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Comment by CoolestBeans | Hacker News Reader

Because for a lot (most?) people their iPhone is their primary and only personal computer. I also want a smaller phone. I bet Apple designers would love to sell you a smaller phone. They've certainly tried with my beloved and retired iPhone mini and the same size but thinner iPhone air. But the market keeps rejecting it because it's not just a portable companion to some other computer, it is the computer. If you're doing all your work on it then you need more real estate. Aging populations across the globe probably need more screen real estate also for bigger text.

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My need for this new iPhone is driven by my declining vision. Twenty years ago, I had no problem with my first iPhone. Five years ago, I started to get acquainted with some of the visual accommodation measures in iOS. I do still use my (physically larger than I would like) iPhone 16 Pro Max, which I bought for the biggest screen. I'd love to do my stuff on my laptop or desktop, but smartphones are de facto The Computer these days. So I'll probably buy an iPhone Duo after I sell a kidney for financing. All that said, today's Apple presentation left me gobsmacked at the technology they've developed. I was born before civilian jet transports were in service, with all that implies for a long personal view of tech dev. The tech feels to me like a cut&paste from 2076.

And why should we all have to buy big ass phones because your vision is declining? Nobody argued big phones shouldn't exist, it's just small phones currently don't.

They confused "smaller" with "budget" though, if the good camera was available in the smaller size I would have bought it.

Same, I look longingly at the Samsung Flip and I'd buy one in a heartbeat if only it had the camera system from the Ultra. I'll even pay the Ultra price+extra for the foldable function.

But right now it's in a space where you're paying extra for the fact that it's a foldable, but it feels....budget in its specs? Like...how does that work?

Camera blocks take internal volume. Smaller phones have less internal volume to spend - while still having to pack all the non-negotiables like the modem and the SoC into it. Something's got to give. And no one want that something to be the battery life going down to 6 hours.

Volume constraints are bad enough for "normal" models. "Minis" have it way worse.

The iPhone Air's SOC demonstrates that they could compact the actual SOC portion substantially. Add a bit of thickness back for the battery, and they could have a Mini with space for a decent camera and decent battery life. Remove the camera bump by making it a uniform thickness and the battery life would be fine.

But we already know that they can make a smaller iPhone with everything.

The iPhone 6 was a decade ago and was smaller in all dimensions than an iPhone 17 and had a perfectly acceptable battery life. Since then, they have removed headphone jacks and buttons, batteries have gotten more power dense, chips have gotten more efficient, etc.

Reading this on my 6s, and it’s still great.

It’s the camera and Face ID. The camera on the iPhone 6 is nowhere near as capable current cameras. Even the much improved camera on the last iPhone SE was considered a huge issue by most people. Cameras are too important to go back to something that thin. The current Air is leaps and bounds better in every way to the iPhone 6 but it doesn’t sell. Why? The battery life and camera. Imagine shrinking the iPhone Air and having even less battery life. Critics would howl and even fewer people would buy it.

Smaller phones can’t fit as much stuff in them as larger phones. Shrink the phone and something has to give. People in the aggregate do not want to make those compromises unless the price is noticeably less. But then it can’t have any of the premium features that are expected from Apple. Small phones are compromises that don’t pay off for Apple.

We’ve come close to doubling battery capacity per volume in that time.

The battery was the single largest module by a long shot in an iPhone 6, and now you can get the same capacity in a much smaller volume. We’ve also lost other bulky items like the home button and headphone jack.

The camera on the current gen has its own expanded volume area of the case, so I don’t buy that they couldn’t just use the same hump they use on literally all of their phones. Sure Face ID is new, but I’ve seen the size of that module, and it is only slightly larger than the selfie camera from back then that it replaced.

They used to be able to. I don't think they can anymore. The iPhone 6 was 3 years after Jobs died. Apple's corporate/engineering culture has had 12 additional years to rot since then. If the Scott Forstall situation, Chris Lattner situation, etc, tells you anything, it's that Apple cannot make basic, common-sense tradeoffs anymore. All they can do is copy whatever the wider industry is doing.

All of the excuses people are coming up with in these comments are just that: excuses. Look at the sibling comment by musictubes, for example. Citing these ethereal "critics" and "most people" when in reality Walt Mossberg was the only critic whose opinion mattered.

Occam's Razor: The Innovator's Dilemma. It's a rotting, bloated megacorp with too much to lose, that doesn't take risks, and can't change direction. The direction it's in is "bigger phones", for whatever reason. So we're gonna keep getting bigger phones. It's that simple.

> They confused "smaller" with "budget" though

Apple is in the luxury business.

I miss the time when smaller was considered more advanced

The iPhone Air is nearly 20% larger than the mini

As my eyesight is getting worse I do end up appreciating bigger phones. Even though I miss how smaller phones felt in my hand, it's just hard to see small text on it and that's even though I don't use my phone all that much since I have a kindle for reading and a computer for everything else.

Like many other HNers, I don't quite understand the appeal of not having their own computer, or even a VPS setup they can remote info for more structured work. But then I remember the famous Dropbox comment where one user had qualms, and perhaps looking outside our bubble can be worth it.

