iPhone 16 production cut by millions while iPhone SE 4 assembly will soon start

An investor note written for clients of banking firm Barclays was read by 9to5Mac and in that note, Barclay's analysts said that Apple might have cut production of the iPhone 16 series by a whopping three million units this year. The analysts came to this conclusion by running through Apple's supply chain and noticing that the company reduced its orders through the December quarter with a "key semiconductor" partner.

Running through sell-through checks to see how how the new iPhone 16 series has been selling, Barclays says that compared to sales of the iPhone 15 line at this time last year, iPhone 16 sales are off 15% year-over-year. This decline would have an impact on shipments of the new iPhone 16 line for the September quarter. Barclays now calls for Apple to deliver 51 million units for the third calendar quarter which includes July, August, and September.

But the Barclays analysts blame the staggered Apple Intelligence rollout, the "limited adoption of AI outside of the U.S.," and the "lack of hardware differentiation" as reasons why the 2024 fourth-quarter ending in December "looks increasingly at risk" for shipments of the iPhone 16 line.

Speaking about iPhone production, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said on Tuesday that Apple is getting ready to start production of a new iPhone codenamed V59. That model is better known as the upcoming iPhone SE 4. The report adds that Apple could release new iPad Air models at the same time as the iPhone SE 4. Last year Apple released the M2-powered iPad Air with both 11-inch and 13-inch variants mirroring the iPad Pro options. 

This was done because the new OLED screens used on the M4 iPad Pro models caused Apple to raise the price of its top-of-the-line tablets and it wanted to give users a lower-priced option for both an 11-inch and 13-inch iPad models. Gurman says that next year could bring refreshed versions of the iPad Air codenamed J607 and J637 for the 11-inch and 13-inch models, respectively. People knowledgeable of the matter told Gurman that Apple would also be working on a new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Air tablets with the codenames R307 (11-inch) and R308 (13-inch).

As for the iPhone SE 4, it will be the first new low-priced SE handset since 2022's iPhone SE 3. The iPhone SE 4 will resemble the iPhone 14 which means that it will do away with Touch ID in favor of Face ID. The 6.1-inch OLED display will be "edge-to-edge" and carry the infamous "notch" on top of the screen. The iPhone SE 4 is expected to carry 8GB of RAM and could be powered by the same 3nm A18 application processor that runs the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus.

The reason for equipping the iPhone SE 4 with twice the amount of RAM used on the iPhone SE 3 and including a chipset introduced this year is to allow the device to run Apple Intelligence, Apple's AI initiative. Depending on where Apple prices the iPhone SE 4 (the previous model started at $429 when released in 2022), the iPhone SE 4 could be a big winner for Apple in certain markets like China and India where low-priced Android phones sell well.

The new look iPhone SE 4 will have a big design shakeup. After all, the iPhone SE 3 was based on the look of the iPhone 8 which had a home button, Touch ID, and featured an LCD display. We expect to see the iPhone SE 4 released early next year, possibly during the first quarter. But before all of this takes place next year, we could see a new iPad mini, codenamed J410, hit the market by the end of this year. The last iPad mini released was the sixth-generation model on September 24, 2021.