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Comment by n2d4 | Hacker News Reader

If each iPhone model served only 3% of total iPhone users like the iPhone mini did, you'd end up with 33 iPhone models

I don't get this logic. Putting aside that to get 33 different models you would come up with 5-6 different form factors, each of them on a distinct point in the tradeoff scale, why do you think that something is only worth doing if it can be put on an uniform supply-demand curve?

What percent of the iPhone sales do you think it took to pay off the significant engineering and factory/tooling setup costs? I bet it's more than 3%.

How much of those costs are already sunk regardless of the split in your product line?

Apple made nearly $190 billion last year selling just iPhones.

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.

Revenue is not profit!!! A good chunk of that is the cost of parts!

Apple's R&D expenses were $34B for 2025.

...you do know that Apple produces its own silicon, and probably uses about an entire TSMC fab's worth of capacity? In the end, the money to build that fab is coming from Apple.

Apple isn't making average consumer products with average contract manufacturers.

If Apple didn't run such a closed ecosystem, other hardware vendors would step in and be happy to sell a form factor that 3% of the market uses.

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.

Apple developed iMessage to work around the problems with SMS and MMS, as well as decrease load on carrier networks. There is no closed ecosystem, you can still receive messages and videos from iPhone users, just at the quality your hardware and software can support.

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.

Apple's strategy to use iMessage for lock in is public record.[1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

Yes because Google offered nothing of value in return. Like in my example, nothing stops Toyota from offering enough money to license BMW's laser headlights.

It's a poor example because laser headlights don't have network effects.

Does Apple allow non-Apple devices to send and receive messages from the iMessage network? Under any conditions?

> Rather than work with Apple on bringing an iMessage app to Android or licensing it

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.

Google tried the same thing Apple did long before RCS when it made Hangouts the default SMS app for Android. Conversations could be upgraded from SMS to Google's internet-based chat protocol if the other person had an account; it was even available for iPhones, but it couldn't be an SMS client.

Carriers didn't like it and Google caved.

Lets be honest, Hangouts (which of the three versions) was a crappy chat app that they wanted to boost the usage of. It wasn't intended to be a functional SMS replacement.

As a former regular user, I don't remember it being notably worse than any of the other options. It was definitely preferable to SMS.

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.

> just at the quality your hardware and software can support.

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.

> If Apple didn't run such a closed ecosystem, other hardware vendors would step in and be happy to sell a form factor that 3% of the market uses.

There aren't any decent small (less than 6") Android phones either.

There is a wide variety of form factors available in the android ecosystem. Whether or not they fit your definition of "decent" just depends on how much you prioritize size:

https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip7/

https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max

I don't really count foldables but I hadn't seen the Jelly Max. I stand corrected, looks like a great phone.

Foldables get this job done well. My (OG) Pixel Fold is a great size & aspect ratio while folded, easy to use one-handed, but has a giant screen when you open it up. The newer Pixel Folds and the other foldables on the market have all grown the screen vertically but they're still more compact than most flagships.

I wouldn't. I personally think iOS kind of sucks, and I only keep using it because Android developers don't support devices long enough for me. Third party developers would be as much a mess as they are in the Android world and at that point I'd rather have a phone with a good OS.

> I can't get a decent quality video texted to me.

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.

3% was the iPhone 13 mini? It sold the least of the 4 relatively small phones Apple introduced in under 18 months.

How many Android phone models exist?

On the Samsung US store alone, currently 12 models (not counting renewed phones)

Not to mention the SE (variant of the 4 I think?) was way more popular. Dismissing the whole concept just because one implementation at one time was a relative flop (and as you point out, that's still a lot of sales).

Also, they're happy to have Pro and non-Pro SKUs etc., just averse to smaller for reason.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to launch the iPhone mini during Covid, offer it 2 years, and say no one wants them.

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.

I bet the iphone mini still outsold several macbook skus

Good.

Good, in some ways. But do people want to pay higher prices for these iPhones to cover the costs that have to be amortized over a lower volume of devices?

I highly doubt it.

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