I'm not afraid to say the original iPhone SE may have been one of the best iPhones I've ever used. Working in this business affords you the luxury of using loaner phones, but shortly after the iPhone SE's 2016 release, I went out and bought one with my own money. I was taken with its compact size and — especially — its miniaturized price tag.
That original iPhone SE gave up the ghost several years back, and the demands of phone reviews and feature writing have had me relying on a wide variety of iPhones and Android devices ever since. So last week, I got the chance to reacquaint myself ever so briefly with the iPhone SE 2022 for the first time since comparing Apple's phone to the Pixel 7a at some point last year. And as I held that still compact, still affordable device in my hand, one question kept echoing in my head about the iPhone SE.
How did I ever live like this? The iPhone SE found its way back into my life as I was updating our guide to the best phones and needed to rerun some test numbers so that the benchmarks we had for this two-year-old phone were apples-to-apples comparisons with the other top-ranked handsets. (Spoiler alert: the iPhone SE's A15 Bionic chipset that's three generations behind the A18 silicon in the iPhone 16 family is starting to show its age.) And since I had a fully fired-up iPhone on my hands, I reacquainted myself with that phone's interface and Touch ID controls.
The iPhone SE's dated look For context, I use an iPhone 12 for a lot of day-.