Apple’s new iPhone SE will echo the design of this iPhone 14 (Photo by Getty Images)
The Apple community has been waiting impatiently for the next iPhone to arrive. They might have less than a week to wait until the new iPhone SE is introduced. It can’t come soon enough for Apple because the SE arrives at a pivotal point in time for Tim Cook and his team.
Latest iPhone SE Release Date News
Writing on X (nee Twitter), noted Apple reporter Mark Gurman confirms that the launch of the iPhone SE “is still imminent and should be announced by next week when the company is holding product briefings.”
Tim Cook and his team will be keen to get the mid-range iPhone to market sooner rather than later. Stock levels of the current iPhone SE are dwindling, and there is currently no SE on sale in Europe due to the EU mandate for USB-C charging ports on small electronic devices.
Is The iPhone SE Release Delayed?
Apple has long been expected to launch the fourth iPhone SE model during the first quarter of 2025, with the generally held view that it would launch in mid- to late March to sync up with the release of iOS 18.4 and the last tranche of generative AI tools in the awkwardly backronymed Apple Intelligence software suite.
With several hardware releases to make in the first few months of 2025, it is understood that Apple will not hold a single launch event, instead spreading the launches across the calendar to give each product its own chance to stand out. That also means a “launch by press release” strategy, which ties in with private product briefings to members of the press, something that Gurman’s news highlights.
When Can I Buy The New iPhone SE?
Of course, launching the iPhone SE is not the same as releasing the iPhone SE. The first iPhone was announced on Jan 9, 2007, and was not available to purchase until June 29,2007. The pace is a little bit faster now, with pre-orders tending to open at the of the launch week, with a physical release seven days later.
A launch early next week would allow pre-orders to open by Friday, Feb 21 and a retail release seven days later on Feb 28. Forbes’ contributor David Phelan has more on the potential schedule.
The Importance Of The iPhone SE
2025’s iPhone SE arrives at a pivotal time for Apple. The iPhone 16 family is not having as high an impact on the market as previous models, the competition is pulling ahead today, and it’s seven months until the iPhone 17 family arrives.
The iPhone SE release allows Apple to push through a course correction without significant disruption.
The mid-range has become both competitive and competent. Advances in hardware and software put these handsets on the same footing as flagship handsets from two or three years ago. Apple will be forced to lift the specs of the iPhone SE to match the alternatives, and that means the SE is close to matching the far more expensive iPhone 16.
The Android-powered competition is racing ahead with tight integration of various artificial intelligence models and techniques into the software, with the second generation of Google’s Gemini AI available across the platform. Meanwhile, Apple Intelligence has still to finish the first-generation release, and some of those tools have already been suspended due to a lack of accuracy.
We’ll get some definitive answers by the end of the month, but it’s clear that the iPhone SE has its work cut out for it.
Now read more about three key issues the iPhone SE will need to address…
