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Wikipedia
With all the interest in Apple’s newest and most expensive iPhone, the iPhone X, it’s important to remember that Apple also offers a powerful and capable entry-level device. The iPhone SE was introduced in 2016, and refreshed in 2017 with more storage options. It shares the Apple A9 processor with the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
The shirt-pocket sized iPhone SE may seem like a low-end phone, especially compared to the iPhone X. But let’s travel back in time, and see how far shirt-pocket computing devices have come over the last 20 years.
You couldn’t use them to make phone calls, browse the internet, or send text messages. They didn’t have Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or NFC. It wasn’t until years later that the Palm Treo became one of the first smartphones. But in the early days, it was all about the big four: calendar, contacts, notes, and calculator. And that was enough.
The original Pilot 1000 came out in 1996. Interest was high, but it wasn’t until the PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional devices came out in March of 1997 that PalmPilots became mainstream consumer hits. Since the 1997 PalmPilots were introduced exactly 20 years before the current iPhone SE, we’ll use them as our basis of comparison.
Let’s start with price. When they launched, the PalmPilot Personal sold for $299, while the Professional sold for $399. The current iPhone SE starts right in the middle of those two. It’s available now for $349.
But, of course, 20 years have passed. Accounting for inflation, that PalmPilot Personal would cost $459 in today’s dollars. The Professional version would be $613 in today’s money. So the devices of that time cost quite a bit more, in terms of real purchasing power.
But that’s only part of the story. For almost twice the cost of the iPhone SE, the capabilities of those early PalmPilots were positively prehsitoric.
The difference between the PalmPilot Personal and the Professional was internal storage. The basic model came with 512K of RAM, while the Professional shipped with a whopping one megabyte. By contrast, the $349 model of the iPhone SE ships with 32 gigabytes.
That’s 512,000 times more storage, compared to lower-end Personal and 256,000 times more storage than the PalmPilot Professional. Think about that for a minute. That’s insane.
Let’s move on to the display. The PalmPilot screen (for both models) was a 160×160 monochrome display. By contrast, the iPhone SE has a 1,136×640 full color display with an sRGB color space, representing 32-bits per pixel. Just accounting for dots on screen, the PalmPilots had 25,600 dots, while the iPhone SE has 727,040 dots — or 29 times more pixels.
But that’s just dots. Once you realize that each iPhone SE pixel can represent 16.7 million colors (and that’s not counting special attributes like transparency), compared to just black and white for the PalmPilots, the difference becomes more profound.