iPhone SE (2022), Four Years Later: Does Apple's Cheapest iPhone Still Make Sense in 2026?
Released in March 2022 on a body design dating back to 2017, the iPhone SE is now Apple's oldest current design. Here's whether it's still worth buying.
The iPhone SE (2022) is a strange product to evaluate four years after launch, because its internal hardware and its external design are aging at completely different speeds. The A15 Bionic chip inside it remains genuinely fast even now. The body it's wrapped in — a design Apple first shipped on the iPhone 8 back in 2017 — was already old news when the SE launched, and hasn't gotten any younger since.
What's Held Up: The Chip
Start with what's held up well. The A15 Bionic remains a capable chip for 2026 standards — it was Apple's flagship silicon as recently as the iPhone 13 Pro, and Apple's famously long CPU performance lead over competing Android chips means a four-year-old Apple processor still handles everyday apps, web browsing, and even moderately demanding games without the sluggishness you'd expect from a phone this old. If you judged the SE purely on raw processing speed, you'd assume it was a much newer device.
What Hasn't: The Screen
What hasn't held up is everything around that chip. The 4.7-inch, 750p LCD display at a fixed 60Hz refresh rate was already a weak point at launch, and the gap has only widened as even budget Android phones now routinely ship 90Hz or 120Hz panels as standard. Using the SE after any modern phone makes the screen's limitations immediately, viscerally obvious — colors look flat, motion looks choppy, and the thick bezels surrounding the display feel like a relic from a different design era, because they are one.
The Camera Gap Has Widened
The single 12MP rear camera has aged the same way. In 2022 it was already a step behind competitors offering multiple lenses; in 2026, with even $300 Android phones commonly including an ultrawide lens, the SE's inability to zoom out or capture wider scenes feels like an increasingly significant limitation rather than a minor quirk. Low-light performance, never a strength, hasn't improved with time — you're using the same fixed hardware Apple shipped four years ago, receiving only incremental software processing tweaks rather than any genuine hardware advancement.
Software Support Has Aged Gracefully
Where the SE has aged gracefully is software support. Apple has kept the SE updated through iOS 17 and beyond, meaning it still runs the same current operating system as brand-new iPhones, gets the same security patches, and runs the same current App Store apps — a genuine advantage over the Android budget-phone landscape, where software support frequently ends after two or three years. That's a meaningful part of why some buyers still consider the SE four years on: buying it isn't buying obsolescence, even if you're buying dated hardware.
Battery Life and Aging
Battery life remains adequate rather than impressive, a status that hasn't changed since launch — Apple's chip efficiency keeps the smallish battery competitive for light-to-moderate daily use, though it was never built for heavy users and won't get better with age as the battery itself inevitably degrades over years of charge cycles, a consideration any buyer of a four-year-old design should factor in regardless of when their specific unit was manufactured.
What Comes Next
The practical question for 2026 buyers is whether Apple will replace the SE line with a genuinely modern design — rumors have long pointed toward a next-generation SE built around the iPhone 14's body rather than the ancient iPhone 8 chassis, which would fix nearly every complaint in this retrospective at a stroke: bigger OLED screen, Face ID, USB-C, a modern camera system. If that phone arrives, it will instantly make the current SE look even more dated than it already does.
How the SE Compares to What Replaced It
Looking at where Apple's broader iPhone lineup has moved since the SE's March 2022 launch makes the gap even clearer. The iPhone 14 and iPhone 15, both covered elsewhere on this site, moved to larger OLED displays, dual-camera systems, and — in the 15's case — USB-C, while the SE's design has remained frozen in place. Apple has effectively let the SE serve as a deliberately static budget option rather than iterating its design alongside the rest of the lineup, a strategy that works fine for the specific budget-constrained buyer it targets, but means the gap between the SE and every other current iPhone widens with each new release rather than narrowing.
Should You Wait for a Replacement?
For buyers actively considering the SE today, the honest advice is to weigh urgency against uncertainty: if you need a phone now and the SE's price and simplicity fit your situation, it remains a perfectly serviceable purchase with strong software support ahead of it. If you can wait, persistent rumors of a redesigned SE built on more modern hardware make patience a reasonable strategy, since any successor would almost certainly address the screen, camera, and design complaints that define this phone's weaknesses four years on.
Repairability and Longevity
One underrated point in the SE's favor: its simple, well-understood design means third-party repair shops stock parts and know the procedures cold, four years into its production run, keeping repair costs for cracked screens or battery replacements lower than for many current flagships whose designs are still relatively new to independent repair technicians. That practical repairability extends the phone's realistic useful lifespan for budget-conscious owners willing to fix rather than replace.
Accessory Compatibility
The SE's Lightning port, now the only current iPhone still using it after the rest of Apple's lineup moved to USB-C, means SE owners are stuck maintaining a separate cable ecosystem — a minor but real inconvenience that will only grow as USB-C becomes the universal standard across nearly every other device category, from laptops to headphones to Android phones.
Verdict
For now, though, this SE remains what it's always been: the cheapest legitimate way into the Apple ecosystem, not a phone that competes on features with anything released in the last three years. Its chip has aged well, its screen and camera have aged poorly, and Apple's software support has kept the whole package functional longer than most budget phones manage. It's still a reasonable buy for a specific, budget-constrained buyer — just don't expect it to feel like a 2026 phone in the hand.