Sept when the iPhone 7 launches. If it doesn't sell they'll quietly axe it in a year or so just like they've done with the 5c. If it does sell they'll simply replace it with another 4" iPhone in the same design as the current iPhone 6s to maintain that "one step behind" philosophy for non-premium products. Either way you're buying a lame iPhone that's only been released to try and stem the fall in iPhone sales until they can rush out the iPhone 7 in Sept. The iPhone SE is a stop gap measure and as such will get no attention from Apple after this Sept. That will probably mean the resale values will fall dramatically after only a few months. App developers are not going to waste time optimising their new apps for the 4" screen when Apples' flagship products remain at 4.7" and 5.5". Just look how nobody develops for the 4" iPod Touch. If you desperately need a smaller smartphone and/or can't afford an iPhone 6s I would buy an Android device instead. They're much better value for money and they run all the same apps as an iPhone. Ignore all the guff about how many users are on the latest Android OS as nobody gives a monkeys about that in the Android world.

 

[Mac 128]

Regardless of what some people might think, I stand by my view that you would be foolish to buy an iPhone SE. It's a 4 year old design that looks dated and is going to look even more dated in Sept when the iPhone 7 launches. If it doesn't sell they'll quietly axe it in a year or so just like they've done with the 5c. If it does sell they'll simply replace it with another 4" iPhone in the same design as the current iPhone 6s to maintain that "one step behind" philosophy for non-premium products. Either way you're buying a lame iPhone that's only been released to try and stem the fall in iPhone sales until they can rush out the iPhone 7 in Sept. The iPhone SE is a stop gap measure and as such will get no attention from Apple after this Sept. That will probably mean the resale values will fall dramatically after only a few months. App developers are not going to waste time optimising their new apps for the 4" screen when Apples' flagship products remain at 4.7" and 5.5". Just look how nobody develops for the 4" iPod Touch. If you desperately need a smaller smartphone and/or can't afford an iPhone 6s I would buy an Android device instead. They're much better value for money and they run all the same apps as an iPhone. Ignore all the guff about how many users are on the latest Android OS as nobody gives a monkeys about that in the Android world.

What are you a shill for Android? Because that's the only way your bizarre, misinformed diatribe makes any sense.

"will get no attention from Apple after this Sept."? Seriously? It's the functional equivalent of the 6s in a 4" package for those who don't want to carry around a "phablet". And it costs $250 less. It's already $399, how could the resale values drop any further?

 

[Junior117]

The SE would be a huge upgrade for you at a very nice price. It's the goofballs that want to go from a 4.7" 6S to a SE that I can't understand. The 6S is definitely a manageable phone for a average to large person. Even smaller women are rocking bigger phones than me and I'm twice their size.

You have a fair point, but I can certainly see why people are going from the 6s to the SE: maybe some people couldn't wait for a more powerful iPhone at a smaller screen and just opted for the 6s/6s Plus. Then they see the SE and they probably when like, "dang it" and now they want to trade it in.

Again, you make a good argument and U can see why you'd think that way, but I do understand the other arguments as well as see where they're coming from.

To each their own, I guess.

 

[69650]

What are you a shill for Android? Because that's the only way your bizarre, misinformed diatribe makes any sense.

You can't handle the truth. That's your problem not mine.

 

[jeffreyg]

Pretty interesting little device. I think Apple is going to sell a ton of these. I know I'll be getting one for my wife soon. For once my complaints finally paid off! Been rooting for this little guy for years.

Got mine yesterday (gold, 64GB). Loving it, it's a great little phone.

 

[Sevendaymelee]

A premium 4.3" phone in a 6s body may have been good for you, but not necessarily Apple. Why would they invest in the R&D to create a premium phone that will look like last year's model in 6 months?

And your expectations are somewhat unreasonable as well. Are you an engineer? Otherwise, what makes you think Apple could make even a 4.3" model with 100% of the features and performance of the 4.7" 6s, without any compromise? If such a thing were possible, shouldn't the 6s have the same optical image stabilization camera as the 6s Plus? And equivalent battery life? Not everything can be miniaturized to solve space limitations, which means compromises have to be made. Do you really think Apple wanted the camera budge sticking out of the iPhone 6 series phones?

I think Apple should just release three identical phones in three difference sizes. A 4, 4.7 and 5.5 inch version. Sell them 100 dollars apart... problem solved... everyone's happy.

 

[KPandian1]

Regardless of what some people might think, I stand by my view that you would be foolish to buy an iPhone SE. It's a 4 year old design that looks dated and is going to look even more dated in Sept when the iPhone 7 launches. If you desperately need a smaller smartphone and/or can't afford an iPhone 6s I would buy an Android device instead. ... as nobody gives a monkeys about that in the Android world.

The iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus looked like dated Samsung/Android clone when they came out. The design is still "Old" Android!

If you are shilling for small Android phones, wrong idea to pit them against the iPhone SE as those buying it are not interested in the Android platform. And, you are on the wrong forum!

