se

Whenever a new iPhone goes on sale, folks tend to act like it's a religious holiday. There are the rituals of waiting outside stores in snaking lines and getting high-fived by hordes of excited Apple retail employees after making a purchase. These customs happened predictably every year since 2007 -- that is, until Thursday, when the iPhone SE launched. Technically, the SE is a new iPhone, but it's really just the older model iPhone 5S spiffed up with new internal parts to make it run faster and take sharper pictures. At the company's flagship Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan on Thursday morning, there were no lines of customers anxiously waiting to give their tithes to Tim Cook, no Apple retail employees cheerleading the event, and no Apple press representatives telling me I couldn't stand in that spot. Heck, there was no other media, which made me wonder what I was even doing there.