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Comment by jsjohnst | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone SE is very popular with many women I know due to its size and ability to fit into women’s pockets. Women’s pockets are terrible in general. Many further refuse to buy a new iphone until another smaller one comes out.

Happy to provide links to articles on the topic, but <insert search engine of choice> will easily find them too.

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Weird. I've seen the exact opposite. The only people I know who own the SE are men who care about owning the right thing for their life, and not a social signaling device (usually high income, high net worth, or very well-educated).

For most of us, we would gladly pay $1000 for a small version of the XS, but the market for people who like big phones vastly outweighs our niche preferences.

Indeed. IF they made an XS Mini with a good enough camera I’d probably buy it even at the Max price point.

To add some anecdata, all the women I know love their iPhone plusses because they spend so much time looking at their phones. Women also tend to have some sort of purse or bag, so the large phone ends up being less of an issue.

Once you give up on pocket-ability, you may have well go whole-hog and go Plus. Neither the regular or the Plus will fit in a women's pocket, so why settle.

The SE still remains hugely popular amongst women, including my wife who doesn't know if she's going to stay with iOS when her SE gets old (due to size).

I keep reading these statements wondering what kind of women’s jeans I own. My plus has no problem fitting in any of them, I just prefer to put it in my purse.

There's a lot of variety in people's physical size and shape. Smaller women have smaller pockets.

I guess, just annoyed it's always thrown as the defacto complaint about the "Plus-sized" phones when it's really not true across the board.

Nobody said it’s true across the board. As the OP, I clearly said “many women”, not “all” or even “most”.

I’m not the one who downvoted you, but I don’t see how a woman’s body size has a significant impact on their pocket size. Are you saying men’s pockets are a lot different in size when the waist size is 44” than the ones on a 30” waist?

> Are you saying men’s pockets are a lot different in size when the waist size is 44” than the ones on a 30” waist?

Yes? Have you held pants up next to one another, pants that use more material have larger pockets to stay proportionate. If pockets remained the same size as the pants grew they'd visually shrink and look terrible, no item of clothing does this.

I've gained and lost weight, I know first hand this to be true.

https://pudding.cool/2018/08/pockets/

This article has some great numbers on pocket size variation between men's and women's pants.

True - exactly why my wife chose one earlier this year. Her main criteria was "it has to fit in my back pocket" - which meant 4.5" screen. There's so few of those devices in the modern smartphone market - and yet I wonder why? I'd happily keep my phone small if it didn't mean compromising on performance...

Performance gets mentioned a lot, and I'm curious what people are doing with their phones that demands so much of it.

Is the iPhone suddenly everyone's preferred device for playing Fortnite or something?

considering how popular "webapps" (monstrosities with 5M+ of compressed javascript) are, you need a powerful CPU even if all you're doing is browsing.

The A9 seems to still be up to the task, despite being nowhere near as powerful as what's in these newer phones.

It may not always be that way, I admit. But I'm not sure that my Stockholm syndrome with respect to the ad industry has developed to the point that I'm willing to spend hundreds of extra dollars on additional hardware and data plan to solve a problem that I could solve for free with an ad blocker.

True, but Apple likes to keep products around for a long time, unlike other phone makers. Their latest and greatest high end monstrosity comes with premium performance and a premium price tag. Meanwhile Apple is plenty happy to sell you their flagship from two or three years ago a more budget-oriented option.

Do you not use the modern web?

I used a Moto G 2015 until earlier this year. With Firefox and uBlock Origin, browsing didn't seem slow to me at all. I browse a lot of sites but not a lot of webapps. I used native apps (Slide and Materialistic) for this site and for reddit.

I haven’t noticed lag in Safari or apps in general on my iPod Touch from 2015

I also wonder. I play Hearthstone on my phone, and I plan on playing other resource-intensive (or poorly programmed) Unity games (Magic Arena when it goes out).

I do know of people that play Fortnite, but they have to be in the minority... (actually 3 million reviews means it's not a small minority!)

While I haven't owned a statistically significant number of different smartphones, the lower-end Android devices I've owned have seemed poorly tested - especially for problems that skirt the dividing line between the phone developer's responsibility and the app developer's responsibility.

For example, I once had a device where Skype would only use the rear-facing camera. Another device received a software update which couldn't be installed as the internal storage had been consumed by updates to apps like Facebook that were _impossible to uninstall_.

Flagship products seem to receive marginally more testing; I speculate phone companies' employees mostly dogfood the flagship models.

I think the things people notice most are fast fingerprint recognition for unlock, app launch times particularly the camera, and visual effects and post-processing in photography. Face unlock on the X also takes a lot of horsepower.

It will be interesting to see how noticeable the performance improvements fit older models in OSX 12 will be. My 6s is very noticeably faster than my wife’s 6+ so I’m hoping hers gets a bit of a speed bump.

> There's so few of those devices in the modern smartphone market - and yet I wonder why

Battery life. Physically, phones are mostly battery. Smaller phone = smaller battery.

Smaller phone = smaller screen = doesn't need as large a battery. The SE has a smaller battery than the 6S, yet equal or better battery life in every category.

Same here.

The iPhone SE is very popular with many women I know due to its size and ability to fit into women’s pockets.

And purses. My wife chose the XS over the Max simply because when she had a 6 Plus it didn't fit in any the the brands of purses she would buy.

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