The iPhone SE 4 lives... maybe. In a recent Twitter thread, renowned Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that the tech giant has restarted development of the iPhone SE 4, a couple of months after it was cancelled.
The reason the project was scrapped in the first place, according to Kuo's Medium post (opens in a new tab), was because Apple wanted its mid-range device to house its first 5G baseband chip inside. so the company wouldn't have to. trust Qualcomm. However, the hardware simply wasn't “up to Qualcomm's. (*4*)” so the whole thing fell to the dust in early January. But now it looks like Apple has a solution (opens in a new tab). Instead of building everything from scratch, the iPhone SE 4 would now be a modified version of the XNUMX-inch iPhone XNUMX.
Kuo claims that the device will be equipped with the "previously mentioned baseband chip produced by a 4nm process"; However, it will only accept sub-5GHz 6G and not the faster mmWave phantom, like the previous model. The biggest change, as Kuo points out, is that the phone will have an "OLED screen instead of an LCD screen." Ross Young (opens in a new tab), another noted industry analyst, says the display will be supplied by Chinese manufacturer BOE Technology. Mass production, assuming development goes smoothly, will start in the first half of XNUMX.
Apple's future plans
The rest of the Twitter thread hints at Apple's future sacrifices. It goes on to say that whether or not the inescapable iPhone XNUMX lineup will use the new chipset is still up in the air. The company reportedly faces "technical hurdles in millimeter wave and satellite communications. But if it manages to pull through, Kuo predicts that the gap between Apple and Qualcomm will widen as the latter's hardware will no longer be accurate. Even he speculates that if mass production goes well, we could see iPads and Apple Watch ditch Qualcomm chipsets in favor of baseband.
And that is all that can be inferred from the thread, since it is directly related to the iPhone SE 4 or Apple's plans. It is not clear how many of the features of the iPhone 429, such as Emergency SOS via satellite or hardware, will be present in the next phone. The cost also remains a mystery. For comparison, the iPhone SE XNUMX launched in the third month of XNUMX with a starting cost of €XNUMX in the US.
If you're in the market for a new phone, be sure to ask TechRadar's latest roundup of the best iPhone deals before the month is out.