The iPhone SE features an aluminum frame, paired with a glass front and back.

[11] The iPhone SE incorporates the Apple A15 Bionic system on a chip (SoC), with an integrated motion coprocessor and fifth-generation Neural Engine.

[12] The third-generation iPhone SE has the same IP67 rating for dust and water resistance as its predecessor.

[3] The phone lacks the ultra-wideband features enabled by the U1 chip found in the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro.

Despite the phone's smaller size, which may lead to increased thermal throttling, the SE's A15 SoC runs at the same peak CPU frequencies as the iPhone 13.

Like its predecessor, the third-generation iPhone SE does not feature a standard 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack and keeps a home button.

The camera has an aperture of ƒ/1.8, autofocus, optical image stabilization, and a quad-LED True Tone flash.

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.