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>Customers do not prefer it, it was not popular, otherwise we would still see that form factor.

This is not sufficient reasoning — industries can independently yet collectively decide what the next big thing is, and operate in tandem to produce a market where only that thing exists. Notably, the shift to large phone sizes occurred rapidly, suggesting this may have been the case. That the shift was not a reaction to consumer interest, but rather in anticipation of it.

The biggest recent example of this effect was the 5 years or so where every new tv was a 3D TV; its now been phased out in favor of SmartTVs, which I personally believe are shitty enough to likely have no real consumer support. Another example is car touchscreens, and their somehow consistent terribleness across all brands, even luxury ones.

> That the shift was not a reaction to consumer interest, but rather in anticipation of it.

When it comes to Apple, I believe it was not anticipation, but overreaction to the Galaxy Note. Phablets quickly became popular in East Asia[1], and "pocketability" turned out to be a complete non-issue for the many women who carry around a bag all day. But instead of just serving the phablet market, they've gone all-in on it.

That said, I absolutely agree that companies often converge on weird standards. I'm glad that the glossy screen hype seems to be mostly over, but now we're losing inverted-T arrow keys :(

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/02/phablets-...

Which is also funny because Apple made this commercial titled "Thumb" for the 5 (same form factor as the SE)

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

Just my opinion, the fact that they had to make a commercial for this at all signifies their need to convince us to buy in on that sort of thing.

They were absolutely nervous about losing sales to larger phones that customers liked. Turns out reaching everything with one thumb isn't really as important as having a big screen to view content on.

We know the rest of the story, the next year the next iPhone became larger...

> Customers do not prefer it, it was not popular, otherwise we would still see that form factor.

Customers loved iPhone SE, both because it was cheap and because of its size.

I bought one not too long ago on clearance, it's a great phone.

I love the size, the headphone jack, the price, and I get iOS and don't have to worry about the security and update issues of Android. What's not to like? :)

TBH, I probably would have upgraded to an iPhone XR had I not grabbed the SE on clearance but I ended up saving ~$500 so I'm happy how it turned out.

There's definitely a market for phones that are affordable, that can fit in your hand and run iOS. /shrug

Customers who bought it loved it. It's an excellent phone.

But it was not popular in terms of volume. If you need any evidence of this, just look for Android phones with a screen under 4.5" containing a Qualcomm 825 CPU or better.

Actually, try and find any Android phone sold by any US cellular carrier under 5", never mind 4.5". This is not just an Apple-style opinionated decision, the whole market has spoken on this.

My honest belief is that people stopped buying small phones when the screen size trade-off didn't save them any significant money. I also believe that some portion of people who are vocal about the inevitable, eventual disappearance of the 4" screen aren't necessarily even using these small phones, but aren't happy about their disappearance out of some kind of principal or nostalgia.

I don't know that any of us would agree to use a 15" 1024x768 display again, even if it was free. I think it's the same concept.

If "the market has spoken", it seems like its words were dictated by the manufacturers.

As a consumer I don't remember even being given the option of buying any small phones (besides the now discontinued iPhone SE) for the last handful of years.

> I also believe that some portion of people who are vocal about the inevitable, eventual disappearance of the 4" screen aren't necessarily even using these small phones

I'm using my SEs as much as possible, but due to the limitations of iOS it's not feasible for me to use them as my primary work phone. This means I can choose between carrying two phones, carrying one that's too large, or significantly reducing my access to work resources on the go.

For me it's a feature combo that's missing. Make a new SE, bump the price up $100, but give it a camera close to as good as the Plus phones, and that's my next phone, for sure. I only got the 7+ over the 7 for the camera, and if there'd been an SE-sized phone with the same camera I'd have bought that instead of either bigger option.

[EDIT] actually I suspect this is a common reason for purchasing larger phones and the phone makers know this, and are using the large-size-better-camera pairing to charge me $300-500 more for the better camera, instead of $100.

FWIW the 4" iPhone 5s and SE are the last iPhones without a camera bump. Clean look.

