Why the 2020 iPhone SE is an Important Smartphone for College Students

The smartphone is up there with the laptop as the most important device that college students use every day. From communicating with peers to organizing tasks to playing Minecraft when bored, it is hard to deny the value they hold in our daily lives, which can be a problem for some people due to their price. Smartphones can outprice even some flagship laptops, with some notable examples being the Samsung Galaxy s20 Ultra, which costs $1,400, as well as Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro Max, retailing for a slightly more reasonable $1,200.

Of course, those are the prices for the top of the line phones, and there are cheaper smartphones, such as the regular iPhone 11, that retails somewhere in the $700 range, along with an array of Android phones from Samsung or Google that went even lower, to around $300-$400. However, the cheapest smartphones always had a few things in common, they lacked a significant amount of power, and they were usually Androids, which alienated a market that was mostly used to iPhones. For many years, Apple has not made a phone cheaper than $700, but that changed a few weeks ago with their announcement of the iPhone SE.

I often blame Apple’s iPhone X for inflating smartphone prices to what they are now, so this can be seen as penance from Apple. Source: Pexel.com

The iPhone SE is essentially a Frankenstein device that Apple made by reusing and combining old iPhone parts into something new. The iPhone SE uses the chassis of a iPhone 8, which means that the phone lacks the full-screen look that a lot of modern smartphones have, but in return these reused parts are able to be sold for much cheaper. The iPhone will launch with a price of $400, and while it sounds like a casserole of old iPhone parts, it has one huge advantage in performance: it uses Apple’s A13 processor chip, the same one found in the iPhone 11 Pro Max. This powerful processor will give this phone insane speed and power for the price, overshadowing basically every phone in the $400 market right now.

This is a picture of the iPhone 6, but the iPhone SE will look fairly similar. Though it bears the rather outdated look of past smartphones and lacks a full-frontal screen, the iPhone SE’s performance and price are still great. Source: Pexel.com

This cheap package of solid iPhone quality with incredible speed will make this phone a great option for most college students, who may lack the funds to get a flagship smartphone. For $400 they’ll be able to get a phone that rivals those same flagships in power with the ease of use that comes with iOS, along with reportedly solid battery life to boot. The success of the iPhone SE even has an advantage for those who don’t buy this phone: this will send a message to smartphone manufactures that really hitting that $400 niche can be a goldmine, and it may start a trend of more powerful smartphones for much less.

Apple is the company that started the trend of inflating smartphone prices with the release of their $1,000 iPhone X a few years ago, so it seems fitting they would be the ones to hopefully help lower the curve back to reasonable standards. This will hopefully be a wake-up call to the smartphone world, bringing the prices back down and allowing for more competition in cheaper price ranges, allowing future generations of college students to bask in the glory of being able to spend less for better smartphones.