In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
I loved the iPhone SE and small phones generally, but at the same time I realize Apple's not failing at anything. They're giving the market the size people actually want. The smaller phones don't sell nearly as well. Most people prefer a bigger phone even if carrying it is less convenient.
I've just accepted my phone will be bulky now, so I double down and attach a magnetic wallet to it, and carry it in my hand or jacket pocket or bag rather than my pants pocket like I used to. During meetings it lies on the table rather then in my pants pocket. C'est la vie.
Ooops ?
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/03/iphone-16e-sales-lag-be...
Looks like the market did like the SE size.
Adjusting for inflation, the SE (€479 in 2020) was €588 and the SE2 (€519 in 2022) was €567. The 16e is 699, a 25% increase.
The thought that "Small phones are only more popular because they're less expensive" seems to willfully ignore that the phones are less expensive because their inputs are less expensive, because they're smaller.
HTC has been making cheap (very cheap) and small phones for the discount market. Foldables exist in the premium space, but the price tags appear to bake in a higher margin for a device that won't sell the same volume.
That's not a compelling argument when the same chart also shows the iPhone SE 2022 lagging behind iPhone SE 2020, even though they have identical form factors.
I think Apple has such high expectation to sales figures that even if a smaller iPhone comes in, even as the 10th best selling phone, that's maybe only 5% of all iPhone sales. Massively successful as a phone, millions of people bought it, but to Apple, the SE is a side hustle at best.
My daughters friends made fun of my iPhone SE3, they had never seen a phone that small.
It’s not clear if they decided to move just add E models to their lineup, or given up on SE models entirely.
Similarly people have called the 16e as a replacement for the SE line, but that’s a cost assessment not one based of form factor. It could be most people bought the SE because it was cheap, but without two different form factors at identical prices there’s no way to tell.
Regarding the 17e, the supply chain rumor mill keeps mentioning it, so it definitely seems to be a thing.
Just profoundly weird to me that small manufacturers can’t make small phones because they’re small and can’t pay for it, and large manufacturers can’t make it because…(checks notes)…they’re large and don’t want to pay for it even if there’s demand.
Just opining that it’s weird can’t possibly be convincing against a consensus amongst all the large smartphone manufacturers.
Large manufacturers can make them. But there isn't enough demand to make them profitable enough. It's not a question of whether they "want to pay for it", it's just simple economics. They're businesses, not charities. I like small phones, but I understand manufacturers are doing what's economically rational given market preferences and I don't blame them for it.
But why are we needing a phone to be productive? And they were already a distraction from the world around us when they fit in a single hand.
I know I'm probably abnormal, but my phone is a phone first, camera second, and "work" device fifth.
As a society, our boundaries around communication and instant contact to anyone have collapsed. Now if you don't respond to a message within a few minutes, you get multiple follow ups. If you don't pick up the phone when a friend calls you, they don't leave a message, they text, then call again, then text again.
We've gone from being able to leave the house, and no one can contact us for a few hours, to no matter where we are people are trying to contact us. So they may be more "productive" with larger screens, but we never asked whether they SHOULD be more productive.
Being able to instantly communicate via photo and video makes a lot of people’s lives easier. For example, getting quotes for a house repair to save on travel time and energy getting estimates, showing before and after pictures to document performed work, and myriad more examples.
If someone is contacting you too much, that’s a problem solved by asking them not to harass you, not by putting limits on the device for everyone else.
My response was to these statements:
> But why are we needing a phone to be productive?
> So they may be more "productive" with larger screens, but we never asked whether they SHOULD be more productive.
I use my phone for web browsing 99% of the time. I don’t need it to have AI processors or loads of brand new tech. I want it to be cheap, functional, and expendable. So I definitely question whether a phone needs to be super “productive” in that sense too. But people who want their aircraft carrier phones that don’t fit in their pockets and cost over $1000 can have that too.
But this is because Google is a software / service company, so it keeps Android open.
Apple is a hardware company, and always has been. They have a relatively narrow lineup of devices which they support for a very long time, compared to Android devices. So Apple are not interested in fringe markets; they go for the well-off mainstream mostly.
