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I feel like it's a cultural thing. "Designed by Apple in California" where you just drive to work so a bigger phone is only a benefit (larger battery, easier-to-read text when you're using the phone). But in NYC, small is a huge benefit, and it's a shame that the transit-deprived West Coast tech companies don't understand our use case here.

Ahh, you nailed it and I've bitten my metaphorical tongue to avoid saying loudly: the damned mobile phone ecosystem is designed and tested by people in giant suburban, car environments like California. Not subway takers. Not pedestrians. The giant two-handed phone design obviously is torture on a subway. With navigation buttons even Andre the Giant would have had trouble reaching.

You know what else, though, shows the bias? Apps that think they're always connected to data. Even Spotify, with its glorious offline ability to play music, hangs stupidly in its main home screens (the one that has the we-made-this-for-you playlists). Other video playing apps with no real caching or notification or awareness to the user when there's no data.

There are many examples of blind spinning waiting type hanging behavior, as if no one can fathom using a phone during a commute that isn't in a car (or a red yellow and green type of bus?)

Aren't Android phones all developed in transit-oriented societies in Asia? And they're even bigger...

Yes, that's true, but at the same time, flip phones remain(ed) popular in Japan for years after smartphones took over the West due to their physical keypads and small size.

My experience was that flip phones remained popular in Japan for 2 reasons: corporations that didn't want to pay for data plans for their employees, and elderly people who were more comfortable with buttons. Never heard anyone here say they have one for the size (although they may very well exist)

Japanese is a lot less cumbersome to type on a numeric keypad than English. (The common input method was that every key had a consonant and the number of times you pressed the key was the vowel. Current touchscreen input methods are very similar, using the position for the consonant and a swipe direction (up/down/left/right/none) for the vowel. Wayyyy better than having 26+ touch targets on your tiny screen for English.)

But in HK it is socially normal to wear your iPad sized phone on a lanyard around your neck, and indeed to have loud conversations with it in the MTR.

And to walk around with it a foot in front of your face and inevitably bump into any- and everyone that dares wander into your path.

Sorry but this does not sound very convincing. If the car culture in California is causing Apple to produce large phones, why didn’t Apple start doing it earlier? It’s not like the sprawling suburbia of California only came into existence in the last few years.

Samsung, on the other hand, has been producing huge phones that no one is going to be able to use with a single hand since a long time ago, and has no problem selling them in places like Hong Kong. It doesn’t seem to me that it is suburban culture that is inflating the size of phones.

(Don’t get me wrong. I like dense urban environments, public transport, ability to use apps without internet connection, and, at the same time, smaller phones.)

If it's the car culture that causes the big phones, then Korean and Chinese manufacturers should be making small phones, no? But they don't.

I feel like the bigger and more important modifier is whether your phone is your primary computing device.

I think the big phones are:

1) To show off.

2) A battery life hack. (Number of pixels to illuminate goes up like the square, volume of the battery in the phone goes up like the cube... so larger phones will have better battery life. This was a huge, huge, huge concern on Android when the big Android devices started showing up. Remember the days when your Android phone couldn't even last 8 hours in your pocket at work? That is when the big Androids started showing up, and Apple introduced large phones after that.)

3) Most people don't use PCs anymore, so their phone is their only computing device.

These three concerns obviously weigh into the equation in addition to usability on public transit.

But really, New York is kind of unique in how over-capacity the transit system is. Tokyo is similar. Bought a Japanese phone recently?

I'm pretty sure that phablets are primarily due to demand, either by consumers or developers. Market research certainly indicates that users engage more with larger screen sizes

I'd be curious to see some study around that.

It would certainly explain a lot. The dreaded ad-driven 'engagement' obsession rearing its ugly head again.

People buy them for sure, but I'm pretty sure that market research is not why they were invented. People were not carrying around Nexus 7s in their pockets, which are not much bigger than current phablets but predated the existence of them.