Check out Sony's Xperia Compact line - one of my friends swears by them.

They're no longer compact. The XZ2 is a 5" phone (5.3 x 2.6 x 0.5 in).

http://j.mp/2XzLuEV

No company since at least 2016 has made a flagship Android phone under 4.5". The iPhone SE made news for being the only small phone with up-to-date internals. It's not surprising small Android phones have seen limited success.

That's like observing that small cars don't do well with luxury buyers. Well, true -- because carmakers have chosen not to make small high-end cars. I've had friends tell me they wanted to buy a smaller car but the interior wasn't nearly as nice so they bought a bigger model. They'd rather have a car that's too big than get a second-rate dashboard and seats.

So I'm not sure why you're pointing to supply and claiming that it's indicative of demand of one particular attribute. Even more than with cars, the history of cell phones is companies making the wrong thing, and then having their lunch eaten by some other company. 15 years ago, all my friends had Blackberrys or Palms, but today nobody would say "The market had spoken" and everybody wanted hardware QWERTY keyboards and styluses. People didn't have a choice. These companies were seeing exponential growth, right up until a better choice was available.

Also, the desktop display comparison is out of left field. My desk is plenty big enough for two big displays, while my pants pockets aren't big enough for even one 'phablet'. I don't have to move my fingers across every pixel of my desktop displays to use them. It's completely different -- ergonomics, use cases, hardware, OS, apps, and so on.

Whenever there are fewer companies C than the exponent 2^R of the number of relevant attributes R, consumers don't have a sufficient number of axes of control to communicate to product designers purely through market forces.

(There's a name for that law, in the context of systems control theory, but I can never remember what it is.)

> That's like observing that small cars don't do well with luxury buyers [...] because carmakers have chosen not to make small high-end cars.

sigh or they make it but don't bring it to the US. Why no Mercedes A Class hatchback for us!?

No, but I would go back to a Thinkpad with a 15" 1600x1200 4:3 in a heartbeat, or a 4:3 1920x1440. For free, or marked premium over other machines.

look for Android phones with a screen under 4.5" containing a Qualcomm 825 CPU or better.

As a happy user of mid- to low-end phones, I don't need anything in the 800 range. Decent 600s works for me. However, I'd love to have a site that allowed searching and comparisons based on maximum screen size. 'Nothing smaller than X' seems to be a near universally available filter, but good luck with 'Nothing larger than X.'

And I don't know if this is common or special to Huawei but my 5.2" Honor 8 also has a nice "drag across the home button bar" that shrinks the screen down to the bottom left or right in a roughly 4" screen size area. Very convenient for one hand use.

It was so popular that Apple was supply constrained for quite awhile. Then it started to languish without updates, possibly because it was less profitable for Apple compared to selling newer, larger models.

Anecdotally the SE seems to be a popular phone for companies (in Germany) to equip their employees with. Soon people will have to carry two phablets around all day.

Even Apple isn't perfect at determining what people actually want. They dropped the tower workstation form factor entirely for over 5 years before bringing it back.

I don't believe that iPhones moving to a slightly larger screen size for a couple years (and without offering any new smaller models with the same performance) is evidence that people dislike smaller phones.

What would I expect to see if a sizable number of people did actually like the iPhone SE? Perhaps something similar to when Apple discontinued the cheesegrater: some people buying the new model, and some people clinging to the old one, and many people complaining online about having to make this choice and begging for an upgrade of the old design. In fact, that's pretty much what I've seen happening with the iPhone SE.

Apple famously has many future versions of their products in their design pipeline, so a missed prediction can cause a bubble that will takes years to clear.

It's not just Apple though, it's the entire industry of a dozen Android OEMs as well. Apple was really the last OEM to stop making 4.0" phones.

>Customers do not prefer it

Why is it so hard to believe that some people DO prefer smaller phones?

Some people is not enough to support massive economies of scale required for major cellphone companies. This means you eventually need to pay more for a smaller screen, and that’s really unpopular.

