Before a teardown, you can always count on us to kick the tires. (Fortunately, it won't cost us $700 this time.)

We'll wheel it over to the teardown table in a moment, but first we submit the SE for X-ray inspection—courtesy of our clever friends at Creative Electron—along with its predecessors, the original SE (left) and iPhone 8 (center).

If you can spot any major internal differences from the iPhone 8, your eyes are sharper than ours. Apart from some very subtle antenna rework and moving a few chips around the logic board, we can't tell what Apple's been up to yet.

What we expected to see here were changes to the antenna layout to drive the new gigabit LTE (MIMO) and/or Wi-Fi 6 features. On the iPhone XS, the new breaks in the frame were very noticeable over the X. Not so with the SE and 8.