The Apple Spring event introduced us to a lot of interesting products, but the highlight for many was the new iPhone SE (2022). This low-cost iPhone packs in the latest Apple silicon and 5G all in a body with a 4.7-inch display and a Touch ID home button.
We've already heard that the iPhone SE (2022) has 4GB of RAM, but now we've seen some Geekbench results for the new SE. Spoiler: it's a little beast.
The iPhone SE (2022) uses the same A15 Bionic chipset that that's in the iPhone 13, which is very good for SE buyers. But these Geekbench scores further corroborate that the SE is going to be the cheap phone to beat when it comes to raw performance.
Geekbench (via MacRumors), listing the model "iPhone 14,6" (the iPhone SE's codename), gives a single-core score of 1,695 and a multicore score of 4,021. For reference, when we tested the iPhone 13 on Geekbench 5, we got an average single-core score of 1,668 and a multicore result of 4,436. Geekbench scores can vary by a few hundred points — for example, we got an iPhone 13 multicore score as high as 4,584.
According to these results, the iPhone SE (2022) is about on par with the iPhone 13 for performance, which isn't much of a surprise. We'll obviously confirm for ourselves once we get the phone in for testing, but we're guessing we'll get very similar results to those published on Geekbench's database.
The iPhone SE (2022) starts at $429 for the 64GB model. It's available for pre-order on March 11 with general availability on March 18 — we've already broken down how to pre-order the iPhone SE. 5G comes standard (minus mmWave), which is a step up over the previous generation.
The new SE keeps the single camera lens, and it still lacks Night mode, so the phone will have its work cutout for it to beat out the likes of the Pixel 5a at least when it comes to cameras. On the performance side of things, though, the iPhone SE (2022) appears to set the pace among budget handsets.