PS: I have average sized hands and without a case I can easily use an regular iPhone 7/8/X with one hand. Cases make this far more difficult, but imo that’s why phones seem to converge on that size.

> When we see 5 and 6 inch phones, but with higher screen to body ratio, some of us seem to mistake this with a phone that is too large to hold.

That's true. However, it'd still be harder (or impossible) to reach every corner of the display with my thumb, which I think makes it tedious to use. I don't have a problem with that on my SE. If it were up to me, they'd just make the SE even smaller by removing the bezels.

Which is also funny because Apple made this commercial titled "Thumb" for the 5 (same form factor as the SE)

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

Wow! I didn't know this ad existed, but it pretty much nails it: "A dazzling display of common sense."

And thumbs haven't changed since then!

Not only that. But developers still need to support the 4 inch screen resolution because when you enable zoom on the 4.7 inch iPhones, you get a resolution that’s the same as the SE.

>Yes, 17% of these users are using the 4.7" screen, which is what's in the 6, 6S, 7, and 8.

Of which users? Of all the users in the set, 47% are on 4.7" phones, if I counted correctly.

Definitely agree the popsocket helps manage a larger phone. Though I think total screen size matters are much as case size. It affects where your thumb has to reach.

Total case size matters more for the pocket than for holding it, as users never grip the whole of the phone at once.

Good catch! As I’ve been reading all these comments about small screens and cheaper prices I haven’t seen much discussion of the newest market for this: wearables. Now that apple has said you can buy a fully decoupled watch with cell service I may save $600 and just buy the next version of that instead of a new phone that I think is too large and expensive.

It’s not fully decoupled but that’s definitely the direction Apple is headed in.

It's remarkable to me that anyone would argue Apple, of all design firms, is swayed by mere consumer opinion.

I can't tell me if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'd also challenge anyone to find literally any Android phone at any price currently for sale at a US carrier or MVNO with a screen size at or under 4.8 inches.

Small phones are most definitely not popular.

The average consumer likes a bigger screen, but I get a (truthy) feeling that production doesn't match demand.

- Smartphone design goals are to cram as much into a phone as possible, so engineers prefer having more space to work with.

- If I'm a designer for a smartphone, I'm probably pushing for more screen real estate to work with

- If you can only pick 2-3 form factors to build with massive economies of scale (as Apple in particular has to do), the demand for a smaller screen might not align with the relative cost to produce

- I wouldn't be surprised if the "it's smaller so it should be cheaper" mindset that people have in other markets (cars come to mind) plays a factor here. The reverse would be true true: A company can charge more for a bigger phone because it's bigger.

So if, say, 20% of the market wants a smaller screen size but wants it done cheaply, there might not be enough incentives to mass-produce such a device in a way that makes enough money to be worth it.

The small phones usually have much worse cameras than the big ones. Sometimes the mid-sized ones also have worse cameras than the really big ones. I'd love an SE-sized phone with a great camera, but that wasn't an option, so I bought a Plus, solely for the better camera, not for the screen size.

Agree; the only reason I own a Pixel 3 is that the camera in it was so much better than the competition's. Otherwise I would be using a $100 chinese brand phone. Google now sells a second phone that is cheaper but with the same camera; I'd buy that if this one broke.

The only thing impacting my phone purchases these days is the camera, which like you said, the good ones only come in 5"+ screen sizes.

The Palm phone? It’s crazy what you get when you search. I must have bigger hands than normal (I’m 195cm tall) and can’t reach across an iPhone 8 single handed. This phone is repeated called small in reviews.

> Here are some of the problems with the Palm phone: the camera is terrible, the operating system doesn’t have the latest Digital Wellbeing features that are ostensibly the whole point of getting this phone, the face unlock feature is likely insecure, there are no physical volume buttons, its custom software only occasionally helps with its tiny screen, it’s preloaded with a fair bit of bloatware, it’s terrifically slow, and (most of all) the battery life is downright atrocious.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18212311/palm-phone-review...

> This phone is repeated called small in reviews.

It's repeatedly called a few more things in reviews as well.

I wasn’t asked to find a good one.