> However, a follow-up phantom model analysis using 10,000 bootstrap samples at 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals revealed that the overall magnitude of the hedonic path (i.e., LS→PAQ→AT→IU; B=0.14, SE=0.06, p<0.01) was larger than that of the utilitarian path (i.e., LS→PC→PEOU→PU→IU; B=0.07, SE=0.03, p<0.01) even though participants were given a task-oriented, rather than entertainment-oriented (e.g., gaming, movie watching), assignment during the experiment. This implies that users are likely to put greater emphasis on the affective dimension of the technology than on its utilitarian dimension, despite the practical, purposeful nature of the assigned task. Given that user affect (e.g., positive or negative feelings) toward a technology is typically attributed as the central characteristic of the technology (regardless of the accuracy of the attribution),55 the practical implication of this finding is that smartphone manufacturers ought to take full advantage of the positive effects of the large screen on PAQ when designing their products. However, the more challenging design implication is that the optimal level of screen size that does not jeopardize the anywhere–anytime mobility of smartphones should first be identified, since screen size cannot be indefinitely increased in the mobile context. Thus, the remaining question to be addressed in future research is the optimal size of the mobile screen.
In short: Apple can get away with ignoring what those customers want.
There is zero chance I could convince any of my in-laws to switch away from iOS. Data isn't what they care about. It's all about blue bubbles and a decade of familiarity with iOS (and it's irrelevant that the UX between Android and iOS have drifted to be so similar).
I don't understand why you're brining up your in-laws in your response if they don't care about data.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/120267
"Import to your Windows PC
1. Install the Apple Devices app from the Microsoft Store.
2. Connect your iPhone or iPad to your PC with a USB cable.
etc etc"
My whole digital life other than my iPhone works very well! Never better, really. Been Linux-exclusive for years after switching after the release of Windows 10.
Just a real pity that iOS doesn't provide something as simple as a proper export feature. A kicker is that the Photos app does allow you to "Export Unmodified Original" for multiple photos or even whole albums. But you can't do this to everything in Photos (what used to be called the camera roll). There's no "select all" button to work around this.
The point is, that since Apple is providing dedicated tools both for Mac and for Windows to get your photos off your phone, I don't think it's fair to accuse them of trying to lock in people to their devices.
Same with other stuff like bookmarks, passwords, etc.
Large and small companies sell smaller Android phones.
In this alternate history, there's a tiny design firm out of Carmel, south of Cupertino, doing bespoke runs of an iPhone 4 with A18s and eSIM capability and they're always sold out.
In this alternate history, who would have invested the billions of dollars in developing the processor line all the way up through the A18 if it's not available as a market differentiator?
I want an SE4 with touch ID and a 4 inch screen and an A18 processor in it, not the monstrosity that is the 16e. If things were more open; what I really want to see is what we almost get to see with Kickstarter. If I could find one million people to do a first run who're willing to pay $750 for a first run edition, just to simply break even, and then make money off subsequent runs as demand does or does not exist.
Five of these are race-to-the-bottom business models. One is use-the-legal-system-to-retain-your-customers. The last two don't make cell phone class parts, and probably wouldn't be interested in the margins.
I mention this to make a point -- the quality of the A18 that you (reasonably) want in a smaller, niche-market phone isn't a coincidence, it's a consequence of the designer being able to justify the investment because it acts as a market differentiator. PASemi would never have been able to do that on its own, any more than MediaTek has -- customers have no brand faithfulness to cell phone processor manufacturers, so as long as the OEM can freely move between them the distinction must be on price, at the cost of performance. There are upsides to the more open market you imagine in your alternate history, but it would come with the downside of the high end of the market being less developed, and flat out worse, due to less segmentation being possible.
Most customers have no brand faithfulness to desktop processor manufacturers. Why would this stagnate phone processor development when it did not stagnate desktop processor development?
Hasn't it? See the impact the M1 family made.
Isn't that the whole point of alternate history?
