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Phones · Apple iPhone SE

Apple iPhone SE 2020

19owners with an opinion
65%of verdicts positive
11/5positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and software; criticized for display and ease of use.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 5 years
I have 5 years old iPhone SE2020 that is relatively cheap having in mind that is 5 years old. None of Androids served me that long. Only Motorola tried, but water killed it. Water has not killed iPhone when my son threw it into pond. Which Android is that good, practically speaking?
Likes itOwned 2 years
The authors frustrations are shared by many. I used an iPhone 6 way past its expiry date. It also became slower over time for no reason until it was essentially unusable. Finally I bought a refurbished iPhone SE 2020 for 200 euros in 2022. It felt almost like going back to a brand new iPhone 6 in both performance and features. I hope to keep it until the inevitable performance drop makes it annoyingly slow, then buy a refurbished iPhone SE 2022 and repeat. After the SE 2022 becomes unusable there will be no good alternative left in the market for someone who only wants a small, simple phone without an abundance of stupid features, then I guess I’ll just stop using smartphones.
Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year
I wonder if the SE just was released with too little memory. I bought a iPhone SE 2020 and swapped it out a little over a year later for an iPhone 14Pro because of the app reset issue (granted I bought the phone when it already had been on the market for a while). Before that I had my iPhone 6S for over 5 years and had expected to keep the SE for much longer as well. I now also wish memory numbers were more of a focus when Apple releases a new phone. We keep hearing about storage, cameras neutral processors and yet lack of memory makes the device a pain to use shortly after release. I only now looked up memory for these devices on Wikipedia and the 2020 SE has only 2Gb of memory, just like the iPhone 6SE had! I'm honestly shocked that the SE still had the same memory as a phone 5 years earlier and also by how low the absolute numbers are.
Likes it
Apple is about to deprecate the iphone 11/SE 2020 version. Am gonna repurpose them as webcams given the 12MP camera put in there is arguably better than the brand new ones they put on new macs. The phone now has a limited lifespan though because of this prior stupidity where eventually am gonna get into spicy pillow territory. At that point the phone prematurely dies. We are going into a period where we are throwing away devices with 12mp+ cameras, and processors arguably faster than most desktops. It was arguable when the phones were old and legacy, but at this point the cameras on there are stupidly good. We need these phones to be repurposed for a second life and actually capture their manufacture energy costs. Frankly, if Apple allowed old iphones to be used for server usage, it is kind of crazy how efficient per dollar that would be.
Likes it
I'm typing this on an iPhone SE (2020). It runs the latest iOS, although it's likely missing some of the new bits. I prefer the size, although the screen that spans the entire front surface would be the superior device; I like the iPhone 13 Mini.
Doesn’t like it
Not your fault. In the past it used force touch which allowed you to trigger it from anywhere on the keyboard (instead of the spacebar only). This made it far more powerful/flexible. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, removed it. Source: an iPhone 6s in the family that was a joy for all the right reasons. My current SE 2020 is good, but the lack of force touch really sucks tbh. Do you know, for eg, you could open multitasking with force touch instead of the home button?
Doesn’t like it
> Perceived performance is one of these tradeoffs. Perceived performance should never be a tradeoff, only the measured performance impact can be one. My iPhone SE from 2020 has input delays of up to 2s after the update to iOS 26 and that's just really disappointing. I wouldn't mind if it'd be in the 0,3ms range, even though that would still be terrible from a measured performance POV.
Neutral
It might make sense to turn over phones every two years if you are a business that maintains lots of phones. As an individual, I generally keep my phones for at least five years. Why should I spend $300 per year instead of $150 when the lower cost option works for me? (I'm typing this on a 2020 iPhone SE; it runs the latest software. Although this year, that's not necessarily a good thing. Liquid Glass, Safari bugs.)
Likes it
What works for me, and this might not be palatable to everyone, is to intentionally downgrade my phone to a worse experience to add friction. I am currently using an SE 2020 on purpose. This thing overheats like hell, if I try to do anything too intensive with it it starts stuttering like crazy. But that's actually perfect, it's what I want. It naturally reduces my use time because it can get annoying to use.
