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Sunday, April 24, 2016

Keeping Apple Honest Over Its 'New' iPhone SE

Now that the iPhone SE is on sale, everyone is able to get a closer look at the smartphone outside of an Apple demo pit. How close is the design of the SE to the 5S? How durable is the hardware compared to the current flagship handsets? And is Apple being entirely honest in calling it a new handset?
If you start with the reviews of the handset, every writer has been looking over the specifications and software in the handset, and two things stand out. The first is that the four-inch form factor plays a huge part in making iOS 9 feel different on the SE compared to the larger handsets, and the increased performance of the chipset does give the smaller handset a notable advantage over the 5S.

TOKYO, JAPAN – MARCH 31: An Apple Inc. iPhone SE is displayed at the company’s Omotesando store on March 31, 2016 (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
The story really is about how close the handset is to the iPhone 5S.
iFixit’s teardown of the iPhone SE reveals a huge amount of commonality in the parts, including the screen connectors that match up with the existing iPhone 5S screen. The speakers, SIM card tray, and vibration alert motor are all swappable. New to the form factor are the camera, lightning connector board, and the logic board.
Curiously the increased battery capacity comes from changes in the technology, not the physical size. Although there are some waterproof seals in the handset, they are not comprehensive and the iPhone SE is not going to survive any appreciable amount of water immersion
This commonality of parts, re-use of the design and presumably continuing to use the 5S tooling has brought the build cost of the SE to around $160, reports research firm IHS. That shouldn’t come as a surprise – older technology will always have an advantage in price, but when you pair that up with the ability to see the iPhone SE as ‘new’ as opposed to the ‘old’ iPhone 5S, you have a profitable and marketable situation.

The commonality also extends to the durability of the SE. Perennial hardware testers SquareTrade put the iPhone SE through its testing regime to discover the breaking point of the latest handset. Unsurprisingly it matches the iPhone 5S in terms of resistance to bending, and lasts barely a minute under water. If you are looking for a handset with more durability, the design advances in the iPhone 6 family have made a difference.

Why are these third-party tests important? Although Squaretrade, iFixit, and others all gather name recognition and in part look at these experiments and reports as brand-building exercises, third-party testing acts as a confidence check on manufacturers. Of course manufacturers are going to conduct their own tests, of course they will harden their devices to the elements, and of course they will heavily promote protection in certain areas, but confidence in a product has to be more than ‘the manufacturer said so.’
The third-party testing validates the work put in by the manufactures, reassures consumers that what they are told is not simply advertising, and keeps everyone on their toes.
It also confirms many suspicions about the iPhone SE. For all the slick branding and focus on promoting it as a ‘new’ handset, with the limited supply of handsets and the rush to release new accessories, Apple has done the bare minimum to update the iPhone 5S. Now it hopes that iPhone 5S owners who have been hesitant to upgrade to a larger screened handset will upgrade to this ‘new’ handset and confirm if Apple has made the right strategic decision for 2016.

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