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?