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Phones · Apple iPhone SE

Apple iPhone SE2

6owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
2/3positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for durability and value; criticized for performance and reliability.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 4 years
I use an iPhone SE2 that I got refurbished in the past 6 months by Apple. I couldn't replace just the battery, because the rear glass had a crack in it. This thing is a mess, refurbishing it feels like a waste of money. It runs out of battery almost daily, has terrible multi-second camera lag when I open the camera app from the lockscreen. Often the phone will just have like a quarter second of UI lag for no obvious reason. The experience is overall very slow and frustrating, an enormous degradation from when I got it as a gift 4 years ago (part of why I'm still using it). It's a shame, because I like the phone a lot otherwise.
Likes itOwned 2 years
iPhones don't need to be expensive, you can get new iPhones quite cheap. I paid about $100 for a brand new iPhone SE2 through a budget prepaid carrier with a projected support life of 8 years from when I bought it 2 years ago- a fairly common discount offer you can still find for new SE3s now. I don't think you can buy any usable Android phone for the $12 or so I'd have every 8 months instead of buying a base model iPhone. And Apple uses their top end CPUs and hardware in their cheap base model phones.
Neutral
I get 100/s on an iPhone SE2. 50/s on a Samsung Galaxy A16 which was released in 2024 or 2025, but that is due to an API restriction. You can export from phyphox (.xslx or .cvs). You get timestamps in the first column. Phyphox refers to the raw data rate, not Nyquist freq. The sensors have analog lowpass filters that can be adjusted in order to avoid aliasing. In general, with more bandwidth you can do more intrusive things. But if you want to tell wether two people ride in the same car, 50 Hz should be sufficient anyways. Phyphox has a smartphone sensor database: https://phyphox.org/sensordb/
Doesn’t like it
Same here. Stuck with SE2 till it stopped catching pokemon properly. Currently pleased with the iPhone 13 mini. I think part of why I like small phones is I carry a laptop and hate web browsing / typing on the phone. It's mostly a modem and camera for me. Also having a laptop means the battery doesn't matter that much as you can just charge it off that.
Doesn’t like it
> [...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. Yeah, about that. When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13. Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse. I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.
Likes it
Why not just a $100 iPhone? That's about what I paid for my brand new iPhone SE2 from a budget pre-paid carrier a few years ago... right now you can get a brand new SE3 on the TracFone website for $189. Spec wise it's basically an iPhone 13 and is still a fast modern phone that is sold new and is expected to get updates for about 9 more years. Personally the cost isn't an issue but I prefer the SE2/SE3 design to the flagship phones- you get nearly all of the performance but in a smaller, lighter, more durable body, and with a physical button and a fingerprint sensor.
Likes it
You're describing an iPhone. I've switched from Android to SE2 in 2020, and bought 15 last year on release day to get the type-c charging. I feel it ticks most of your boxes: * excellent battery life - can't complain about it. I'm not streaming YouTube on 5G on the phone, and I've found out that it can last about two days per charge with light use - messenger apps, phone calls, emails. YMMV of course. * a great OLED screen - it's bright & crisp. I haven't seen a better screen in person yet. * a great camera - it's a very good camera IMO. Takes good shots of people and nature and shoots impressive videos of music shows in dark basements. * durable/rugged - not sure about 15, but my SE2 was abused and dropped. The metal sides were dinged, the screen had a few nasty scratches, but the phone held up together very well. * fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy - iOS is much nicer and snappier that any of the Android phones (HTC Desire S, Galaxy Note II, Xperia Z3, Xiaomi Mi6) I've had. * don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two - I think iPhones do last a few years, given the fact that my wife uses 13 and has zero desire (or reasons, really) to upgrade. The only requirement the iPhone doesn't fit is the storage - Apple charges an absurd price for storage upgrades on all of their devices. I went with the cheapest option and pay for a large iCloud subscription, and it seems to work well - the photo and file sync between the phone, Macbook & even my Windows machi…
Likes itHasn’t owned it
The last small flagship (iPhone 13 mini) sold poorly, but it was much more expensive than the SE2. This was at the tail end of covid, but before faceid worked with masks, so the SE's touch id was a huge selling point. Other than that and the camera, the only functional difference I can find are that the SE line is still missing the UWB antenna. I'd happily upgrade to a newer small iPhone if they made one. As it is, it looks like the only option is repeatedly repairing my 13 mini (and dealing with the hilariously bad 5G battery drain forever) or downgrading to a newer SE3. I know there are a lot of people in this boat. I predict they'll produce another small phone in a few years. It'll sell well due to pent up demand, and someone will be declared a genius for selling 100M's of extra phones that year.