iPhone SE (1st generation)

Apple had spent two years making iPhones bigger and a lot of people had not asked for that. The SE put the 6s internals into the iPhone 5s body: four inches, flat sides, 113 grams, the A9 and the 12-megapixel camera shooting 4K. It cost $399 unlocked, the cheapest new iPhone Apple had ever sold. There was no 3D Touch and the front camera stayed at 1.2 megapixels, which were the two places Apple found the money. Almost nothing else was missing. The reception was warm in a way Apple probably did not expect, because the constituency for a small phone turned out to be larger and considerably louder than the sales figures had suggested. Apple kept it on sale until September 2018 and quietly sold a lot of them in India and other markets where the flagship price never worked. The name came back in 2020 and again in 2022 on completely different bodies, but this is the one people mean when they talk about the small iPhone.