It has components such as the Apple A13 Bionic system-on-chip, which allows the phone to utilize the single wide-angle lens Portrait Mode, as on the iPhone XR.

[12][13] A successor to the first-generation iPhone SE had been a source of rumor stemmed in 2017, the year after original was released.

[16][15] On April 15, 2020, the second-generation iPhone SE was announced in a press release note on Apple's website.

With a screen diagonal of 4.7 in (120 mm), the second generation of the iPhone SE was among the smallest mainstream in-production smartphones at the time of its release.

Dan Seifert from The Verge declared the second-generation SE a "nail in the coffin" for small phones.

[19] This was affirmed by CNET, who stated that "Apple's decision to not build a brand-new 4-inch screen phone is telling.

It signals that the company will probably never bring back the tiny iPhone, no matter how badly people crave it.

"[20] The iPhone SE incorporates the Apple A13 Bionic (7 nm) architecture system on a chip (SoC), with an integrated M13 motion coprocessor and third-generation neural engine.

[21][22] Despite the phone's smaller size which may lead to increased thermal throttling, the SE's A13 SoC runs at the same peak CPU frequencies as the iPhone 11.

[2][25] The camera interface adopts "QuickTake" from the 11 and 11 Pro, which allows the user to long-press the shutter button to take a video.

[28] The SE's implementation of Portrait mode only natively supports images of humans, as the hardware does not produce depth maps through the use of focus pixels and instead relies on software-based machine learning.

Apple claimed that removing these items will reduce e-waste and permit a smaller iPhone box, allowing more devices to be shipped simultaneously to decrease carbon footprint.