The iPhone SE 4 is due to arrive in a matter of days, and Apple looks set to make the series’ first refresh in three years truly significant. A full-screen OLED display, Face ID, USB-C and the powerful A18 chipset are all exciting upgrades, but there may still be one big sticking point if a new leak is accurate.
The Persian site Toranji has a retail listing of the upcoming handset seemingly lifted from a Chinese website. Although the text is almost exclusively in Mandarin, one part is clearly legible to English speakers: “8GB + 64GB”.
That means a decent 8GB RAM — expected, given it’s the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence — but a paltry 64GB of internal storage space. And given iPhones have never had expandable storage, that’ll run out quickly: iOS 18 is currently around the 10GB mark, and Apple Intelligence is set to gobble up 7GB on its own.
Outside of the SE line, Apple hasn’t sold a handset with just 64GB of storage since 2020’s iPhone 12. It would be a shame to undo that progress with the otherwise promising sounding iPhone SE 4 — especially when the starting price is set to rise by $70 to $499.
Reasons for hope
If that sounds like bad news, there are a couple of things to cling on to here.
Firstly, sometimes retailers list upcoming items with speculative specifications as a placeholder. While the Chinese retailer in question may be expecting a 64GB model, it’s possible that Apple has other plans — indeed, that’s what we’ve heard before. With Apple Intelligence eating up more and more space, it seems backward that Apple would consider 64GB in 2025.
But even if the screenshot above is entirely accurate, the 64GB model is only one of three configurations. Grayed out to its right are two more options: “8GB+128GB” and “8GB+256GB”. This makes sense given that if you made the terrible decision to buy a 2022 iPhone SE today, you could also choose a model with 64GB, 128GB or 256GB of storage.
The trouble with this is two-fold. Firstly, the entry-level model is usually the best seller, so plenty of shoppers will end up with a 64GB model just because it’s the default option, unaware that storage problems lie ahead.
But more importantly, Apple tends to charge rather a lot for increasing the base storage. With the last SE, jumping to 128GB and 256GB would cost an additional $50 and $150 respectively.
Assuming this same path and the starting price of $499, that means you’ll be looking at $549 for 128GB and $649 for 256GB. At that point, what should be one of the best cheap phones you can buy begins to compare unfavorably with Android rivals like the $599 OnePlus 13R (which starts with 256GB of storage).
We’re set to find out Apple’s plans for definite this week. We’ll “meet the newest member of the family” on Wednesday, February 19, according to Tim Cook — and at this point, it would be surprising if he was talking about anything but the iPhone SE 4.