The first link I googled about it is https://tedium.co/2025/09/02/apple-macintosh-clones-history/
In addition, the outer screen of next year’s iPhone Fold will be shorter than the mini, so applications really need to be flexible here.
There's nothing you can do with scaling here, if apps are made for big screens. It is a feedback loop. It would require a whole new ecosystem to break out by now. Impossible.
However as a camera? With the new camera button position it works pretty fine with just one hand. As a thing you tap and while it's in a mount? Also an appropriate size for one handed use.
They tried that this year and called it iPhone Air
The Air is DAMN SMALL. You really should try holding it. Yes the 2D dimensions are as large as a normal modern phone but it’s hardly there otherwise. It’s a good compromise.
I’d want it myself but I shoot ProRes Video.
The 2D dimensions are literally the only thing I care about. I'm going to barely notice the weight difference. The actual thickness is a lie with the giant camera hump.
What I do care about is whether I can operate it single-handedly: I want my thumb to reach the top of the screen (so I can drag down the notification bar and click nav stuff) while the bottom of the phone is resting on my pinky. I could easily do that on my Galaxy S III Mini, it was comfortable with my Moto G 2, it was just about doable with my Nokia 6.1 - and it is impossible with my Pixel 7. At no point did I I actively look for a larger phone: going for a larger model has always been an unavoidable compromise.
Ouch! That sounds pretty bad, indeed.
I was originally a little interested in the Air because I wanted to downsize from my previous 15 Pro Max. I ultimately decided that the Air was only thinner, and still big in the dimensions I wanted it to be smaller in.
What people like me wanted was an iPhone 13 mini that's a bit thicker so it can have a bit more battery capacity. And with the 120 Hz PWM nausea fixed.
The iPhone Air has worse battery life. And it has a larger screen. And it's worse to handle one-handed. Coming from the 13 mini, it's not an improvement.
Otherwise, yeah, you're right. I'm pretty sure I'm going to return it this week before my 14 days are up.
The one thing I don’t see criticized enough is the lack of a SIM card slot in international models. I understand they physically couldn’t fit it in, but I bet it's a deal breaker for everybody who has no experience with CDMA phones, so basically everybody outside of North America.
Huh? CDMA is long dead, and the technical capabilities of physical and e-SIMs are identical. SIM = Subscriber Identity Module, all it does is encode your identity.
eSIM reintroduces this problem. Those who experienced it 20-odd years ago with CDMA may feel like home. But elsewhere, where it's always been a norm to have the easily transferable physical SIM card, it might be viewed as too much of a hassle.
My wife didn't have international data with the carrier she had previously. When we traveled out of the country at first she was thinking she wouldn't care and would just get by with wifi. After a couple of days she changed her mind and wanted to have some kind of service. It was extremely simple to find a provider through the hotel WiFi, prepay for a week of service, download the SIM to the phone, and boom she was back to having service. Manged to get it all done at breakfast.
So long as the carrier is simple to get an eSIM it doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Its trivial to transfer an eSIM on Android assuming both devices are still functional. Its pretty easy to load an eSIM, compared to having to somehow call the phone company and have them manually enter the IMEI or whatever from back in the day. The only somewhat pain point is when your old device is smashed and you don't have any internet. In that case, having a physical SIM is better, I agree.
https://www.ft.com/content/62df8d8d-31f2-445e-bfa2-c171ac43d...
Edit: Found a link to the article content, I gather that's basically the point you're making?
Nope, close to 300 actually…
[1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/tim-cook-rejects-ncppr-poli...
Then they push a tiny-tiny device, the watch. Inbetween? Empty desert.
They do not do things smartly but by force. Like the omission of physical home button, notch, no jack, clud first, and a lot of other things forced on us. Some decide to live with, or even adapt the love of it, despite never ever asked for it. Using the force like Darth Vader.
We don’t know. If having such a phone keeps someone in the Apple ecosystem that may be more valuable. All their services they’re always pitching. People with iPhones are more likely to buy iPads and Macs.
Maybe the get tired of the tiny screen or want a better camera and move up in a few years.
