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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

There haven't really been many attempts at making small flagship-quality devices in years. Didn't the SE immediately sell out when it was released? I struggle to believe no similar market exists today, but Apple obviously has a easier and more profitable path maintaining the device collection they announced today. I just wish they didn't.

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.

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You’re not alone! I think I may replace my aging SE with a new SE.

Edit: I was wondering if an Apple Watch / iPod Touch combo could be an option but it seems they don’t play well together.

I wonder how much of a factor size was in SE sales; of course some customers clearly chose it with size a primary concern, but I suspect many more bought it because it was a good phone at an attractively low price.

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...

"selling out" doesn't mean anything without an actual quantity number. It doesn't even mean apple underestimated demand, because they could have intentionally understocked to get the "iPhone SE sells out in minutes" headlines.

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.

Big phones fit in my pockets and in my wife's purse, but not in my kid's pockets. He chose the SE, because it fit his pockets. He's still growing, so we'll probably be able to postpone getting him a new phone until he's bigger, but it seems an odd choice for Apple to eliminate the most kid-friendly size. I would think that bringing more kids into the controlled theme park that is iOS would matter more than the margins on this particular device, but I guess Apple moves in mysterious ways.

> Didn't the SE immediately sell out when it was released?

Pretty sure no one in this thread knows more about SE sales than the product people at Apple making these decisions.

Right, I get this feeling that there's a boardroom of execs out there saying "well, the Samsung Note sold a whole lot of devices, clearly the reason is because it's big!"

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.

You think that product demand is only conducted by putting a product on the market and seeing how well it sells? And you're posting on HN?

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.

If you knew the top part was snarky, and snarky enough to justify apologizing for, why didn't you just save you the time of writing it and me the time of reading it and thinking "gee thanks asshole"?

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.

Well, there's 4 generations of phones now that came in two sizes (6, 6S, 7, 8) so I would assume they've got a little more to go on than Samsung's quarterlies.

Yes, they were stock constrained for many months.. infact, I tried to buy one 3 months ago, and they didn't have any in the store. I think they just didn't want to make them...

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