Apple.com seems to show the new name for the upcoming iPhone.
There’s a new iPhone coming very soon. It’s definitely not going to be announced this weekend, as some have suggested. That’s not happening. But certainly it looks likely this month. You can find out pretty much everything about the new phone in Forbes contributor Gordon Kelly’s recent post and his round-up of everything we know so far.
But there’s one detail which has remained under wraps until now: the name.
There have been plenty of suggestions. It’s understood that the new handset will be a keenly-priced phone with Touch ID instead of the fancy Face ID on the company’s latest models.
It seems it will look just like the iPhone 8, but be updated with the latest A13 chip found in the iPhone 11.
Apple has followed this formula once before, squeezing a current chip into an older design, when it took the iPhone 5s and put a faster processor in it for what it called the iPhone SE.
That was a very popular phone, by the way.
So, people have been reasoning since the first rumors appeared, that this phone should be called the iPhone SE 2. Which makes sense.
But there was also a school of thought which pointed out that there was a number which had never been used for an iPhone, and that would mean it could use that and be called iPhone 9.
After all, the iPhone 8 and iPhone X appeared at the same time, and Apple hadn’t used iPhone 9 before.
I always thought this was a nonsense idea. Apple is not a company known for looking backwards. How could you launch a new phone and indicate that it was brand, brand new with a name that sounds like it dated from 2017 or 2018?
That left a couple of other possibilities. One is iPhone SE 2, as mentioned, and one other which Gordon, again, had lighted on earlier in the year: iPhone. Well, it seems he got closer than most because in the last few hours, Apple has accidentally revealed the name itself.
Jon Prosser, creator of @frontpagetech has tweeted that the Apple website has let the cat out of the bag by advertising a screen protector from Belkin which is designed for the iPhone 7, iPhone 8 and… iPhone SE.
I’ve found the same page on the Apple website desktop version as you can see at the top of this post, though, please note, the page has now been updated to remove the letters SE. There’s some dispute as to whether it appeared online a while back or just yesterday. Joe Rossignol from 9to5Mac, who knows a thing or two, says it only appeared yesterday.
If more evidence is needed for the naming, well, Prosser goes further, saying that AppleCare+ is also available for this mythical beast and providing a screenshot in his tweet.
So that, it seems is the name, iPhone SE. I like it.
It makes sense, and there is precedent. Apple released an iPad Air, then an iPad Air 2. Years later, after the iPad Air 2 had ceased to be current, it wanted a new super-slip tablet so it appeared. And it was called iPad Air.
So, why not iPhone SE 2? Well, the iPad precedent applies here. The iPad Air 2 was revealed when iPad Air was current and on sale. The iPhone SE has been withdrawn in September 2018. So, a phone called iPhone SE going on sale now could only be a new iPhone.
It looks like the new phone could be coming very soon. Its announcement could be April 14 or 15, if Jon Prosser’s claim is true. In which case, we’ll know soon enough. I’ll be updating this post as new details become known, so please check back.
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