The value of a customer over a longer time horizon, perhaps 10 years, may be better if you let them buy the phone you make $250 on instead of $450.
He’s maximizing value for the quarter. That so often steers companies wrong.
I highly doubt it.
I keep trying to use Andriod to get more choice on form factor, but one thing always brings me back to an iPhone: texting incompatibility. Apple has me locked into their ecosystem because I can't get a decent quality video texted to me.
As an Apple fan since the 90s who remembers how Microsoft abused its market dominance for decades, it's particularly ironic that Apple continues to use this technique against other companies.
Google later decided to come up with a completely different implementation called RCS to deal with the same problems. Rather than work with Apple on bringing an iMessage app to Android or licensing it, they instead tried to pressure Apple with a public advertising campaign to adopt what is frankly an inferior solution that doesn't even have reliable end-to-end encryption.
Your complaint is basically that you bought a Toyota and it does not have BMW's laser headlights that adjust brightness and angle automatically. You still have headlights, you just didn't spend the money to get the good ones.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...
This seems like an unfair take - Apple is on record using iMessage specifically to deteriorate the experience between Android and iOS users. I don't see them working with Google to bring iMessage to Android.
Carriers didn't like it and Google caved.
Maybe there was some glaring flaw I'm not remembering, but Google certainly had the resources to make it more competitive if they'd wanted to.
I assure you, Android phones have been able to render video of far higher quality than what Apple devices would send to them through MMS.
iMessage is a cloud ecosystem. I cannot install iMessage on my Android device.
> Rather than work with Apple on bringing an iMessage app to Android
Apple has been free to release this app at any time. There is nothing Google is doing that prevents it from being made. The only people preventing this app from existing are the people at Apple.
There aren't any decent small (less than 6") Android phones either.
It seems this gap has significantly closed, assuming both sides have RCS support. I've got a number of decent quality videos sent through RCS from friends through RCS.
How many Android phone models exist?
Also, they're happy to have Pro and non-Pro SKUs etc., just averse to smaller for reason.
The haters dismiss the SE point by saying it was the price, not size. But it does prove that no one avoids phones due to being "too small".
The size increase is because of cost optimization. Where it's wrong is that everything else meant for humans comes in small, medium, and large. Phones? Just large and XL.
If you think it costs more than $5 billion to design a phone and set up a production line, you are wildly off base. That’s the kind of money companies spend to build silicon fabs or release half a dozen new car models, not consumer products made by a contract manufacturer.
Apple's R&D expenses were $34B for 2025.
Apple isn't making average consumer products with average contract manufacturers.
Some people definitely want it, but when not even one Android manufacturer will create a model when they can get 100% market share, it looks like there isn't enough demand.
But I'll keep my iPhone 13 mini going as long as I can.
Original was 2406 mAh
https://www.ifixit.com/en-ca/products/iphone-13-mini-battery
It doesn't seem like Repart do direct to consumer sales; I'll look around and see if I can find somewhere reputable to buy that in Canada.
Based on this reddit thread, it doesn't seem that there's really a consensus around whether these purported supersized after market batteries are the real deal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/iPhone13Mini/comments/1gap4yc/share...
I would switch from Android to Apple if this fixed this problem.
Some people clear still want those small phones, just not enough for Apple's profit margins.
Apple could have kept improving the CPU and camera and not much else and would have had a steady stream of income from those of us who want to use our actual pockets (not a weird swaddle) to carry our phones.
The iPhone SE accounted for 5-12% of the market, depending on year. The iPhone mini accounted for about 5%. Let's conservatively call it 13%.
Apple had iPhone revenue of $205bn in 2022. The average smaller iPhone is about .5-.67 the cost of a flagship model.
So fuzzy math, but .13 * .5 * 205000000000 = a $1.3bn market for iPhones you can use with one hand.
Thats nothing to sneeze at. Way more of a market than something like a Magic Trackpad.
And the ramp up is to design and organise manufacture of a whole new phone line. They also would likely have received a hit in sales in general if they didn’t upgrade the design as people would feel insulted and also it would stick out like an ignored pig in the lineup, which isn’t good for apples brand either.
