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.
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 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.