Apple is known for making expensive products that are out of reach for much of the world.
For years, the newest iPhones have started at a whopping $650. And they can get as expensive as $950. That's a lot of money to pay for a smartphone, especially when you can buy a pretty darn good Android phone for only $350.
But the iPhone SE, the new, 4-inch iPhone that Apple announced on Monday, is an incredible value.
For $400, you can get an iPhone packed with *almost* all of the company's latest mobile technology.
It has the same powerful processors as the much more expensive line of flagship iPhones. It has the same 12-megapixel iSight camera as the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, which came out last fall.
It has Live Photos, a feature only available on the latest iPhones. And like those phones, the SE can shoot 4K video. It also has Apple Pay, the contactless (and really awesome) payments feature from Apple, and even, in some cases, a longer-lasting battery than the most expensive iPhone.
It also has Touch ID, Apple's secure fingerprint sensor that's used in many products including Apple Pay.
Basically, it's the innards of Apple's latest line of 6S phones packed into the body of an iPhone 5S.
(The SE falls short of the 6S line in one big way, as my colleague Rafi Letzter pointed out — it doesn't have the same front-facing selfie camera.)
If screen size isn't a consideration (for many people, the phone's smaller size is actually an asset), you can get over the selfie camera not being totally top of the line, and you don't mind carrying around a phone that *looks* a couple of years old, then the iPhone SE is an incredible value.
I was speaking with a friend last night who's considering getting the new phone. He's a longtime Apple devotee (he has a sort of mini-museum of old iPods and iPhones on a bookshelf at his apartment) and he has an iPhone 5. He told me that the new iPhone offers all of the new technology he's missing in his 2.5-year-old phone — a fingerprint sensor, Apple Pay, a top of the line camera, great battery life, and a new, faster processor — and it's a fraction of the price.
Just make sure that if you do get the SE, you spend an extra $100 to buy the 64-gigabyte model.