The truth is, you’d likely make the same decision if you were CEO, especially if you have to justify it to shareholders.
No - call it what it is. They are catering to the largest market segments and ignoring the smaller segments who desire smaller phones.
Reasoning as to why is another thing, but it doesn't negate the existence of the segment who does want one.
Of course everyone has a different version of what they consider crappy but bad battery life has got to be at the top of most people's crap-o-meter
The biggest issue is that it was introduced in 2020 when many people were in lockdowns. A phone's portability was not as important, and people mainly using their phone at home on the couch likely preferred large screens more than usual.
The second issue is that the screens used slow pulse width modulation for dimming and could appear flickery for some users.
Finally, battery life was uncompetitive. Sony Xperia Compact models introduced years earlier had larger batteries. My guess is accepting a tiny bit more thickness would solve this problem.
Are they, though?
In my experience the smaller phones are almost always substantially worse products: they have several gigabytes less RAM, usually half the storage of the alternatives, often lack features like wireless charging, have a slower CPU, have a worse camera, and in general are made using cheaper materials.
We don't know what the market wants, because the market was never able to make a fair choice. It wasn't "big phone vs small phone", it was "big full-featured phone vs shitty watered-down small phone" - no wonder people "chose" for the big phones.
Also, can you actually not fit a phone in your pocket? I can fit the biggest iPhone in my pocket just fine in all of my pants. Conversely my wife cannot, but that’s because women’s pockets are vestigial. She couldn’t fit the 3GS in most of her pockets either.
I've bought plenty of nonsense, but this is some fabric to hold your phone. Come on…
There’s nothing about this product outside of any other product that riles people up except for the fact that it’s made by a company that collabed with apple.
It’s very easy to just not buy it, sheesh. Touch grass people.
But I agree with you on the diamond front. I may not be interested in diamonds personally, but it’s a similar parallel - people shouldn’t be confused that may humans would care about the story behind a special item and not just the materials within it, yet some people can’t understand it.
“They didn’t spend their money irrationally the same way I’d spend it irrationally, therefore they’re wrong” - this entire thread
I would love a smaller phone that doesn't kill my pants...
Apple is doubtless doing the same kind of “they say they want this but they buy that” calculation that automobile manufacturers are doing. “People say they want fuel efficient cars but they actually buy SUVs And giant trucks.”
Maybe "I want my battery life to be the longest available" dominates the decision.
New pro max fits perfectly fine in all my dressier trousers, it is rather big for some joggers though. Especially with Cuccinelli joggers it’s hard to get the phone to reliably stay in the pocket because they’re just not deep enough, so the top of the phone sticks through the opening.
The very easy solution to this has been to just buy joggers with reasonably sized pockets, Lululemon does not have this problem for example.
If the smaller iPhones and Android phones of 10+ years ago had continued to sell well as larger models were introduced alongside them, they'd still be selling phones that size today.
It’s not as if Apple dislikes money. If they believed the market for small phones was large enough, they’d still be selling small phones.
The Air doesn't even fit in my jeans comfortably, I have to carry it in my jacket now (what do I do in summer?). I'm considering returning it and switching back to my mini until it just can't run anymore.
Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone. I paid more for a worse spec'd phone (Air vs 17), solely hoping it would be easier to use as a mobile, out in the world device. It's not. If they launched the same exact mini with a processor bump at $1k or more I'd be fine paying it.
The reality is that “I want a small phone” for most seems to mean “I would prefer that the phone is small but this is actually the least important factor for my purchase decision”. The set of people who bought the mini was quite small, estimated around 3% of sales.
You didn’t even buy the smallest phone. You got seduced by the thin phone but the 17 and 17 pro are both physically smaller devices corner to corner and would fit in your pocket better.
I purchased the phone that was the lightest, thinking that maybe it's thinness would make it nice to hold in one hand (it does), but it's still too big. And so back it goes for my 13 mini until that thing can't hold on any longer.
