The market has spoken loud and clear since 2010, when Androids bigger than iPhone became popular. iPhone dragged it's feet till 2013/2014 because they didn't want to appear conceding that they were wrong, but eventually they had to buckle.
I was thinking about replacing my SE with whatever was announced today, but instead I'll be continuing to use it until it dies/isn't supported any more. Maybe I'm alone on that, I dunno.
Edit: I was wondering if an Apple Watch / iPod Touch combo could be an option but it seems they don’t play well together.
The iPhone 7 still carries the flag for price conscious customers today, even if it is more expensive. The SE was a very unusually strong low end value proposition by Apple standards at 349 dollars for the 32GB handset, and I suspect this _much_ more than size mattered. Cheap small sized Android handsets have never really sold in remotely meaningful numbers in recent years (and Sony made some resonably solid designs), which gives me further pause as to how well "small" as primary feature sells now.
It is definitely a shame for those who did value the SE for its size, but iPhones are unabashedly mass-market devices, and for better or worse bigger appears to sell. I do think an imaginary SE design with the full size screen design of the X with FaceID etc would be a gorgeous looking little device though...
The best clue that the small phone market is actually a small market is to look to android: the smaller phones don't sell particularly well, especially in the premium tiers. The only company really making a go at the small phones is sony, and they're basically failing.
Pretty sure no one in this thread knows more about SE sales than the product people at Apple making these decisions.
Then the release a bunch of only-big iphones, which sell more than the previous generation of iphones, and they go "Aha! We're on to something here!"
Like, there's a ton of reasons that sales of a new gen of iphone could be higher than previous, or that the note sold more than some other iphone model, etc, without having anything to do with physical size of the device.
I for one am absolutely desperate for a galaxy s1 sized device with a headphone jack, long battery life, and reasonable performance, regardless of thickness. I would probably pay 800 dollars for such a device. It's just me here and now but judging from other comments I've seen I bet I'm not alone.
Sorry for the snark but damn this trope was stale 4 years ago. Apple has more than enough money to throw at researching whether or not it's worth it to make a particular size phone without first producing said phone.
Nope, I don't work at Apple, I have no idea how they do market research. They sure do know how to make money, though.
Imho, it's harder to convince people a "smartphone" is worth USD $1k+. But a laptop / tablet replacement? That's reasonable(!) compared to a MBP...
Given Apple's build costs don't scale with device size (++screen, +battery, +gpu/mem), selling the same internals in bigger devices for more is a win.
So you continue expanding device size and price until you discover the market boundaries. And unlike Samsung S*/Note, Apple has the ability to say "These are the only form factors this generation, if you want the newest iPhone..."
Only if those customers buy the bigger device, and if smaller phones require the latest internals. If these people stick with their older/smaller devices, you've lost a sale. If you can get away with 2-year-old internals in these smaller phones, it could be much cheaper to produce than the latest flagship.
I don't know what Apple's margins are on these devices, but a couple months ago AT&T was offering the current (final) iPhone SE for $50.
> Apple has the ability to say "These are the only form factors this generation, if you want the newest iPhone..."
True, but the SE was never about appealing to users who wanted the newest iPhone.
From a technical standpoint, they could have released larger phones before they did. What stopped them is that UIKit and iOS apps were not designed to handle multiple screen sizes or any screen except for the 4 inch iPhone and the 9.7" iPad until iOS 7 and support improved in IOS 8.
So .. they couldn't?
Software - they didn’t have the framework to allow for it.
It would have been like all of the Android phones that copied the notch before the OS was ready.