Apple iPhone SE (2022) review

Apple iOS 15.4 on iPhone SE

All recent iPhones come with Apple's iOS 15 out of the box. It's not a significant update over iOS 14, but it does round many UI elements shapes such as settings menus and icons, notifications, buttons. It also improves heavily on FaceTime and Messages, Notification management, Safari browser (which now has extensions), Wallet and Maps. It also makes Photos and Spotlight even more intelligent - the Photos app can now read and let you copy text in real-time.

The iOS interface is still based on homescreens populated with apps and stackable widgets, App Library with automatic sorting is your app drawer, there are also the familiar and Notification and Control Centers.

Apple iOS 15

The navigation gestures stay the same as they were on the iPhones before the X - press on Home key for Homescreen/app close and double press for Task Switcher.

The Notification Center is summoned with a swipe from the top of the screen. The pane was unified with the lockscreen in iOS 11, and if you use different wallpapers for home and lock screens, you may get confused at first.

The Control Center with all your (customizable) toggles, is called with a swipe from the bottom of the screen. You can use haptic touch to access additional controls. And the battery percentage has been moved permanently here because there is no room left for it on that status bar.

Notification Center • Control Center

Apple's iOS 15 has improved notification profiles (Focus) based on different automations, which are great for those who receive a ton of notifications per day. There is also a new Summary option to get you up to speed after having some downtime.

Focus

One of the most important updates in iOS 15 is in FaceTime. The new app looks more and more like Zoom, and it now supports Grid view. It has a cleaner interface, supports background blur, spatial audio, and most importantly - it can make conference calls, and non-Apple users can join the fun, too, by using an invite link and Chrome of Edge web browser.

FaceTime

The Safari web browser has seen quite the upgrade. First, the address bar is now at the bottom of the screen for easier access, and you can swipe on it left or right to switch tabs (in portrait mode) just like you fast scroll between apps via swipes on the infamous line. And second, Safari now supports extensions; you can download such from the App Store.

Safari

Apple uses its Siri and makes various upgrades to it every year. Multimedia is handled by Apple's own apps - Photos for your images and video clips, TV for movies and Apple TV+, Music for MP3s and Apple Music, and Maps for navigation.

Photos • TV • Music • Maps

Apple's system apps each year receive intelligence updates, which makes them even more powerful. For example, the Photos app now supports Live Text feature - if you see a text icon over an image and you tap on it, you will be able to (scan and) copy or look up the text you are seeing. You can even translate that text. Neat!

Live text

There is Files for your local files, Books are here for your documents, PDFs, and eBooks. Stocks and News are onboard. There is Weather app, too. Apple also offers its office suite for free - Pages, Numbers and Keynote. iMovie and Clips are also onboard, so you can edit your videos.

Files • Stocks • Weather • Books

Finally, With SharePlay, users will be able to listen to songs, watch a movie or a TV show, complete a workout together, or share their screen to view apps with their friends or family members while on a FaceTime call. SharePlay is currently supported by Apple Music, Apple TV+, and Apple Fitness+, as well as Disney+, ESPN+, HBO Max, Hulu, MasterClass, Paramount+, Pluto TV, SoundCloud, TikTok, Twitch and will be coming to other services in the future. It works on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV.

Performance and benchmarks

The Apple iPhone SE (2022) uses the latest Apple A15 Bionic chip, the same as the premium iPhone 13 series. It is the second 5nm Apple chip (second-gen 5nm TSMC process) and packs the whopping 15 billion transistors - that's 27% more than the A14 within the iPhone 12 phones.

The A15 chip still relies on a hexa-core processor with 2 big Avalanche cores clocked at 3.23GHz and 4 small Blizzard cores working at 1.82GHz.

There is an improved 4-core Apple GPU that should be noticeably more powerful than the GPU inside the second iPhone SE's GPU within the A13 chip.

The A15 has a new 16 core Neural Engine, too, powering features such as on-device voice and image recognition and other advanced machine learning tasks. On top of that, there is a new ISP on board, twice the amount of cache, as well as a new display engine and new video encoders and decoders.

The iPhone SE (2022) has 4GB of RAM, 1GB more than the iPhone SE (2020) and the same as on the iPhone 13 and 13 mini.

Finally, the Apple A15 Bionic also comes with Qualcomm's X60 5G modem.

The Apple A15 processor is the fastest mobile CPU to date, that is undeniable, and it is ahead of the Android competition. And it offers a big boost over the second iPhone SE's A13 processing in both multi-core and single-core operations.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  4681
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  4629
• Apple iPhone 12 mini
  4174
• Samsung Galaxy S22
  3682
• Asus Zenfone 8
  3604
• Apple iPhone SE (2020)
  3237

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  1735
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  1729
• Apple iPhone 12 mini
  1599
• Apple iPhone SE (2020)
  1334
• Samsung Galaxy S22
  1171
• Asus Zenfone 8
  1118

Since the Apple iPhone SE (2022) screen has a fixed refresh rate of 60Hz (and an HD resolution), the phone hits the 60fps threshold on the onscreen GPU tests.

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Asus Zenfone 8
  105
• Samsung Galaxy S22
  97
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  60
• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  60
• Apple iPhone 12 mini
  60

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S22
  69
• Asus Zenfone 8
  61
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  60
• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  60
• Apple iPhone 12 mini
  60

As far as raw graphics performance is concerned, the iPhone SE (2022) offers the best among the current generation of chipsets.

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  150
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  146
• Apple iPhone 12 mini
  131
• Asus Zenfone 8
  117
• Samsung Galaxy S22
  108

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  107
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  97
• Samsung Galaxy S22
  74
• Apple iPhone 12 mini
  73
• Asus Zenfone 8
  69

3DMark Wild Life Vulkan 1.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  9199
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  9130
• Samsung Galaxy S22
  7526
• Asus Zenfone 8
  5666

And finally, here are the AnTuTu scores.

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S22
  881428
• Asus Zenfone 8
  799738
• Apple iPhone 13 mini
  772512
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  723486

The iPhones have been known for their throttling when using 100% of the available resources. That's why we ran CPU and GPU stress tests.

So, the iPhone SE (2022) managed to keep 75% of its maximum performance on APSI Bench when running for 30 minutes. This is an excellent result for such a thin glass phone.

Then we ran 3D Mark Stress Test and the iPhone kept 74% of its graphics performance, another solid achievement, all things considered.

CPU test • GPU test

So, the iPhone SE (2022) offers excellent sustained performance even when using 100% of the available resources, and that's great.

Will you ever be able to utilize its full potential? Probably not. The HD display with 60Hz is just too limiting.

Sure, you can expect that every game to come out in the next 3-5 years will easily maintain the maximum quality and 60fps, but you will not get a particularly detailed image nor any extra smoothness. On the upside those thick bezels are an excellent place for resting your thumbs while playing.