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 phil
schiller 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 because that's what it is
the iphone sc 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 old design and home
button and everything and 429 dollar
price tag now last generation this
formula i said it was a hit right but
now it's two 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 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
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 sc 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 headroom for
days this phone is going to perform the
same way it does today as it does in two
years as it does in four five maybe six
years and that is a priority for an
iphone sc 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 four 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
because 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 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
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 hdr4 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 ultrawide
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 inch 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 inch display and that
display is like i said barely above 720p
resolution it's 60 hertz 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 all
trying to give you much larger displays
thinner bezels lots of them are doing 90
or 120 hertz 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 ultra wide
right that's not the iphone se 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
four thousand forty 500 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 sc 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 waze 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 churning down battery and i
killed this phone more than once by 9 pm
and then because of this formula this
phone still maxes out at 20 watts of
fast charging so it'll fill up zero to
100 in like an hour
and it still only has seven and a half
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 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
basically 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
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
because i kind of still want to see it
like i would argue that a crappy 120
inch 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 gonna do that because
they've still got this panel that
they've gotten since the beginning of
time and we also know that those
obnoxiously thick four five thousand
milliamp hour 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 in 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 gonna 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 studios 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 hundred 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 because that's better for
people getting this phone now into the
future
old dog
new trick
thanks for watching
catch you guys the next one peace
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