I can never compete with the market that replaces their phone every year. Nobody can. They are the ones that keep buying giant phones.
>It’s not as if Apple dislikes money. If they believed the market for small phones was large enough, they’d still be selling small phones.
Apple, like almost every business that size, only does things that are profitable enough. It's not enough to sell 1 million phones for a good profit, they try to avoid doing that.
This is true but also not the entire story. Apple also has to consider:
* How many of that million would we sell anyway in a non-mini version?
* What will the margin be on these relative to our other phones?
* How much of our engineering resources will be siphoned into creating yet another variant that we could use for other efforts or to make our flagship phones better?
* What’s the long term support cost for yet another variant?
Most people use a phone for at least two years. The way it happened in the 2010s, by the time someone is looking at buying a new one, all available phones on the market have already grown larger compared to their current one. So, they get sad and buy whatever is available.
There isn't a grand conspiracy to make everyone sad with big phones they don't want.
This is the key thing. It’s not that no one wants it. But it’s a lot of engineering to produce another distinct hardware model and the market is tiny compared to the larger models.
I still blame Apple for considering that 3% of total iPhone sales is a failure. And then launching the iPhone air, as if it will do any better...
Sometimes that isn’t enough to justify dedicating a mass production line to that product.
I'm not sure it's fair to compare cars to phones or other tech products. Phones are not very repairable these days, but even if you manage to keep a 15-year-old phone working, the unnecessarily ever-changing protocols, APIs, and standards will render it unusable for most practical purposes. So you're kinda forced to upgrade every now and then. A 15-year-old car though? It takes the same fuel and drives on the same roads as brand-new ones. And spare parts are most certainly still available.
- Are the Mac Pro and Mac Studio getting yearly updates?
- Are they as intricate to design and manufacture as phones?
- Are they liable to eat into sales for more profitable models?
Personally, I'd be happy to get a new Mini if they made one, but I'm not shocked that they're not catering to that market.
The comparison to cars is the market. A company makes products it wants to and that it thinks will pay back their investment, and that will be the most profitable choice among the choices of product they could make.
Sorry, you aren’t going to debate your way into Tim Cook choosing a less profitable product to make.
By that logic the iPhone 17 (base model) is at least 24 SKUs.
If for example the 15" MacBook Air ended up being less than 3% of Mac sales, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple killed it off.
I'm typing this on an iPhone SE 2022 (the last one with a home button). I'm done with iPhone as soon as I am no longer able to use this model. I don't like the new, oversized pieces of junk, and I also like the home button as opposed to the new Face ID/swipe up workflow.
For people that have good visual acuity, the smaller screen is ideal; it's such high resolution that you can fit a lot of things in a small area. For people that turn the font size up to 600, the bigger screen is obviously ideal, but nobody really wants to have to hold something that is bigger if they don't need it for the screen size. That's the market I fit in and Apple has abandoned at market, along with all common sense (re: liquid glass, the recent Apple/Google Gemini deal, etc.).
My prediction is that the age of AI and LLM assistance will make tiny devices the norm. Like those AI pins. Like Siri inside AirPods. Like Meta's AR glasses. But it seems that Apple is losing the race here. They lost their edge when it comes to developing new user interface paradigms.
EDIT: [1] Bloomberg claims 10-15% return rate, which would be massive: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-18/apple-... (for comparison, Galaxus reports 2% as normal for Smartphones and <5% for Meta's Quest)
They are normalizing Apple Vision look so it looks less weird when you switch.
Honestly id say this is a mix of both Jobs and Ive being gone.
Now under the operational maximalist that is Tim Cook, they just revert to old designs every few years and call it revolutionary. See: edges on the iPhone. First, rounded edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, hard edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, rounded edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, hard edges. WOW, revolutionary!
All the while stripping actual functionality out of the devices and removing useful features like headphone jacks. There hasn't been real product innovation at Apple in over a decade.
But I digress.
Everyone says this but forgets that AirPods were released in 2016, Pros in 2020, and they're now the most popular headphones in the world
I don't think most users were returning it because they hated the UI or even the device in the usual sense. (There are certainly issues I could detail, but they don't feel like the core problem).
