The next iPhone SE benefits from Apple’s intelligence

I’m a big fan of the iPhone SE. In a market where you can easily spend over $1,000 on an iPhone, there’s an option that includes many (if not all) of the features most people want in an Apple phone, for a reasonable price. Sure, Apple makes a few sacrifices that some of us can’t live with (outdated design, less impressive cameras, inferior displays), but what comes with the SE is generally enough for the average customer.

The iPhone SE 4 will be an upgrade

In fact, it looks like the next iPhone SE will be more More than enough: According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple plans to follow up the iPhone 16 line with a new iPhone SE that essentially refreshes the iPhone 14: Where the current iPhone SE looks like an iPhone 8, with big bezels, a home button, and a 750p LCD display, the new SE will reportedly have a high-resolution, edge-to-edge OLED display with Face ID. While Gurman doesn’t mention cameras, the iPhone 14 has two high-quality rear cameras, including an ultra-wide lens. If Apple is recycling that iPhone’s design for the SE, it would make sense for those cameras to be there as well. (That may mean we’ll finally get Night Mode on an iPhone SE, too.)

But the big thing here isn’t the iPhone SE’s new cameras; it’s AI, specifically Apple Intelligence. Gurman says that “you can also bet” that Apple’s next suite of AI features will be supported on the next iPhone SE, which is crazy: Currently, Apple Intelligence is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max with the A17 Pro chip. The iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, released the same year, don’t support it, because Apple used the chip from the iPhone 14 Pro for those phones. You can buy a brand new iPhone 15 today, and by next year, Apple’s “budget” iPhone will have AI features that your phone can’t do, from Siri AI upgrades to composing emails.

Cheap, but powerful

That’s not so surprising, though, when you look at the history of the SE. The one area where Apple typically doesn’t compromise on the SE is performance: Sure, the latest SE carried over the same form factor and cameras as a smartphone released five years earlier, but it included the company’s newest iPhone chip, the A15 Bionic. If you don’t care about the other premium features, you could get an iPhone with the same power and performance for literally half the price of Apple’s flagship.

This is likely what we’ll see with next year’s iPhone SE: Apple will “save money” with an iPhone design that will be a few years old by then, but will likely use the A17 Bionic chip currently in the iPhone 15 Pro. (They could even use the chip they use in the iPhone 16 Pro, but if they continue the trend of using last year’s chip for base iPhone models, it would make more sense for them to do the same for the budget iPhone as well.) It would also be an easy marketing ploy for Apple: Want an iPhone that can run Apple Intelligence? All of our new iPhones, including our cheapest option, can.

That would be a shame for anyone who finds themselves on the wrong side of the fence, especially for the iPhone 15. But generative AI is still fairly new, and it’s not clear that any of these features are particularly groundbreaking. While it’s never nice to be left out of new things, Apple Intelligence might not be. THE reason to upgrade your incompatible iPhone, especially while Apple still supports your iPhone with non-AI features.

Apple will launch the iPhone 16 lineup this fall and wait to refresh the iPhone SE until the following year, likely in the spring, so it will be a while before we see what the company decides to do.