 

[hokieputter]

Show me an Android phone that is on par with the SE, both performance and size?? It doesn't exist except for the Sony Xperia Compact, which is not even sold in the US. Which seems silly to me, but that's a whole different topic. I certainly wouldn't mind if Apple took some hints from the Xperia Compact for it's next small device though. The Xperia Compact is marginally bigger than the SE and has the same size screen at the 6s. That would ok with me. Can't wait until they ditch the physical home button and integrate it's functionality directly into the screen. Via 3D touch or some other yet to released tech?!?!

 

[kdarling]

One thing that never happened with the Newton due to then conflicting interest was making a Newton into a smart-phone.

But worse, he later tried to make an iPod into a smartphone . Fortunately, it was as bad an idea as it sounds, and he eventually had to listen to others who showed him what a (multi-)touch phone could be like. (J. Ive says he had to develop such a demo in secret, to keep Jobs from stopping the idea prematurely.)

In general, an intuitive and great UI design is easy to think about once presented.

Actually, it's pretty easy if you spend a lot of time working with touchscreens. Many options become quite obvious, while others are a choice that can go very right or very wrong.

For example, you quickly figure out stuff like putting the most oft-used controls at the bottom where your thumb is, and the least used controls up top.

Apple initially goofed by putting the Back button way up out of reach of most people, which was okay with only simple situations. The designers of Android and Windows Phone had more experience and put a Back button at the bottom, so that no matter how large the screen grew or the button's usefulness grew, your Back navigation did not change.

The scrolling which is intuitively obvious, was very hard to conceive before it happened.

Nothing could be further from the facts. Heck, our enterprise handheld group had inertia scrolling on one of our field apps in late 2006, just before the iPhone came out.

Flick scrolling is easy to conceive for an experienced touch developer, and was even demo'd on a handheld back in 1992 by the inventor of the Java language:

The reason it wasn't used by business smartphones, was because while it's fun for short lists, it's not very good for longer lists or many-page documents. Worse, Apple threw out the baby with the bathwater when they got rid of draggable scrollbars. Ever try to pick a "Z" item out of an alphabetical list of hundreds on an iPhone? What a living hell, unless someone throws in an alphabetical shortcut.

People with little knowledge of what was already known in this area, don't realize that Apple was simply repeating concepts that had already been known for years, and even used in products most people never saw. Apple's primary difference was that they are a company with enough publicity to make customers sit up and take notice. I"m glad they did!

 

[Gudi]

Steve Jobs was a salesman. He carefully avoided showing any touch smartphones on stage, instead only showing ones that were totally keyboard dependent.

Sorry, touchscreens alone don't make a smartphone. There is more to the recipe. But yes, strike all the phones with physical keyboards from the list of possible first ever smartphones and your fairytale of a healthy smartphone market prior to the iPhone shrinks accordingly.

The smartphones of the time were not failures at all. In fact, sales were headed up, and the iPhone barely changed the trajectory (except perhaps to flatten it a bit). What DID enormously boost sales was the introduction of reasonably priced Android smartphones.

And every Android phone is an iPhone clone, which kind of proves my point. Before Samsung copied every aspect of the iPhone, it did the same with Nokia and Blackberry, without market success.

However, as I mentioned before, there were also store apps on phones. Where do you think Apple got the idea?

And as I mentioned before, everything needed to build an airplane existed prior to the Brothers Wright, but their thing flew and was steerable. For whatever reason no prior airplane took off. It's the same with Tablet-PCs and Smart-Featurephones. Their usage wasn't simple enough to be mass adopted. More a prove of concept than anything else. It's not important if you could download apps to your phone, it's more important if people actually do.

Take for example the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. The term "graphics tablet" existed long before to describe Wacom PC peripherals, the industry standard for graphics designers. Equally as long exist "tablet-PCs" a failed form factor from the 90ies. The Microsoft Surfaces tried to marry both concepts to give the tablet-PC another shot. And while it may have done all the same things an iPad Pro does, it won't bring the breakthrough of WYSIWYG-drawing, because the Surface is not a light, ARM-based, fanless tablet with a mobile OS. Soon "graphics tablet" will mean something that works like an iPad Pro. Nobody will think of the many successful Wacom tablets or the few unsuccessful Tablet-PCs with a pen.

Apple didn't invent smartphones. On the contrary, their R&D time was enormously cut short by following most of the design ideas that had been hammered out for decades, from general candy bar shape, to what kind of apps people liked to use on their smartphones.

Yes they did. And nobody said they invented every aspect of the smartphone themselves. Instead they decided what should and what shouldn't go into a smartphone. For example no filesystem and no process management. If you have a touch screen and an App Store, but force users to shovel files around by hand, than you've not created a smartphone.

Most importantly, Apple rode the coat tails of all the smartphone makers who had spent billions of dollars and many years helping to create a worldwide infrastructure for data and customers.

Doesn't matter, no one ever claimed Apple invented cellphones or build up networks. This stuff just was around while the iPhone revolutionized computing itself. Who cares about the roads when we talk about a completely new technology to build and propel cars? Cars who are nonetheless small enough to put them in a pocket, yet capable enough to replace the big cars of old!