Neutral
Personally I've downgraded my phone intentionally, from an iPhone 14 Pro to an iPhone SE 2020 (the previous iPhone I had). It's slow, it overheats, the battery is short. But that's what I want -- the friction makes me really consider every use of the phone, and the occasional slowdowns frustrate me just enough to reconsider taking it out of my pocket for everything. It kind of "works" for me. Might get a battery pack though hahah
Likes itStill going
I know you are making a flippant and pointless comment, but I’m compelled to respond. Of all the laptops I’ve owned my 2020 MacBook Air is still my personal daily driver, my 2010 Mac mini still works fine for running my 3d printer, my 2014 Mac mini works great for crafting and my 2020 iPhone SE2 is still getting OS updates and is sending this message. Are they repairable? Not easily. Do they still work, absolutely. Having used a bunch of non apple laptops and devices at home and work I would say the Apple products last at least 2x as long before breaking or hitting enforced obsolescence.
Likes it
I haven't been able to do that too, but, here's my experience regarding smartphone use--When I was using an Android, I'd go to accessibility settings and turn the display grayscale. It felt so /tasteless/. Like food without salt. And my smartphone use went down. When I switched to iOS, I deliberately chose the little SE 2020 edition with a terrible battery so I wouldn't use it much and it has worked. I still click a lot of pictures, use the banking apps, whatsapp here and there, readonly email access but haven't been wasting time on it and it makes me happy :D In fact my first smartphone ever was a BlackBerry Q10 (in 2018!), deliberately chosen to not get into smartphone addiction. By the way, kome, would you please get in touch with me? My email's in the bio. I'd love to chat with you about your time prior to having a smartphone :)
Neutral
I'm perfectly happy with the performance of my iPhone SE (2020), and it's still receiving software updates, but the battery is severely degraded. The same was true for my first-generation iPhone SE; I was able to get a cheap replacement back then due to Apple's battery replacement program related to batterygate. Access to cheap replacement batteries would definitely have an impact when deciding whether I should replace my phone or not. I believe Apple even mentioned the battery replacement program being a factor contributing to lower-than-expected sales a few years ago (sorry, can't find the source).
Doesn’t like it
Related to UI but not exactly on density. Even Refilling a prescriptions from Wallgreen's seems to have become impossible from a smaller phone such mine - IPhone SE2020 - since the control to choose the pharmacy or add a zip code for searching one is not actionable, the interface automatically scrolls down and when I drag the page I can see that it's there but there's no way to access it. It appears to be some kind of React garbage optimized for larger screens but completely and utterly broken on slightly smaller ones. It's not that I have anything against the technology itself but it broke basic functionality of yesteryear that just worked. And to what avail? All seems broken and ugly these days. And this isn't even about looking under the hood and analyzing the waste this wave of technology has brought. Where are we heading to? Is everything about to get worse and worse? Who is benefitting from all this because the user isn't...
Likes it
> You're just making up facts [...] Here's objective facts and my experiences that I used to draw my conclusions. My final Android phones were: [1] a Samsung A7 (2017), which included a non-replaceable battery, shipped with Android 6 (2015), officially supported Android 8 (2017; theoretical first-party security patches which it never received were offered until 2021), no longer receives updates even from LineageOS, and never ran postmarketOS; and [2] a Nokia 3 (2017), which had pretty much the same story (support ended on Android 9). In 2019, someone gave me an old, smashed [3] iPhone 7 (2016), and the phone literally worked better than any Android phone I've owned before, including either of the two above. Since it was already physically falling apart, I took the liberty of getting [4] an iPhone SE (2020), which is still with me; the 7 continued to serve in the family for a couple more years. [1]: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a7_(2017)-8335.php [2]: https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_3-8572.php [3]: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_7-8064.php [4]: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_se_(2020)-10170.php > All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years. I have a 2002 TiBook, which, believe me or not, continues to outlive my T61 and X200. My MBP (2017) had a spicy pillow though (which Apple repaired for free, outside of warranty). > [...] to protect your beloved brand/cult. I'm not a cultist, I'm a pragmatist. I used t…