iPhone SE vs iPhone 8 — FIGHT! By Rene Ritchie

- Sponsored by CuriosityStream. Get access to my streaming video service, Nebula when you sign up at curiositystream. com/reneritchie. Now, Apple has got a brand new iPhone SE and it starts at just 399. Subscribe and you'll never miss my reviews. I've already compared it to the iPhone 10R and iPhone 11, because I figured that's what most potential customers would do.

But a bunch of you have asked me to also put it head-to-head against the iPhone 8. Either because you're considering the upgrade, or you're wondering if getting a discounted iPhone 8 from a carrier or a big-box store may be an even better deal than a new iPhone SE, and price just isn't always the same as value. So I'm Rene Ritchie, and this is the new iPhone SE versus the iPhone 8. Design is easy here. Design is a draw, kinda, because the new iPhone SE is based on the old iPhone 8 chassis.

They're almost identical. Almost. The new iPhone SE ditches the word iPhone on the back and drops the Apple logo down to the middle to balance it out, also to make it consistent with the new iPhones 11, which have bigger camera bumps at the top. And I like this new branding better. Like I said in my review, it's less, which isn't just more confident Apple's part, is cleaner for us.

Is it odd that Apple didn't change any of the design more than that? Well, not really. See when Apple designs a phone, they don't just design the phone. They design the machines that make the phone and then they outfit a whole assembly system with those machines which is expensive, especially at first. Over time though it all gets paid down and becomes not very expensive at all. That means as long as Apple doesn't change anything significant, it stays not very expensive at all.

In other words, moving the Apple logo down, fine. Changing the bezels, or chamfering the edges, expensive. Which is the exact opposite of what Apple wanted to do with the 399 iPhone SE. Both the new iPhone SE and old iPhone 8 have the same 4.7 inch LED-backlit LCD display, both in retina density, which means it's hard to see the individual Pixels at a regular viewing distance and P-3 wide-gamut which means deeper reds and lusher greens. The only real difference here, is that the iPhone 8 also comes in a larger version.

The iPhone 8 Plus with a 5.5 inch display. The iPhone SE at least for now, only comes in the standard 4.7 inch size. So if you do want bigger, you're gonna have to go with the iPhone 8 Plus, again at least for now. Home buttons and touch ID are also easy because they're also identical. Both have Apple's iPhone 7 era virtual home buttons and second generation touch ID fingerprint identity sensor.

That makes them super reliable, super fast, and both work exactly the same. The colors on the new iPhone SE and old iPhone 8 are slightly different. The SE is white instead of silver and black instead of space gray. Both of which I also liked better because they also just look cleaner. And there's a product red version of the SE, instead of a gold iPhone 8.

The iPhone 8 did get a red version six months after it debuted. And I liked it and have to buy it because red. And I like new iPhone SE and red as well mostly because the glass cores just never clicked for me the same way the metal ones did on the iPhone 6 through 7. Lastly, the face plate on the white iPhone SE is now black as well. On the iPhone 8, the silver and gold versions had white face plates.

The space-gray and red-black. Now I know some people prefer the white in general or because it looks brighter or find it less claustrophobic for reading text on white backgrounds. I like them both, but black does help make the bezels melt away for videos, especially for movies. Now here's where things get very different. The iPhone 8 has Apple's A11 Bionic.

The exact same chipset they shipped with the iPhone 10 in 2017. The new iPhone SE has Apple's A13 Bionic, the exact same chipset that ships with the iPhone 11 in 2019. And yeah, exact same, not under-clocked, not slowed down or missing or lesser than in any way. And that brings me to a quick word on benchmarks. It's totally cool to download an app, tap a button and get a general sense of the relative performance of the device.

But real benchmarking, the kind that should make or amplify headlines should be left for the people who code those apps or the science types that work for places like Genentech. Everything from battery to radio state, to room temperature affects benchmarking which is why I personally leave the serious stuff to the serious engineers. Anyway, there are several major differences between the A11 and the A13. The A11 Bionic has four 1.42 GHz Mistral, high efficiency cores, two 2.39 GHz Monsoon high-performance cores, three Apple-custom GPU cores, and Apple's first ever neural engine, at least in its very nascent form, all fabricated at 10 nanometers, where the smaller that number is, generally, the better performance and lower the heat and power you get. The A13 Bionic has four 1.73 GHz thunder high efficiency cores, two 2.65 GHz lightening high-performance cores with machine learning accelerators called AMX blocks on those two cores. It's also got four Apple-custom GPU cores and a new eight core fully formed neural engine all fabricated at seven nanometers under that lower is generally better rule.

I believe it's also got a next generation performance controller, which is like the cherry on top of Apple secret Silicon Sunday. You know what I mean? Also the new iPhone SE has three gigabytes of RAM, to the iPhone 8, two gigabytes. All that to say the A13 can do far more, for far longer in the same chassis and around the same power consumption levels as A11. So everything will feel quicker and more responsive day-to-day. It will handle more complex filters and AR experiences more smoothly, quicker and for longer, but it'll also handle app and operating system updates for three to five years longer, which means if you have, or get an iPhone 8 today, you're looking at updates until about 2021 or 2022.