> I feel like it's a cultural thing.

I don't think culture has much to do with it.

Apple's market cap is over $1 trillion. They sold over 40M iPhones last quarter. They have way more data than either of us do, and the market has spoken: there is not enough demand for small phones to justify a separate SKU.

(Also, as a fellow strap-hanger for 6 years, I just shoved my phone in my pocket and listened to podcasts while riding. But I know everyone has a different use case!)

EDIT: Folks complain on one end about Apple’s lack of product focus and on the other end about cutting out SKUs that do not make sense at their enormous scale.

As much as you all love the SE, it went untouched for years at a time. I imagine there were no components that made sense for the smaller SKU as Apple transitioned to larger phones (and batteries, crucially). It is also a low-ASP phone to begin with, which makes less sense for a company who increasingly makes “luxury” tech products.

Apple would sell millions of the SE2 without cannibalising sales. Every other phone manufacturer would salivate at this opportunity, especially at 100%+ margins. "Not enough" smacks of a lackluster excuse of an adhd department head.

You have absolutely no idea if any of this is true and you risk nothing saying it. It sure sounds nice though.. :)

Making things at the scale that Apple makes them is hard. If the SE was a great business idea, Apple would keep doing it. Maybe they will make another one in the Spring. It's not dead dead yet.

My understanding is that the SE is made out of leftovers—not in a micro sense of things literally left sitting on the factory floor, but rather in a macro sense: they're made from the tail ends of multi-year component supply contracts, where Apple is obligated to take receipt of components that no longer feed into any current product they're building. They're a "bone broth", a way to use up those tailings and make a profit (however slight) off of them.

This was also true, ten years ago, of the iPod Touch. It was the reason for the iPhone 5C. It's at least partially the reason for the iPhone XR today. It's also the reason Apple keeps selling the iPhone 7 and 8.

The problem (for consumers) is that, eventually, you run out of the tailings you were using to make one of these "byproducts", since you never signed on to produce more of them. (That being rather the point of the whole process, from Apple's perspective.)

Once the supply contract for iPhone 5S "chassis" components is run through, that'll likely be the end of that form-factor. No device Apple has produced since then has that form factor, so there are no hand-me-down components to repurpose into a new device of that form-factor.

What does 100%+ margins mean?

They probably mean it costs less than $175 to make and they sell it for $349.

That’s a gross margin of 50%.

Yes.... unfortunately many do not understand the difference between Margin and Mark up.

Just for the records:

Margin = profit / sale price Markup = profit / cost Profit = sale price - cost

I frequently meet people that are not aware of the above.

They would however hurt the quarterly profit numbers. The SE costs less and the profit margin of ~38% on $800 is less than ~38% on $1000+

It’s just business

Apple will probably sell 70,000,000 in 90 days this quarter. I think they know how to sell a lot of phones

The wins that define Apple didn't come from the market analysis approach you're referring to.

Can you elaborate?

It think it means that some of Apple's wins came from building something no one knew they wanted. So no amount of market research would have led to it.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/988332-some-people-say-give...

They released the SE, originally, because there was enough demand for it. They said pretty much exactly that in the announcement of it. That demand clearly still exists.

Does that demand exist at a scale that makes sense for a $1T company with many rapidly-growing product lines and high product margin expectations, though?

Yes.

Guess how much a 128GB SE goes for now, if you can even get one?

To add to this, the SE represented 8% of their iPhone sales so far this year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/804398/us-iphone-sales-b...

they don't actually know the demand for all these new iphone Xx models. it's an educated guess. and... to some degree, a portion of the market will go wherever apple suggests they go anyway.

apple got caught 'behind' in the 'bigger phone size' competition, and it seems they'll keep going bigger.

you could keep the 'high margin' on an se-sized phone - people would buy it anyway, because they want that size.

Nothing is clear at all, just because you want it to be true.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/804398/us-iphone-sales-b...