The core problem is just that it just doesn't really....accomplish anything.
Once you get past treating it like an expensive Google Cardboard ("neat tech demo") - it's very hard to figure out what the point of the thing is. What problem does this actually solve for you/what thing is it actually better to use this for than other existing solutions.
Extremely high price tag with no "killer app"/function that makes anyone who tries it "get it" quickly and want one, is a pretty impossible sell.
(I'm not associated with Fjallraven, I just enjoy this bag and think it makes the functionality of the Apple Pocket look even more ludicrous in comparison.)
Can any woman with a purse or man with a fanny pack chime in and let us know if they've ever thought about putting their phones in their bags before?
> Apple releasing a 'solution' is them admitting it
Apple released a collaboration with a fashion brand.
They’re purses you can wear that also tend to make you look better.
They’re friggin’ great, and even the largest smart phones easily fit their hip pockets.
No more keys poking you through jeans pockets. No more sitting on your wallet. Even room for a smallish paperback book.
We never should have moved away from them. They’re a utility garment.
Hell I own sweaters that are totally comfortable up to about that point, and higher if there’s a breeze. It’s all about construction and fabric.
Marketing 101: Create a customer. Even if phones were small enough that there was no need for such a product, Apple's marketing team would convince you that you needed this product for [reasons].
I think it's an admission that consumers prefer phones that are large enough that they have become inconvenient to carry in a pocket.
Some people have never had pockets big enough to comfortably fit even a smaller smartphone and have been carrying them in bags this whole time.
Yes, and I was about to write "so some Android manufacturer will copy Apple and deliver a phone of the size that was common 10 years ago."
Almost all of them are too large and they weight too much. 200 grams, why?
Instead it's an ugly, phone-only purse.
Bleh.
I've been on Android since day 1 but I'm thinking about switching to iPhone. If they ever made foldable (clamshell style, not book style) phone I would buy it immediately. I just want a small phone.
Yes I could get an Android foldable that already exists but I like to stick with Pixels and they don't have one yet and I'm kinda of done with Pixels. They are crap quality.
Instead it’s an overpriced Apple branded jock strap.
Larger screens are better for advertising
Maybe there are more eyeballs on mobile than on larger form factors
Mobile OS are, with few exceptions, exclusively corporate-controlled. The corporations controlling the OS are enagaged in advertising services
Might make sense for them to try to increase mobile use for more tasks. Perhaps increasing screen size will help
I still have an old iPhone 4. Is it still possible to jailbreak and install some old software for experimentation. I'm not interested in using it to access Apple servers. All computers I own access the web through a TLS forward proxy. I see no advertising
Since it can’t get the lastest OS many apps don’t install, effectively making it the type of dumb phone I always wanted.
It would appear people simply don't want them based on mini 13 and other sales.
But I have kids, and am less willing to compromise on camera quality than I am size.
I’d pay the same price for a smaller phone if the camera specs (and ideally battery life—go ahead and make it a little thicker, they’re too thin anyway) were the same as the larger phones, but they’re not.
I bet those kinds of differences are what do it for a lot of folks. They’re like me and would prefer smaller, all else being equal—but all else is typically not equal, even compared to standard iPhones and not the ultra-high-end ones.
But overall people didn't.
I see a lot of similarities between big cars and big phones: i.e. They're not really well suited to their most-common applications and there is also not much of another choice. The average person seems to just gobble it up without much thought though. Very strange from my perspective.
iPhone 3GS
Galaxy S3
Sony XZ1 Compact
iPhone SE 2016
iPhone SE 2020
iPhone SE 2022
Unihertz Atom
The various Mini models accounted for 3 to 6% of sales, which was still millions of units.
The problem is that everyone believed Tim Cook when he claimed that this is a failure.
It's all relative.
If Google sold five million iPhones Mini it would be considered a smash hit. But because it's Apple it's considered a flop because of the ridiculous sales numbers of their other models.
With this phrasing, does it feel like iPhone owns its user?