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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them

I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.

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You can't just look at units sold, you have to look at net units sold because the version of the product existed.

For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.

I have no idea what those numbers are, though.

> You can't just look at hamburger sales to judge hamburger demand. You have to consider an alternate universe where hamburgers aren't on the menu, then subtract all the people who would have ordered something else for lunch vs going hungry.

I know this probably is how the decisions get made. Especially if the alternative has a higher profit margin. I just have to say I think the world is worse for it.

That's an important analysis but it's answering a different question from whether the product would sell enough to make a nice profit.

And it only works when there are notable deficits in competition. Otherwise a company with less to cannibalize would make the smaller model and get themselves 3-6 million sales.

> For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.

If nothing else, you could still give the mini a higher margin and make some gains that way.

That’s another issue, those same users won’t tolerate paying more for a smaller phone. They’re picky and principled, which is a customer type that is just not worth chasing at scale.

Hi, my name is PickyAndPrincipled. Ha, that describes me perfectly and is the reason why I still use a Pixel 4a. It works still great and has a nice form factor.

And that’s fine! Just don’t be surprised when new phone manufacturers don’t see an incentive in catering to you.

Smaller phones tend to have a lower price point.

If they don't offer a smaller phone, you'll eventually buy a bigger phone. Once you are in camp big phone, you'll probably be back on the 2-5 year device treadmill. And you'll be spending more on the big phones.

Apple is in a continuous state of not giving their customers what they want.

A convertible Macbook with a touch screen and dual MacOS/IOS personalities would sell out. They will never make it because no one will ever buy an iPad again.

A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.

A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.

Apple won't do these things because you'd be happier but spend less.

> A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.

With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.

> A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.

This was the iPhone SE sold for many years until Feb 2025. It started at $430. It’s unfortunate they got rid of it for a 6inch 16E, but it is pretty reasonable on price at $600.

> With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.

If you were a person that likes Apple TV, I imagine it would be nice to have a TV that was just that rather than a TV with whatever smartness the maker insisted on, plus a standalone Apple TV. (Even nicer would be a TV without smarts, but those seem to be extinct)

Yes, a privacy preserving TV that lacks home screen ads, forced updates, automatic content recognition (ACR), etc.

Apple TV has by far the fastest processor in a TV set-top box. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any smart TV. And I'm sure Apple could do best in class 4k or 8k AI upscale, and live AI captioning w/ translation. They also have the lawyers needed to do some of the AI transformation and deal with the inevitable lawsuits from copyright holders.

They are probably also smart enough to class it as a "smart monitor", delete the TV tuners, and avoid lots of local regulatory requirements that way.

Could be a very competitive product as long as the price is no worse than Sony Bravia.

This thread seems to have a lot of people that love the iPhone mini (me included - I still use my 12 mini).

But from all reports that you can find with a quick search it seems clear that it did not sell well by Apple standards.

I would love them to bring it back and I’m not sure what it is about the Hacker News crowd that makes this phone over-represented. Maybe the tech crowd also uses laptops more, so we think of phones as our “small device” and use other devices more as appropriate?

> by Apple standards

Yeah. The question I'm trying to answer is not "does it make sense for Apple to make a small phone?", but rather "does it make sense for anyone to make a small phone?" I'm using the 13 Mini's sales data as evidence, because it is the one and only small phone made in the past decade or so.

I understand why you'd reach for that data, not a ton of other alternatives... But I'm not convinced that an arbitrarily chosen brand could achieve those sales figures. Especially if it was a new or no-name brand that didn't have a proven track record with software updates and hardware build quality.

Maybe I'm just incredibly naive but I have this small hope that we'll see a return to smaller phones that are trifolds for when you need the real estate.

I tend to like smaller phones as well, but even comparing the Pixel 9 Pro vs Pixel 9 Pro XL used markets, it seems really hard to find non-XL versions. I would totally believe that the XL is a far more popular model, unfortunately for the rest of us.

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