Teardown Video Reveals What's Inside The iPhone SE (2022)

When Apple revealed the 2022 edition of its cheapest iPhone model, the Apple iPhone SE, most people assumed it was just an iPhone SE (2020) with an upgraded Apple A15 Bionic chip and 5G support. And why not? It's essentially identical to the previous generation and only 4 grams lighter. In fact, most accessories you may have purchased for the iPhone SE (2020) would also work just fine with the latest model.

The only way to discover how different these two devices are on the inside is to perform a teardown, but who in their right mind would want to disassemble something that costs a tad over $400? Well, that's where the good folks at PBK Reviews come in.

On Sunday, March 20, 2022, PBK Reviews posted a fairly detailed disassembly video of the iPhone SE (2022) on its YouTube channel that showed the innards of the device. Then, to make things even more interesting, the channel compared the disassembled device to its predecessor, the iPhone SE (2020).

As it turns out, both of these similar-looking devices have slightly different internal components — most of which cannot be interchanged, in case you were considering using an old iPhone SE 2020 as a parts bin for the 2022 edition.

Even though we weren't really impressed with the battery life of the iPhone SE (2022) in our review, Apple deserves credit for increasing the device's battery capacity to 2,018 mAh, which is a substantial upgrade over the previous model's 1,821 mAh capacity. The company seems to have done this despite keeping the battery dimensions nearly identical between the two generations. However, the 2022 edition of the phone does have a slightly different battery connector, making it incompatible with the battery in the iPhone SE (2020).

What hasn't changed at all is the display hardware. The iPhone SE (2022) still sports the 4.7-inch IPS LCD panel with a resolution of 750 x 1334 pixels, and even the connectors on the new phone remain the same. Despite that, swapping the displays between the two different generations did not go well, resulting in major touch input issues. This, however, is caused mainly by Apple's software restrictions rather than hardware compatibility problems.

Another interesting change on the iPhone SE (2022) is the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X57 modem that seems to have been custom-made for Apple. This hardware powers the newly added 5G capabilities on the iPhone SE (2022) — a feature the 2020 model lacked. Towards the end of the video, PBK Reviews ultimately said the iPhone SE (2022) is a fairly tricky device to repair, giving it a 5.5 out of 10 repairability score.