Apple’s ‘made-in-India’ iPhone may get a successor in June
Here are some new rumours about the successor to Apple’s made-in-India smartphone, iPhone SE. According to the latest reports coming from China, Apple iPhone SE 2 will launch in June this year. A report in Chinese website QQ.com claims that the Cupertino giant will launch the smartphone at its annual developers conference, Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), in June 2018.
The report claims that the smartphone will sport similar design as the original iPhone SE. This means, as a report in MacRumours says, “…a metal back and frame, top and bottom bezels on the front, and a home button.” On specs front, the report Chinese website claims that the phone will sport 4.2-inch display, run on the company’s in-house A10 processor and pack 2GB RAM. It further adss that Apple iPhone SE 2 will come in two storage options — 32GB and 128GB.
Incidentally, A10 Fusion Chip is the processor that powers the company’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 smartphones that launched in the year 2016.
Apple launched the original iPhone SE in March 2016. The company now assembles iPhone SE smartphones in India in the Bengaluru’s industrial hub of Peenya. The company has partnered with Taiwanese company Wistron, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to manufacture the devices in India. At the company’s earnings conference in September 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that almost all of the iPhone SE modeals that Apple sold in India were made locally.
“We started manufacturing the iPhone SE there six, nine months ago so. And the majority of the iPhone SEs that we sold in the domestic market last quarter were manufactured there. And so we also have that going and are hoping that that winds up saving some amount of money over time and avoiding some of the compounding of taxes, et cetera,” Cook said during the earnings conference call.
In fact, iPhone SE is the only Apple smartphone whose prices didn’t go up after after the government increased import duty on mobile phones to 20% from 15% in the Union Budget earlier this month.