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Comment by aczerepinski | Hacker News Reader

I bought the $30 battery replacement because they stopped making small phones. My preferred plan would have been to spend ~$700 on an updated SE.

Similar story on the Mac side.

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I would also spend a similar amount on an upgraded SE.

Current phone lineup (not just Apple) sucks IMO. An untouched SE with latest radio and faster CPU would be worth the upgrade for me.

Just adding my voice to the crowd of people willing to seriously shell out for an updated SE. I have a tablet and a laptop, what I want out of my phone is portability and phone, in a one-handed form factor. For now I just replaced the SE battery and I’m waiting for trends to shift again.

I recently purchased a nearly new condition 128GB SE and it feels performant with iOS 12.

I still CANNOT believe the amount of people that want these gigantic ass phones. How are we in the minority for wanting a phone that fits in one hand??

All my phones fit in one hand - and yet I haven't used a phone smaller than 5" in many years now.

Maybe 4" is just too small for most, even for one-handed use?

Having seen plenty of grown women using two hands to type on an iPhone 4s when those things were popular, I'd say we need accurate population data to truly confirm.

You mean the ones who are not buying the XR or the XS Max?

was so hoping for xr to be smaller. i mean prob wouldnt have switched anyway without my headphone wire antenna enabled built-in FM radio in moto phone, but was thinking about it.

Because a phone that fits in one hand has less screen real estate, which converts to either poor resolution or a ton of squinting?

I’m a huge fan of the Xs Max. The near-bezelless display gives you maximum screen size in a relatively slim form factor. Watching videos on this thing is just amazing tbh.

iPhone and Android sales numbers have proven time and again that the vast majority of people want a larger screen. Your best bet is probably the compact Sony Xperia Z series.

Right, and people are replacing tablets and the browse-read-shop functionality of laptops with highly functional phones.

In my own friends and family circle, they want the larger phones because it has become their sole personal computing device. The calling function is not the primary use anymore.

small phone + laptop/desktop is becoming the tech equivalent of owning a 4x4 truck and a small compact. consumers on a budget just want to own a crossover.

I’d actually like iOS to have a toggle to disable phone calls without disabling 4G.

(Owner of a huge phone, but not as primary computer)

I’m in the same boat and would rather have a small phone. Using 6 plus right now and holding phone against hip sitting down just to type with one hand. Far from ideal.

My hobby: inserting hyphens for effect.

> gigantic ass-phones.

Because we largely don't carry multiple digital devices around and can work off the phone a lot of the time. I don't use any tablets and don't carry my laptop to meetings since OneNote on mobile works perfectly well. When I do need to do serious work, I use a souped up large screen high RAM, SSD i7 laptop.

For those of us who have Gigantic Ass Hands.

I can comfortably type with one hand on my OnePlus 6 (6 inch phone). I use it to browse when and I'm out and about, so the extra real screen estate is very valuable.

I’d buy several. It was the most best way to give family members an affordable way to be part of Apple’s ecosystem and now I’m weighing Apple’s pricing vs disappointing them with an Android device when it’s time to upgrade.

likewise, replaced my SE battery before Dec 31st. Would shell out money for an all screen OLED SE size iPhone with the latest silicon.

Maybe a crowd-sourced replacement board, like the neo900 project?

I'd pay $1000 for an XS Mini should they ever decide to make one. Until then, I'm sticking with my SE, which is the best iPhone they've ever made regardless of price.

I would pay double to have an iPhone 4 size phone.

I'd pay double to have the iPhone 3GS curved back that actually felt comfortable to hold.

I got my 4 out the other day because I was having the $29 battery replacement done in my SE. The 4 feels a little heavy, but the size is juuuust right. I would gladly pay the same. Hopefully with a headphone jack.

Purely anecdotal, but how are you comfortable with the real estate the screen offers? I understand it feels amazing in your hand, but it wasn't until I actually picked up a working iPhone 4 that I realized I could read maybe only two message responses from a person I would be having a conversation with.

I'd imagine if they reduced the bezels on the size of the 6 product line, you'd really find the best of both worlds. Both small in the hand, but also enough space to get more screen real estate out of your applications.

