iPhone SE 4 live: latest news and rumors ahead of the big Apple launch

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Welcome to our liveblog for Apple's first big launch of 2025, which takes place this Wednesday February 19. The rumors are pointing towards the arrival of a mid-range iPhone SE 4 – but could there be more? We're rounding up of the latest news and rumors here. The iPhone SE 4 has been strongly rumored for weeks, with leaked images and case photos giving us a taste of what to expect. In short, it looks like we'll get a rebooted iPhone 14 with a tempting price tag.

This all means that Apple's mid-range phone looks like a shoo-in for the launch announced by Tim Cook last week (we don't yet have a time for the announcement). But could Apple be planning to announce something more? The teaser is vague and we have also seen rumors that an AirTag 2 and new HomePod are due sometime in 2025. Join us we piece together all of the latest rumors about the iPhone SE 4 and more ahead of Apple's unusual February 19 event...

Axel is TechRadar's Phones Editor, and has been reviewing and writing about the best mobile devices (iPhones included) since 2020. Based in the UK, he handles news and feature coverage for the phones section of the site, and is intrigued to see how a budget-friendly, Apple Inteligence-compatible iPhone will fare with consumers. A display upgrade. This might go without saying, but inheriting the iPhone 14's 6.1-inch display would mark a major upgrade for the iPhone SE, representing the greatest display upgrade between two iPhone generations since the iPhone X replaced the iPhone 7.

The current-gen iPhone SE 3 sports a 4.7-inch LCD display that can't even claim to be full HD, whereas the incoming iPhone 14 display has a full-screen resolution of 1170 x 2532. It's also much brighter than the outgoing SE display, at 1200 nits of peak brightness versus 625 on the older SE 3. That said, we can't expect too much from Apple, especially on a budget: I reckon there's zero chance of us seeing a refresh rate higher than 60Hz, seeing as Apple still sees fit to equip its baseline iPhone 16 with this refresh rate, despite nearly all of the competition moving on to 90Hz or 120Hz panels.

Budget beast. Personally, I'm looking forward to welcoming the most powerful cheap phone we've ever seen to the market, because if the rumors are true, the iPhone 16E will have a lot more muscle than anything in its price bracket. Though I remain unconvinced that $500 / £500 / AU$800 (as is rumored) is a particularly fair price for a budget iPhone, there's no denying that the Apple A18 chipset is something of a beast compared to equally priced silicon from the competition.

If we take a look at the Google Pixel 8a, for example, we see a phone equipped with the Google Tensor G3 chipset, which while capable isn't exactly flagship-grade even a year after release. When the iPhone 16 series launched, bringing the A18 chipset with it, we were impressed by the generational improvement between it and the previous generation A16 Bionic, so it stands to reason that the iPhone SE 4 will be an impressively powerful smartphone, too.

Return of the notch. In borrowing the design of the iPhone 14, the iPhone SE 4 is expected to bring the notched display back to the current iPhone lineup for the first time in three years. The iPhone 14 was, in fact, the last time we saw a notched display on an Apple handset, as the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max introduced the Dynamic Island now common to all models in the iPhone 16 lineup. It stands to reason that the iPhone SE 4 will miss out on the neat tricks we've gotten used to in three years of Dynamic Island use, such as live notifications, now playing icons, and timers, unless Apple finds a new way to add these utilities as regular floating windows or notifications.

Still, is it too early to say I'm feeling a little bit nostalgic about seeing a notch on an iPhone display again? Just me? Okay then. iPhone SE 4 or iPhone 16E?. Bloomberg's resident Apple guru Mark Gurman has speculated that the next generation of the iPhone SE might get a new name to go with its new look and new hardware specs. The iPhone SE 4 may in fact launch as the iPhone 16E, which would mark it out as a member of the iPhone 16 lineup rather it occupying its own branch in the iPhone family.

As this liveblog previously mentioned, this could simply be a way to recognize the internal power (and likely Apple Intelligence support) that Apple's new midrange phone brings – but I think the change could go deeper than that. Apple's main competitors all produce a cheaper version of their flagship phones at some point during the main products' life cycles. Most recently, we've had the Galaxy S24 FE from Samsung and Pixel 8a from Google, both of which share a similar naming scheme and general concept with the supposed iPhone 16E.