Re: Competing with Apple
"The original SE was based on the iPhone 5S platform, so it is still receiving security updates for iOS 12.x despite being left behind feature-wise by iOS 13 last fall."
Not exactly. The SE was put into the same case as the 5S but includes the internals from the 6S, so it has continued to get support for new versions of IOS including IOS 13 and 14.