We’ve seen countless hardware mods on iPhones over the years, but someone just set out to make one of the wildest ones we’ve seen. The result is an iPhone that looks and very much feels like a Nokia Lumia phone.
Reddit user OceanDepth95028 has created the “NokiApple LumiPhone 1020 SE,” a fully functional smartphone that’s turning heads for a few reasons. It is, functionally, an iPhone SE 2022, but the user chose to stuff the innards of that phone inside the outer shell of a Nokia Lumia 1020.
They thought this up as a smartphone equivalent to a “Hackintosh,” although it’s more like taking the innards of a Mac and throwing them into a PC case—it’s kind of cheating, but it works. The Nokia Lumia 1020 specifically remains a fan favorite even as it was released a whopping 12 years ago, partly because of its unique design as well as its outstanding camera performance—it took amazing snaps in 2013.
This required a lot more effort than just sloppily dropping the insides of an iPhone inside the Nokia case. The project involved intricate modifications, including integrating a rear-mounted fingerprint reader, creating a custom SIM card slot, and even cleverly disguising the Lightning port to resemble the Lumia’s original micro-USB. The result is a device that looks like the classic Lumia 1020 but fully functions as a modern smartphone running the latest version of iOS.
Being the iPhone SE 2022, it also has relatively decent specs even today, featuring the same A15 Bionic chip used in the iPhone 13 series. This is the last iPhone made with a 16:9 display (probably ever, if the rumors about the new iPhone SE are right), so it was the perfect phone for this kind of mod—newer iPhones feature a different form factor and Face ID as a replacement for Touch ID. If you don’t mind the loss of NFC payments or wireless charging, this could even be used as a daily driver if you don’t mind the ancient form factor.
The maker of this mod hints that they might “sell it off” when they get bored of it, so that could be your only chance at getting your hands on something like this. It’s not clear if the creator is willing to do a walkthrough on how to do this, and even if they did, this is probably too complicated for most people to do at home.
