iPhone SE 2020 review: good battery life but has a tired design and while the camera is good in bright light and great at video, it is noisy in low-light
A strong case against $1,000 phones — What do you look for in a new iPhone? The top of the list likely includes battery life and camera quality.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple put a current-generation chip into a four-year-old body and priced it at $429, and The Verge's verdict frames the iPhone SE 2020 as 'a strong case against $1,000 phones': battery life holds up, video is great, but the design is tired and low-light shots are noisy. The trade is deliberate — cut the camera hardware and reuse the chassis to hit a price the flagship line won't touch.
The pattern stuck. Two years later the iPhone SE (2022) earned nearly the same review — well-priced and fast, but still the tired design, still no night mode — while the flagship line kept iterating in small steps, with the iPhone 14 reading as an 'iPhone 13S' with an improved selfie camera.
First-order effects
- Budget buyers get flagship-grade performance and battery at $429, but accept a dated display, a tired design, and a camera that falls apart in low light — a clear fork against the $1,000-plus flagships in Apple's own lineup.
Second-order effects
- The SE caps how far Apple can push flagship pricing: as long as a $429 phone covers the basics, each incremental flagship update — the 12's excellent camera but weaker battery than the 11, the 14's '13S' feel — has to justify its premium on camera and design alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's entry tier stays design-frozen across generations (as the 2020 and 2022 SEs did) while the real upgrade money migrates to cameras and ecosystem features — and the Lightning port that ships on both the SE and the 14 series leaves those models outside the EU's USB-C requirement, a regulatory pressure point the budget tier inherits.
The trend: Apple is running a two-speed iPhone strategy: a design-frozen, price-anchored budget line that changes slowly, and a flagship line whose yearly gains are increasingly incremental.