Obviously it is for Apple to decide who Apple's customers are. It is just really sad to have something that works so well for me that no longer exists.

I won't buy a large phone, which in 2011 meant I could buy the best phone on the market and in 2018 means I'm facing a future with some phone that just doesn't match a 2011 iPhone in looks, style and maybe even functionality and objective quality.

I'm sure they have great reasons, but it is very tempting to wave a fist in the sky and yell "why do they have to keep changing things?". The Apple ecosystem was great for me, and now I'm being forced out. It is like watching open source projects try to nuke themselves out of existence with the Big Trendy Rewrite; except Apple is wildly profitable and successful.

> They have way more data than either of us do, and the market has spoken: there is not enough demand for small phones to justify a separate SKU.

Let's not pretend this is some natural result of "the market". The UX of most iOS apps, including Apple's, has been steadily getting bloated with bigger buttons, bigger labels, more padding in text fields, and reams of whitespace. This is personally annoying, but manageable on the bigger, newer phones. On iPhone SE it means that many apps can be maddening to use - with only a little bit of content visible on screen in some situations.

iOS 7 on the iPhone 5 form factor was great. iOS 12, not so much. Apple clearly sees no future for the smaller phones and their UI designers consider them an afterthought. It's little wonder that only diehards are willing to put up with this kind of UX compromise.

I moatly use mobile web, and maybe 2 screens of common apps. The SE works great for me. Every now and then something is a bit off, but I’ll just ditch the rare site/app that doesn’t work right. There’s plenty to do in this life.

I'm specifically thinking of the Music and Messages apps which show very little content while typing a search or message. It's hard to reply to a set of text messages when it feels like you're reading them through a keyhole and typing anything scrolls you back down to the bottom. Music is just as bad and shows ~1 result while the keyboard is up during search.

> I feel like it's a cultural thing. "Designed by Apple in California" where you just drive to work so a bigger phone is only a benefit

This born-and-raised Californian also rides the subway (bart) to work every day, and I'll have a hard time giving up my SE for similar reasons to you. Don't let assumptions about what California is like get in the way of a good argument.

I loved the SE, but last year in New York I suddenly knew the SE form factor was doomed. I forget the app I was using, but with the navigation buttons at the top and the options at the bottom, there was less than a 1 inch vertical bar with the content left. I want my cell phone in one hand and my coffee in the other.

Clearly app developers had already abandoned the size, but worse I realized how horrible all the apps had become. Apple iOS apps are now the same complicated disasters as every other platform. I was hanging in there with my Mac Book Pro 2011 hoping for a new machine that deserved to have Pro in the name and now I knew that soon there wouldn't even be an iPhone that I could use with one hand (comfortably - Yes I have heard all of the Apple apologists and Android phablet fanatics)

It is difficult to remember how lost we were, Microsoft Vista, Donut and BlackBerry. Steve changed the world one last time, but can't imagine Apple will again.

The iPhones sold off within a day and the Mac Book Pro 2011? To a musician with a rig that connects to Firewire.

Oh Apple...

I'll never abandon the 5" phones just because people make terrible UIs

Meh, I ride the BART every day in California, and before that I rode the tube every day in London. The bigger size is just something you get used to, it doesn't prevent one-handed operation, you just use Reachability or do a little hand shimmy.

I get the elegance argument about 4/5/SE design, but the screen size thing is just the market speaking. A lot of people use their phone as primary computing device and a bigger screen is nice when it's your only device.

Yeah, I can just about manage a 7 one-handed. But definitely couldn’t go bigger. Not a fan of the big phone thing at all. It’s not just a problem on the train, either; a one-handed phone is also useful while walking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O99m7lebirE

I have ridden the Paris Metro, London Underground, and NYC Subway.

Never have I had to hold a cell phone to do so.

What do you do on the train? Stare off into space?

A lot of people use it as a time for reading, and your phone is the logical thing to use for that purpose.