Picked up an iPhone SE this afternoon. $399, 16GB, space gray, no line, no fuss, in and out of the store in about eleven minutes including the part where the guy tried to sell me AppleCare twice. Compare that to the 6s launch back in September, where I stood outside for forty five minutes next to a guy livestreaming himself to nobody. Today it was me, one other customer buying a MacBook charger, and three employees standing around looking like they wished they had somewhere else to be.
Honestly the quiet made sense once I thought about it. This phone shipped into a week where the big Apple story wasn't a phone at all — it was the Justice Department standing up in a California courtroom on Monday and saying, actually, never mind, we got into the San Bernardino iPhone ourselves, dont need Apple's help anymore. That case had been eating tech press oxygen for two months. Tim Cook spent February and March positioned as the guy defending your privacy against the federal government, and then three days before his company's actual product launch, the government just... walked away from the fight without saying how they cracked it. So the SE dropped into a cycle where every reporter still had "encryption" and "backdoor" typed into their last six headlines and a $399 phone with a 4-inch screen was competing for attention against that. I dont think thats a coincidence of timing so much as it is just how March went.
As for the phone itself: it's basically a 5s body wearing a 6s's insides, and I mean that as a compliment. A9 chip, M9 coprocessor, 12 megapixel camera with Live Photos, Apple Pay works off Touch ID same as the bigger phones. No 3D Touch though, which stings a little more than I expected — I'd gotten used to peeking into emails on the 6s and now I'm back to just tapping like an animal. Small price for a phone that fits in a jeans pocket without making a weird rectangle bulge, which is the whole reason I wanted this thing in the first place. I know the internet has decided giant phones are the future and I get it for some people, but I have small hands and I like being able to text with one thumb while I'm carrying a coffee, and apparently in 2016 wanting that makes you a weirdo holdout. Fine by me.
One complaint: the camera bump. On the 6s it barely registers because the phone is already big and thin and the bump blends into the curve. On the SE, which has flat squared-off edges like the old 5s, that camera hump sticks up like a wart. It doesnt sit flat on a table. Rocks back and forth every time you type on it sitting on a desk, which is a small thing but an annoying one, and it tells you this was a phone built by grafting new guts into an old shell rather than designing the case around the parts. Not a dealbreaker. Just a little inelegant for a company that usually cares about that stuff.
Setup took longer than it should have because I restored from an iCloud backup over the coffee shop wifi instead of just plugging into my laptop like a sane person, and twenty minutes in I was still watching the little progress bar creep along while my actual coffee went cold. Lesson relearned for the third time in five years: use the cable.
Also worth mentioning, completely unrelated except that it's the same week: Oculus started shipping Rifts to preorder customers and immediately a bunch of people who paid up front back in January got emails saying their unit slipped to a ship date in May or later. Palmer Luckey had to go on Reddit and apologize. Rough week to be launching hardware and also rough week to be waiting on hardware, I guess. At least my phone showed up on the day it was supposed to.