the iPhone SE 4 alive…maybe. In a recent thread on Twitter, renowned Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the tech giant has restarted development of the iPhone SE 4 – two months after it was reportedly cancelled.
The reason the project was scrapped in the first place, according to Kuo’s post on Medium (Opens in a new tab), because Apple wants its mid-range device to house the first in-house 5G baseband chip so that the company does not have to rely on Qualcomm. However, the hardware is not “equivalent to Qualcomm’s [tech]” so the whole thing was scrapped in early January. But now it appears Apple has a solution (Opens in a new tab). Instead of making everything from scratch, the iPhone SE 4 is now reportedly a modified version of the 6.1-inch iPhone 14.
Kuo claims that the device will come with the aforementioned “baseband chip made in a 4nm process”; however, it will only support sub-6GHz 5G and not the faster mmWave spectrum, like the previous model. The biggest change as Kuo points out is that the phone will sport an “OLED display instead of an LCD”. Ross Young (Opens in a new tab), another well-known industry analyst, claims that the screen will be provided by Chinese manufacturer BOE Technology. Mass production, assuming that progress goes smoothly, will begin in early 2024.
Apple’s future plans
The rest of the Twitter thread heralds Apple’s future endeavors. He went on to say that it’s still up in the air if the inevitable iPhone 16 lineup will use the new chipset. Apparently, the company is facing some “technical hurdles [relating] to mmWave and satellite communications.” But if it manages to pull it off, Kuo predicts the gulf between Apple and Qualcomm will grow as the latter’s hardware becomes redundant. He even thinks, that if mass production goes well, we could see iPads and Apple Watches ditching Qualcomm chipsets in favor of a single baseband.
And that’s pretty much all that can be gleaned from the thread as it relates directly to the iPhone SE 4 or Apple’s plans. It is not known how many iPhone 14 features, such as Emergency SOS via Satellite, or hardware will be in the upcoming phone. The price also remains a mystery. For comparison, the iPhone SE 3 launched back in March 2022 with a starting price tag of $429 in the United States.
If you’re in the market for a new phone, be sure to check out TechRadar’s latest round-up of best iPhone deals before the end of the month.