The on-again-off-again iPhone SE 4 might be off again. After a report this week revived hope that Apple was working on a new model of the budget handset based on the iPhone 14, a new report has dashed those hopes as quickly as they arrived.
The one doing the squashing this time is analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who tweeted on Thursday that Apple is indeed using a prototype iPhone SE to test its homegrown 5G modem it has been developing for some time now. However, this “derivative model” of the iPhone SE is strictly for internal testing and Apple has “no plans for mass production and sales,” according to Kuo.
As Kuo indicates, his tweet is basically a backtrack of a tweet he made in February that said that Apple “restarted” the iPhone SE development, which followed a report in January that Apple canceled the iPhone SE 4. So now it seems as if the iPhone SE 4 is dead again–or that it was always dead.
Kuo’s tweet on Thursday comes after analyst Jeff Pu reported that Apple will release the iPhone SE 4 in 2025. As for the 5G modem, Kuo says that if testing goes well, “mass production could commence as early as 2025. But if testing falls below expectations, the schedule may be pushed back to 2026 or later.”
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor
Roman has covered technology since the early 1990s. His career started at MacUser, and he's worked for MacAddict, Mac|Life, and TechTV.