Apparently a lot of people don't even own a proper computer nowadays, be it a PC or a laptop, it's all just phones/tablets. In fact I know a university professor teaching CS and he told me that obviously not everyone, but a growing population of students starts the CS course without knowing how to use a mouse. They all have laptops, they know how to use a keyboard and a touchpad, but unless they are gamers they probably have never used a mouse.

I taught a basic html course for elementary kids 5 years ago.

The first thing I had to teach was files folders and desktops. For many of them, Chrome was synonymous with computer.

I didn’t expect anyone to know DOS like I did at that age, but was a little shocked that “Save your file to the desktop” was gibberish to them

I'm in the market for one of those foldy phones.

My use case is that I have terminals on various servers that I'd like to access when I'm travelling, and I'm often just doing short trips without my laptop. It's often inconvenient to schlep a bag with me just so I can use it on the train, so it's nice to be able to bring a phone that has enough screen for the terminal to not be tiny.

If you went back in time to 2006 and showed a cellular Apple Watch and an iPhone (with no apps for either) side by side I think a lot of people would assume the former would be the ubiquitous consumer product and the latter would be a niche product for wealthy executives.

The cellular Apple Watch would be a great cell phone if all you want is to use your phone as a phone + iPod. But it’s hamstrung by its software and being forced to be anchored to an iPhone to be activated just makes it unsuitable as a primary device. We’d probably all be healthier as a society if we didn’t have the black rectangle of doom in our pockets all the time.

I’d love a cellular Apple Watch that’s elongated enough to have a headphone jack (lol) and all day battery life. It’d be fine even if it was meant to stay in my pocket instead of on the wrist.

I really don't think this is just for people who don't have personal computers. I do think this is for people who don't want to carry additional separate devices with them in order to access the bigger-screen experiences. There are a couple gimmicks based on the fold as well.

I for one would love to have my phone turn into a tablet while I'm charging my car. Saves me from having to bring the iPad separately, which can't fit in my pocket. Would eliminate a step from that routine.

Also would love to always have that capability on me in the case where I couldn't have foreseen a need for the bigger screen. Being randomly out with friends and able to spontaneously just show them something in a way they can actually see would be nice.

And why does it need to be wider when folded for that? The competition showed that a narrow folding phone works quite well if you want to have access to a bigger screen without a different device

Apple explained during the event why the square aspect ratio was not for them, but basically it doesn't conform to content well. You supposedly get less black bars with this approach.

Thanks, I will check

I'm honestly curious about the "market keeps rejecting it" part. Yes, they sold far fewer units than the other models....but did they really not make money? I have made variations on this comment many many times. I completely buy that the opinions about phone form factor and features expressed on HN/reddit/online, and my own idiosyncratic preferences probably even more so, represent somewhat of a niche, and that your median phone consumer isn't interested in what we/I want. But the phone market seems like it's so large that it should be able to support a lot of niches! A tenth of a percent of the total market (~1,300 million in 2023 according to [0], 0.1% of which would be 1.3 million phones) should be totally viable as a business! I get that, maybe for Apple there is opportunity cost. Having more product lines adds overhead, and if the profit margin on those extra product lines isn't enough higher than the main lines to justify that overhead, they kill it. But why doesn't some smaller company (so yes, this mostly applies to Android) try to steal that fractional market share? I simply don't understand why it doesn't work to the point that now, when the market is so much larger than it was in the past, we have so much less hardware diversity.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

> should be able to support a lot of niches

Apple's whole thing is that they don't do niches. Support a select few versions of select few products very very well is the whole MO

Why does the Vision Pro exist then? What is that if not a niche? What about the iPad Mini or for that matter the Mac Mini, which if not for the recent AI craze would have been cut in the next few years for sure.

Apple can absolutely do niche products. Just not this one I guess.

The Vision Pro was meant for early adopters of a new mainstream thing. (Yes, I also thought this would fail.)

The Mac Mini is an entry level product I see quite lot of people pick up. How is it niche?

>>The Mac Mini is an entry level product I see quite lot of people pick up. How is it niche?

It's a stationary computer that requires a standalone monitor, keyboard and mouse/touchpad. People just buy a laptop instead, a dedicated "computer" space at home is increasingly a thing of the past. And especially now if you can get the Neo for very similar money I have no idea why you'd buy the mini if your entire computer use is Facebook and maybe some word editing from time to time.

Yeah and the production numbers from the start seemed to indicate that Apple knew it wouldn't be extremely popular.

FWIW, I bought one knowing this, and have zero regrets. Amazing hardware, it's the best personal display on the market. I use it for the majority of my movie watching.

They are beachhead products, aren't they? Plant your flag in case it gets big.

Phones got big.

The Vision Pro (and the folding iPhone Duo) involve developing a lot of underlying technologies that will be useful in currently popular or potential future product lines, even if the market they serve themselves is niche.

> Why does the Vision Pro exist then?

They are thinking that VR headsets will not be niche products in the future

The apple watch was very niche when it came out as well, but their intention was absolutely to make a major product line

Curious decision to make a phone for the 2% of foldable users, then.

> but did they really not make money?

I'm sure they made money. But that's not the right question to ask, in my opinion. The right question is did they make as much or more than their internal rate of return (IRR)? Perhaps the smaller iPhones (I had one) do not so they cut the product line. Or maybe they over-purchased some components and figured they could make a phone or two out of them.

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