March 21, 2016•Update: March 21, 2016
By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
Apple unveiled the iPhone SE, a new smartphone with a much smaller screen than the iPhone 6S, during a keynote presentation Monday at its headquarters in California.
Also presented was a new version of the iPad Pro tablet, the latest mobile operating system iOS 9.3 and a new platform for medical care called CareKit.
The iPhone SE is very similar in appearance to the iPhone 5, first released in 2012, which also had a screen measuring 10.16 cm (4 inches) diagonally.
Apple significantly enlarged the screen size with the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 6S, which were unveiled in 2014 and 2015.
However, the smaller smartphones proved popular; the company noted in the keynote that it sold more than 30 million of them worldwide in 2015.
“Some people simply love smaller phones,” said company Vice President Greg Joswiak.
But even with the smaller size, it still has the computing power, features and security of the current generation of iPhones.
The iPhone SE will be available in the U.S. on March 31 and will be available in 100 more countries by May, Apple claimed.
Chief executive Tim Cook used the international attention to briefly argue for Apple in its ongoing legal battle with the FBI over encryption.
On Tuesday, a federal judge will oversee the first major arguments in the case that will decide whether the government can force Apple to decrypt an iPhone belonging to the suspect in a U.S. terror attack that killed 14 victims late last year. The company sees a ruling for the government as a dangerous precedent.
“We need to decide, as a nation, how much power the government should have over our data and our privacy,” Cook told the crowd in the first few minutes of the presentation.
