Super-high-quality renders showcase the oddly familiar design of Apple's 2023 iPhone SE 4
Apple's next big iPhone has just leaked in all its glory, but before you get too excited... or accuse us of using deliberately vague wording to mislead you into reading our full story below, we should emphasize this is not a member of the company's fall 2023 premium handset family we're talking about here.
Instead, Front Page Tech's Jon Prosser is completely blowing the cover of a slightly humbler device than both the "vanilla" iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 today that many analysts and insiders are expecting to see daylight at some point early next year.
For a 2023 product, of course, the fourth-gen iPhone SE sure looks... outdated (yes, already), taking more than a few design cues from the 2018, yes, 2018-released iPhone XR.
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from the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max to the entire iPhone 15 lineup and even if said lineup were to miraculously adopt under-display facial recognition technology across the board, you'll almost certainly have to stand the sight of the iPhone XR's "traditional" screen cutout for at least another year.
There's really no way around it - the iPhone SE (2023) will look exactly the same as the 6.1-inch XR, "borrowing" everything from, well, that display diagonal to the noticeable but not-too-thick side and bottom bezels to an extra-wide notch housing all the components needed for Apple's Face ID system to work flawlessly without the elegance of the aforementioned Dynamic Island double hole punch setup.
Unsurprisingly, this means that the iPhone SE 4 will draw the ire of the European Parliament by also keeping Apple's proprietary Lightning port alive while presumably "cloning" other iPhone XR specs and features like screen resolution, battery capacity, and the 12MP resolution of the single rear-facing camera rendered today.
Also rendered today (in gorgeous detail) are the expected Midnight, Starlight, and (Product) RED flavors of next year's iPhone SE generation, which just so happen to be the exact same color options of the current iPhone SE edition, released earlier this year with a powerful Apple A15 Bionic processor under the hood.
iPhone SE 4 - probable specs and prices
If you're having trouble trusting Jon Prosser after that spectacularly inaccurate Apple Watch Series 7 leak from last year, you should know that multiple reports from multiple sources of late have pointed in this exact same design direction for Apple's next big budget-friendly 5G iPhone.
Prosser himself claims to have sat on these product images for a "hot minute" in anticipation of confirmation from experts like Ross Young, and although nothing is certain until it's... certain, this potentially divisive aesthetic approach to a 2023 iPhone is pretty much as close to settled as we can get in lack of an official Apple announcement.
Unfortunately, very few other things are guaranteed at the moment, which doesn't mean we can't speculate the fourth-gen iPhone SE will likely pack the same A16 SoC as the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max, as well as some hot new camera capabilities... of some sort.
With built-in 5G support, far more screen real estate than the iPhone SE (2022), no fingerprint sensor, no headphone jack, and no USB-C port, we'd expect this thing to start at around $500, thus sitting below the iPhone 12 on Apple's current totem pole, although that's obviously little more than a guess. And yes, we're guessing the entry-level configuration will still offer the same old 64 gigs of internal storage space as both the iPhone XR and iPhone SE 3.
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