Android and iPhone fans can argue about just about any feature or technology found in their beloved smartphones, but there's one simple fact that Apple fans can typically hold over their Android counterparts.
It's the fact that if you buy an iPhone outright, you can generally reclaim a lot more of its asking price when you come to sell it in a year or two. It's led to an entire culture of annual upgraders who buy the latest iPhone model and switch out a year later, selling the previous model and making the difference an effective "rental price" for the new handset. iPhones have been especially popular in Australia, and funding a new phone by selling the old one makes good financial sense.
Even if you don't want to upgrade every year, the prospect of getting a little extra cash for your iPhone once you're off contract has solid appeal.
By way of contrast, even new premium Android phones typically tumble in outright price terms just a few months after they debut. Last year's excellent Samsung Galaxy S7 commanded a price above $1000, but it didn't take long for directly imported models to come to market at $700 or less. In that market, selling your old Android phone and expecting any great return was a frustrating experience.
Exactly a year ago, Apple introduced the smaller iPhone SE handset, built on what were fundamentally the same innards as the then-current iPhone 6s. The SE looked like the older iPhone 5 physically, and it was markedly cheaper than the 6s at the time, even though Apple truly loathes the word "cheap".
Apple has typically worked with one year refresh cycles for its new smartphones, so an update to the iPhone SE was due. Among the hype for a new iPad model and a PRODUCT(RED) iPhone 7 this week, Apple also quietly updated the iPhone SE.
However, where you might have expected it to expand to the processor and functionality of the iPhone 7 as its predecessor, all Apple did was bump up the storage on the iPhone SE. The iPhone SE 16GB is no more and the same $679 asking price will buy you a 32GB model from this Friday. The $749 64GB model has given way to an $829 128GB model.
Otherwise, they're the same phones they always were, which isn't a huge vote of confidence by Apple in the whole iPhone SE range. It typically reduces choices down to just one or two variants for product lines it's likely to discontinue. When you consider that in six months time when the presumed iPhone 8 is likely to be announced, the internals of the iPhone SE will be a full two generations behind, it's not hard to draw that conclusion.
So who wins and loses as a result of Apple's iPhone SE changes? Clearly if you were intending to buy an iPhone SE, either outright or on contract, you'd be wise to wait a few days and order the higher capacity models. You might have to wait a while for telcos to rid themselves of 16GB and 64GB stock, however, for them to order in the 128GB.
You're likely to face a similar scenario down the track as anyone trying to sell an existing iPhone SE, because by not changing anything but the storage Apple is strongly signalling that the SE line might not have a future. It doesn't feel likely that it will turn around in six months and present an iPhone 7 based SE model, if only because it would directly burn anyone buying these exact new higher capacity models right now.
If you were on the upgrade cycle and waiting for an upgraded iPhone SE model, however, the news is markedly worse. The resale price of the iPhone SE, and especially the 16GB model will likely crash, because there's no sense at all in paying near-new prices or anything like that for a model with half the storage of the newer models.
Not that you could upgrade to a more powerful iPhone SE anyway, but if you were thinking of holding out until the iPhone 8 to upgrade, you're going to have to save even more cash on hand to afford the difference now.
Alex Kidman is the tech & telco editor at finder.com.au