You have absolutely no idea if any of this is true and you risk nothing saying it. It sure sounds nice though.. :)

Making things at the scale that Apple makes them is hard. If the SE was a great business idea, Apple would keep doing it. Maybe they will make another one in the Spring. It's not dead dead yet.

My understanding is that the SE is made out of leftovers—not in a micro sense of things literally left sitting on the factory floor, but rather in a macro sense: they're made from the tail ends of multi-year component supply contracts, where Apple is obligated to take receipt of components that no longer feed into any current product they're building. They're a "bone broth", a way to use up those tailings and make a profit (however slight) off of them.

This was also true, ten years ago, of the iPod Touch. It was the reason for the iPhone 5C. It's at least partially the reason for the iPhone XR today. It's also the reason Apple keeps selling the iPhone 7 and 8.

The problem (for consumers) is that, eventually, you run out of the tailings you were using to make one of these "byproducts", since you never signed on to produce more of them. (That being rather the point of the whole process, from Apple's perspective.)

Once the supply contract for iPhone 5S "chassis" components is run through, that'll likely be the end of that form-factor. No device Apple has produced since then has that form factor, so there are no hand-me-down components to repurpose into a new device of that form-factor.

They would however hurt the quarterly profit numbers. The SE costs less and the profit margin of ~38% on $800 is less than ~38% on $1000+

It’s just business

Apple will probably sell 70,000,000 in 90 days this quarter. I think they know how to sell a lot of phones

What does 100%+ margins mean?

They probably mean it costs less than $175 to make and they sell it for $349.

That’s a gross margin of 50%.

Yes.... unfortunately many do not understand the difference between Margin and Mark up.

Just for the records:

Margin = profit / sale price Markup = profit / cost Profit = sale price - cost

I frequently meet people that are not aware of the above.