Plus the broadband and other mobile chips developed for all the smartphones that had come before. Without all that much more expensive and time costly R&D from others, Apple would've had zero product or market to sell to.

Rubbish. 100% of my data comes through WiFi. They sell iPads without Cellular and could as well sell iPhones without it. That's not the core innovation about smartphones. First and foremost it's a computer without a file and a process manager, running only one app at a time in fullscreen. The iPhone completely eliminated all the context information you needed to know to use a traditional computer. Nobody thinks an iPhone is too complicated to be used by an average person without any interest in computers and that's the all important part of the smartphone revolution. Computing for the rest of us!

 

[kdarling]

Sorry, touchscreens alone don't make a smartphone. There is more to the recipe. But yes, strike all the phones with physical keyboards from the list of possible first ever smartphones and your fairytale of a healthy smartphone market prior to the iPhone shrinks accordingly.

A touchscreen is not required for something to be a smartphone. Or a smartwatch. Or a smart anything.

It's not important if you could download apps to your phone, it's more important if people actually do.

People downloaded plenty of apps to their phones prior to the iPhone.

It's all relative to the number of devices of the period.

Heck, flip phones downloaded more copies of Shazam in less time that iPhone users did.

Yes they did. And nobody said they invented every aspect of the smartphone themselves. Instead they decided what should and what shouldn't go into a smartphone.

A completely arbitrary... and frankly, fanboy... definition.

Whatever Apple decides to (finally) allow in their iPhone, does not define a smartphone. Using that thought process, the first iPhone defined a smartphone as one without a video cam or copy/paste or MMS capability or multitasking or notifications.

For example no file system and no process management. If you have a touch screen and an App Store, but force users to shovel files around by hand, than you've not created a smartphone.

What do you think the ability in iOS to show a list of running apps and stop them and/or remove them from memory is all about? It's a process manager.

The claim that having a file system makes something NOT a smartphone, is beyond ridiculous.

What defines a smartphone is not decided by Apple, but what's popular in a smartphone can be. Perhaps that's what you actually mean.

 

[CFreymarc]

But worse, he later tried to make an iPod into a smartphone . Fortunately, it was as bad an idea as it sounds, and he eventually had to listen to others who showed him what a (multi-)touch phone could be like. (J. Ive says he had to develop such a demo in secret, to keep Jobs from stopping the idea prematurely.)

So goes Apple. There is a swirly Kafka-esque world where demo products are built, presented and never sees the light outside of The Loop in Cupertino. Most of it is centered in the "bomb shelter" where some prototypes get the green light. Others are developed off campus and even at employees private residence to keep it away from rival prying eyes. Was told there were dozens of watch concepts before setting on the existing model.
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People downloaded plenty of apps to their phones prior to the iPhone.

Way before the iPhone, there was an app economy on the PalmOS. Problem was that the third party app stores did a Sears & Roebucks on the developers with way too much middleman margin and very restrictive policies such as forcing developers to take thier contact information out of apps. Thus, the developers did not thrive resulting stalled product growth. Push came to shove between developers and third party app site. Palm refused to intervene. That among several other very short sighted moves caused Palm to implode after the iPhone arrived.

Some say Palm's volume fell as much as 80% a year after the iPhone hit the streets. The proliferation of cost effective Android units was the killing blow for Jeff Hawkins legacy. By the time Palm "got it" with the Palm Pre and their own app store, it was too little too late. Also, only having JavaScript as a programming language with no native code options plus a very poor emulator for legacy Palm apps did not help out at all.

 

[rickyt07]

Pretty interesting little device. I think Apple is going to sell a ton of these. I know I'll be getting one for my wife soon. For once my complaints finally paid off! Been rooting for this little guy for years.

Yes I have the 64GB silver SE and it is nice, runs really smooth, great picture and camera. Battery life is so nice!!! compared to the 5s and even 6s in my opinion. I have been running it all day yesterday to add all the apps and get things setup and still at this afternoon the next day I am just now getting down to 10% on battery charge. just watch out getting this on Verizon as they charge $20 per month if you choose the monthly option or $40 per month for contract price of $49 for 64GB. They do not have contract price for the 16GB. If you pay either one in full it is still $20 a month fee.

 

[kdarling]

Some say Palm's volume fell as much as 80% a year after the iPhone hit the streets. The proliferation of cost effective Android units was the killing blow for Jeff Hawkins legacy. By the time Palm "got it" with the Palm Pre and their own app store, it was too little too late. Also, only having JavaScript as a programming language with no native code options plus a very poor emulator for legacy Palm apps did not help out at all.

I liked WebOS, and many people I know loved the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi. They were great pocket smarphones.

I think Palm blew it by making the Pre a six month exclusive with Sprint, which was long enough that many Verizon buyers lost interest.

It also would've helped if they had come out with a larger screen model, as HTC big screens were popular at the time.

So it goes.