171–180 of 317 posts
138.4 x 67.3 x 7.3 mm (5.45 x 2.65 x 0.29 in)
143.6 x 70.9 x 7.7 mm (5.65 x 2.79 x 0.30 in)
For half a cm extra in length I get 2.5 cm extra in screen size with the XS. I would have liked a smaller phone and if this were similar in size to the original SE, I might have switched, but the true size difference between this SE and a phone considered "much larger" is negligible (I own both).
> So, yes, a $400 iPhone SE bests a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in single-core CPU performance. Lies, damn lies and benchmarks? I don't believe that for a second.
Those benchmarks are impressive. iPhone SE beating the 2019 MBP in single core performance? That's fantastic! I wish I could comment on or know what he was talking about with the iPhone X vs "old iPhone" interaction paradigm. I personally thought the "single button" hardware interface was an incredible innovation that changed everything. Even Android relies on it. My Galaxy S9+ has a "software home button" (like most…
the real question is why we need that performance in your phone? I'm honestly asking, because with every flagship phone (no mater the brand) there is the hype about performance (X's processor is 2x quicker than Y) and it always makes me think. I don't think that in the last 10 years I ever had thought "I wish my phones CPU had higher clock speed"...
Thats a thing with the computer industry, everthing is getting faster all the time but everthing keeps feeling getting slower.
For me the pinnacle of UI was Mac OS 9, it was just so snappy and responsive. It's (pre emtive) multithreading was a pain to wait for but the UI itself was tactile. Apply only approached this on Mac OS X with (I believe) 10.7 Lion when they overhauled stuff under the hood (after upgrading to that version it felt like I bought a new machine). After that it's been downhill again.
For me it means if I want to buy my elderly parents an Apple Watch I can buy them this phone and have a cost almost comparable with existing A13 phones by themselves; $399+$399 vs $699($599 XR)+$399
Interesting point that iPhone SE might be hard for people used to iPhone X or later to downgrade to due to the swipe gestures.
Compared to my first gen SE, I'd like the faster processor, better camera and better battery life. But I'm not sure I'm willing to go up in size and weight, and get the rounded edges that make it even harder to grip one-handed. For me, a bigger screen isn't a plus - after years of following the trend and being on my phone more and more, I managed to kick the habit and I'm very happy that my phone has now found its ri…
The new SE requires very little new manufacturing capacity. The case and probably battery are from the iPhone 8; the CPU/GPU/SOC and most of the rest of the electronics are from the iPhone 11; the camera still seems to be a slightly unknown quantity but the specs suggest it has a lot in common with the iPhone X camera. No doubt a certain amount of tricky engineering was required to put those parts together efficiently, but the SE requires almost no new manufacturing capacity beyond the final assembly line. For Apple it's pretty much a no-brainer.
A hypothetical "iPhone Classic", with modern innards in an iPhone 4/5 form factor case, would be a very different matter. You couldn't combine the 11's CPU with the 5's battery - battery life would be laughable. So you'd need to use a CPU from an earlier model; I suspect you'd have to go back at least to the 8 to find a CPU that doesn't drain an iPhone 5 size battery like water through a sieve. That means keeping one more CPU fabrication line in business beyond its intended life, taking that capacity away from the plants that are making silicon for the iPhone 11 and the coming 12. The camera would of course also have to be based on an earlier model, with all the same downsides again in terms of keeping old technology going and taking up factory capacity. And fitting all that into a 4/5 case would still be a much bigger engineering feat than the actual SE 2.
Bottom line: Even if you assume that the "iPhone Classic" market would be as big as that for the SE 2, it's hard to see how it would be worth Apple's time and money to cater to it. If you want to argue that the Classic would be a practical proposition for Apple, you would have to claim that the Classic market would be much bigger than the SE 2 - and given how popular the SE 2 is already turning out to be, that seems really unlikely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do mobile chips focus less on floating point for some reason? Could that explain the seemingly massive difference in perf/watt?
Floating point tends to matter for classic 'number crunching' workloads- crypto, media encoding, anything to do with modeling the physical world, image processing, AI. Phones tend towards 'control flow', e.g. display an interface, accept a user input, communicate with a server, display information... and media decoding & gps both have dedicated hardware. FP workloads can be incredibly power hungry, so it's fortunate…
[0]: https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf
Compared to my first gen SE, I'd like the faster processor, better camera and better battery life. But I'm not sure I'm willing to go up in size and weight, and get the rounded edges that make it even harder to grip one-handed. For me, a bigger screen isn't a plus - after years of following the trend and being on my phone more and more, I managed to kick the habit and I'm very happy that my phone has now found its ri…
I'm with you here, I went through a period of moving to feature phones and ditching the smart watch to reduce the phone back to utility rather than a distraction. But feature phones, even those running kaiOS, just don't have the support for communication tools and things like 2fa authenticator apps. I eventually went for an iPhone SE (2016) in the last year, after it was discontinued and managed to get a boxed, new u…
For what it’s worth, Apple last updated iOS 12 on March 24th, so they seem to be supporting not only the most recent major version of iOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222