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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

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jsheard

They did try bringing back smaller ~5.5" phones, and hardly anybody bought them.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-mini-sales-a-disast...

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...

I think the vocal minority is the other way around.

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I think your argument is flawed -- perhaps rephrasing it to say is that _Apple_ tried bringing back a smaller _iPhone_ and _presumably_ few _existing_ customers bought them, would have made a better one? Because I would assume most of iPhone buyers are either _existing_ iPhone users, or people who swear to Apple software (iOS, MacOS) so this is about being able to read the statistics correctly.

Add to the above that iPhone "mini" might have been slower or just "worse" and it wasn't just the screen that was reduced in size, so the word of mouth might have been that the phone is simply worse, and that contributed to poor sales.

There's no way of telling how a 5,5" phone would fare until there's consistent prolonged feature-parity based sales of such phones that are otherwise identical to other offerings by the same brand, across multiple brands (if I am a die-hard Fairphone customer, I am not buying an iPhone regardless of screen size) to help gather proper statistics.

As the article points out, the iPhone 13 mini sold half as much as the other iPhone 13 models, while competing with the iPhone SE which was the same size at half the price. That isn’t exactly terrible.

The lowest alternative, 13 Pro Max had double the sale volume (at 1.5x the cost), while the VAST majority chose the 6.1" models instead, how does that support the argument the desire for a >5.5" phone is from a vocal minority? The articles themselves directly state the sales of small models are poor, it's not the other way around no matter how you spin the charts.

The relative preference for the larger unit has increased over time as well, e.g.: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/28/iphone-16-q1-2025-best-...

The markets for smaller phones and the larger Pro Max models look like they’re roughly in the same order of magnitude. It doesn’t look like a negligible demand that is not worth serving.

The larger market has 2 phones (Pro and Pro Max) which release each generation, separate from the base model being >6". That one needs to compare a specific subset of a larger model type and say it's somewhere within the same factor of 10 is exactly why Apple stopped making the mini.

The articles are literally about how bad the sales were before Apple stopped making minis. There is no reasonable way to conclude that means they were actually worth serving.

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