For that kind of reading my iPad is right here in my bag. For quickly sending messages, playing music or arguing with Siri, the iPhone 4 or 5 were much easier to hold or pocket.

The best phone you can fit in an iPhone 4-sized package isn’t signicantly better than an iPhone 4.

Apart from a better screen, faster processor, T2 and A-series chips with far better graphics performance, Touch ID, inductive charging … what have the Romans ever done for us?

You sure you can fit all that in an iPhone 4 case? And if so, in 2019, can you make a significantly better phone in an iPhone 6 case than an iPhone 6?

The iPhone 4 is significantly thicker than the later models, somthere’s plenty of space for a battery. The backlight of the screen is a large power consumer too so smaller screen means less energy used for backlight, more energy available for power hungry extras.

Where do you put the battery for all that? The higher resolution screens and faster CPUs all are power hungry as hell.

There obviously are trade offs, but personally I would forego nicer screens, cameras, CPUs, and slimness to have a smaller phone. Obviously, Apple is betting that this isn't a sufficiently profitable market, but one can dream.

An iPhone XS phone doesn't even fit into most women's pockets. It'll be funny if pockets get bigger to accommodate phones.

The iPhone 4 has less real estate, so far fewer pixels, so less graphics processing required. Also less energy required for the same brightness. Also the case doesn’t have to be proportionally thicker, so the extra thickness is entirely for battery.

I’d be surprised if an iPhone 4 based on new power-sipping technology wasn’t within a few percent of the web browsing/movie watching time of the iPhone 8 or similar.

I’m the same. We must be a small niche if no competitors are bothering to cater towards us.

Hard to imagine many Apple people lined up for that opening day: "Here's an iPhone-4-shaped thing running Android!"

Even if they nailed the form factor, how many people are really willing to switch? You see some people swearing off a brand (on the internet, anyway) when something egregious happens but there's definitely inertia that keeps most people firmly in one ecosystem or the other.

The lock-in is real, especially when you’re younger and more vulnerable to peer pressure. I doubt my kids would appreciate being the cause of a downgrade from an iMessage group to MMS.

For me the lock-in is not iMsg, hell I don't even use it - no one uses it in my circle, it's the knowledge that Google is not getting to track my every shift, every breathe, every shake, every jump etc etc.

It's sad I will have to move back to Android within a year (I can neither buy big iPhones nor spend those amounts the way the new ones are priced). I wish there were fully functional privacy focussed ROMs that was shipped by Android OEMs.

> I wish there were fully functional privacy focussed ROMs that was shipped by Android OEMs.

I'm sure everyone on this discussion board knows why this will never be the case, unfortunately.

With that said, are there any regularly-updated aftermarket ROMs that are privacy-focused? I've had a rough look at LineageOS[1] - a continuation of CyanogenMod - and it seems to mostly fit the bill.

I'm aware of CopperheadOS, but they had a "touch" of infighting about half a year ago[2] and mostly dissolved.

I too am moving away from Apple products, for the same reason. They are reaching expense levels (especially in my country) that I simply can't justify when I can get a HP or Lenovo business-grade laptop with drastically better hardware specifications and install simply OpenSUSE on it. Without going all-in on the Apple ecosystem to fully reap the rewards, it's simply not worth it for me to use any of them.

1. https://lineageos.org/

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/copperheados

Sonys Xperia Compact models are a good option if you want a high specced phone that fits in one hand.

+1 for an update to SE... really hoping they’ll release one this year

The SE was my question too—and I just bought a new one in Q4 after breaking my old one. Is it not the case that the average hand in China is smaller than the average hand in the US? I'm surprised they didn't mention this at all. Do they have data finding that reluctance to upgrade to a bigger phone was not a factor in reluctance to upgrade?

Does Apple report enough data for us to attempt to make correlations between average height (as a proxy for hand size) per country and purchasing decisions?

Same. Went in the last day of 2018 and got the battery replaced on my SE even though it was only at 88%. Hoping it lasts for long enough that design trends change and apple issues another SE or even an original iPhone sized phone.

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