Just like the 2015 iPhone 6S was updated to iOS 13 in 2019. If you get a new iPhone SE today, you're looking at updates until about 2024 or 2025. And the longer out that goes, the bigger the difference makes, because the A13 Bionic in the new iPhone SE is seven nanometers instead of 10 nanometers and generally more advanced. Even though it's faster and has more cores, it's also more efficient. Which means average battery life ends up being about the same as the iPhone 8.

According to Apple, the iPhone SE will tap out after about 13 hours of video playback, same as the iPhone 8. It can just flex way harder when it needs to during that time. To show the other end of the extreme, I ran both the new iPhone SE and iPhone 8 on Pokemon Go, which is GPS and data and graphics and max brightness, pretty much everything that can kill a battery as fast as possible. And they were neck and neck the entire time, every hour, on the hour dropping down to the same exact percentages. And so, yeah, total draw, but again, with one having far greater potential performance than the other.

Also both coming with the same USB eight five-watt charger in the box, which is so 2014. But they can also both use a more powerful USB 8 chargers if you wanna buy them. The iPhone SE is also optimized for much faster charging on the 18 watt USB-C charger. Again, if you wanna buy it. And they both support inductive charging on standard Qi compliant, inductive chargers.

While the iPhone 8 supported LTE advanced, the new iPhone SE supports gigabit LTE. That's also single SIM on the iPhone 8 and dual SIM one physical, one eSIM on the new iPhone SE. With the iPhone 8 supported 802.11 AC, or what even is that, Wi-Fi 5, the iPhone SE supports 802.11 AX or Wi-Fi 6. With the iPhone 8 supported Bluetooth 5, the iPhone SE supports also Bluetooth 5. But you get the idea.

If you move between multiple carriers, dual SIM is a real benefit. The rest depends on which carriers and what kind of router you have, whether you'll see any real world improvements or not. But the potential is there. In terms of a hardware, the new iPhone SE and iPhone 8 cameras are identical. Same 12MP F1.8, optically stabilized 4k 60 fps, wide angle on the back, same seven megapixel F2.2 1080p 30 fps selfie on the front. Except the old iPhone 8 has the A11 image signal processor to handle those photos.

And the new iPhone SE has the A13 image signal processor to handle these photos. And yeah. Oh my! Dual is the case style. What a difference those two generations of Silicon make? The end result is that the iPhone SE just shoots circles around the iPhone 8. It shoots better than the iPhone 10 are in most situations as well, falling roughly equal only in low light.

I even like some of what it does better than the Pixel four which is consistently cooler and contrast here as is Google's want. That's thanks to things like second-generation smart HDR which stacks multiple exposures and uses things like semantic rendering to pull out the best image possible. It also ties in those improvements and the neural engine. So unlike the iPhone 8, the iPhone SE does full on portrait mode including all portrait lighting effects front and back. Now you can get portrait mode on the iPhone 8 Plus.

Thanks to its dual camera system. But at a slightly higher price and bigger screen size. The iPhone SE can also do extended dynamic range on video up to 4K 30fps which is the same as the iPhone 10R. If all you care about is the gram or the talk, you may not see a big difference. But if you want the best possible photos of your family, your pets, your life preserved for future you, you're always gonna want the best photos and video you can get.

And that's most definitely the new iPhone SE. Pricing on the iPhone SE is stone stamp simple. It's $399 for 64 Ghz, just $50 more for 128 GHz and a hundred dollars more than that for 256 Ghz. AppleCare Plus is also just $39. That price can be more, much more internationally, which totally sucks, but it's true of most of Apple's current product line.

Pricing on the iPhone 8 depends a lot on where you're looking. You can find them secondhand on Gazelle or Amazon starting at around $300 for 64 GHz for excellent condition. You can get them cheaper through Craigslist or eBay. If you're willing to put in some work and sometimes risk things like water damage, you can easily see. You can also find some really good deals from carriers and big-boxes that are still selling out their existing stock, sometimes discounted.

So I'll sum things up in just a hot second. But first I wanna tell you about my new podcast. You can grab the audio version in your favorite podcast player every week. But you can also watch the full on-video versions when they come out, early even on Nebula. Nebula is the streaming video platform I'm building alongside other independent creators like Legal Eagle, Thomas Frank, Real Engineering Sarah Z, Lindsay Ellis, many more.

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Go to curiositytream. com/reneritchie for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and nonfiction series and now Nebula as well. Enter for the promo code Rene Ritchie to start your membership completely free for the first 31 days. Thanks CuriosityStream, and thanks to all of you for supporting this show. So my recommendation is this, if you already have an iPhone 8 and it's fine and you're fine with it, stick with it.

If you don't and you need to upgrade, go with the new iPhone SE because it's simply the better upgrade and you'll be able to stick with it for longer. There'll always be something new and something next. So buy when you absolutely need to buy and then enjoy the hell out of what you bought. At least that's what I think. But now I wanna hear from you.

Hit like, hit subscribe, if you haven't already, ring that bell gizmos. YouTube will actually tell you when new episodes go live, then hit up the comments and let me know, iPhone 8 or new iPhone SE? Which one do you recommend and why? Thanks for watching. And here's a complete playlist of super detailed iPhone videos for you.

Source : Rene Ritchie