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Comment by mmmmmbop | Hacker News Reader

100%. It was so funny to see how for years, everyone on HN was harping on about how well a smaller iPhone would sell. Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.

Basically, try to do the opposite of what HN is saying and you might just create a successful product.

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I kept an iPhone Mini until an App I need for work started consuming so much memory it became unusable on it (iOS would kill it after 15s). Even then, I raised ticket after ticket with support to get them to fix their app – which they did, then slipped again, for months.

Now I own a 17 pro, which feels like a brick in comparison but has 12 GB of RAM instead of 4.

I really miss my mini.

You're just proving the point of this thread by pining for a niche phone that almost no one wanted enough to actually own.

You think this big clunky thing isn’t going to be a niche at $2000?

Suburban wives will have it in droves

I’m buying it just to flex on everyone whose phones cost merely $1000

But have you got the I Am Rich app, the apotheosis of conspicuous consumption?

Without that you are nothing.

Enough people can (and already do) spend that, especially if this replaces an iPad for them.

A huge number of people get smart devices from their employers for free, and $1,200 for a regular iPhone vs. $2,000 for a Duo is a rounding error.

Fun fact: The iPhone Duo‘s outer display is 5.4 inch, just like the iPhone mini. Ok, with different proportions.

And different price tag

You could have bought an Air and been closer to your Mini than the Pro is...

interesting, I didn’t notice it also hat 1TB storage and 12GB RAM. But the size is maginally smaller only. Still, I agree, would probably have been a better fit.

> Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.

And by "nobody", you mean "actually a lot of people, just not as many as the bigger model". It's ok to have a model that meets a less common, but still extant, need in the market. If everyone followed Apple's logic on this, people with very small or very large bodies would have to go naked because companies would go "that size doesn't sell as much, we have to kill it" rather than (as actually happens) charging more per unit to make up for the overhead of lower volumes of sales.

The mini accounted for 3% of sales. Personally I’m a believer, and a buyer, but 3% isn’t a good number.

6 to 7 million units is a good number.

6 to 7 million units at the scale of Apple is not necessarily worth the investment.

I’m willing to bet that the minis made Apple more profit than the AirPods Max and their display business combined.

I see AirPods Maxes daily, I hardly ever see iPhone mini in the wild, anecdotal of course.

My estimate is very much anecdotal as well, but at my office alone there are three iPhone mini users than (used to be four until they switched job), only one AirPods Max user. I think this year I have only seen one other person wearing them. Much harder to see the exact model of phone people use without staring in a bad manner.

I'm sorry, how many units?

"Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air. Supposedly they're gonna refresh the Air next year, we'll see. But even if they don't: we're well into the "keep phones 3 years or more" era of the smart phone. You don't need an exact match for every phone for everybody every year.

But I think you do need some level of consistency to retain customers. Churning models, especially given Apple's otherwise-excellent retention metrics and mechanisms, seems like a self-goal by almost encouraging those buyers to switch after 3 years.

If you bought an iPhone Mini or an Air, but that model is gone at T+3 years, that's a lot more likely to result in you looking to Android, than if you bought an iPhone 13 and want to upgrade to an iPhone 16/17.

The Air wasn't "smaller", it was thinner in some areas and as far as I can tell just a pathfinder for a folding phone

> "Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air.

The iPhone air has a 6.5" display. That's bigger than the base iPhone 17 (6.3") and the iPhone 17e (6.1")

You're probably thinking about the thinness of the phone. iPhone air is 2.4mm thinner than iPhone 17, but I don't think anyone is asking for that, as most people use a case which makes the phone thicker.

Yeah, it's smaller in a different way than the mini was small.

But the thinness isn't actually the appeal. The key thing is that it's a lot lighter. (And yes, a case adds weight as well as thickness. But if you start from a lower baseline, you still end up in a lower place.)

By that logic a supermarket would sell only 33 items.

Trader Joe's limited SKU model. They are also 4x more profitable than a standard supermarket per square foot of store space.

Only if they’re also the manufacturer of all of the products they sell, and they probably would in that case.

It's not ok if it uses resources that could be better spent elsewhere. At 3% share what do you expect them to do?

Apple sold around six million Mini models per year that they were on sale.

It's hard to envisage a boardroom scenario where that's not considered successful, but apparently it exists.

Apple sold ~230M iPhones the year the mini was discontinued. 2% is an unquestionable failure.

-an iPhone mini fan

6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.

OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.

I don't get that mentality. Millions of units, shares many parts with other models, OK margin. This is no reason to kill a product.

For comparison, that's roughly like Ford killing the Bronco Sport, or VW killing the ID.7.

well, VW has cancelled the ID.7 for the US market, and by 2030 will have killing 50% of their models across all brands (according to topgear).

Of course, they never even brought it to the US. It has no chance there, there's barely a market for lowslung station wagons, and close to no market for EV wagons. Always was a niche in the US, while it was always the primary family vehicle in Europe.

And yes, VW is fighting for survival. The things they are killing are the low volume models specific to the Chinese market (because absolutely nobody in China is buying any VWs) and a lot of the variants and overlaps they've accumulated over the years. They'll continue making less than 100k iD.7s, and will be happy to do so (it's modestly profitable).

this is exactly what Steve Jobs did after coming back from Next. Simplifying is very useful, especially in a big corp that want to be differentiated

Except having a 16, 17, 17e, 18 Pro, Air, and Duo, …doesn’t feel particularly simple.

> I don't get that mentality. Millions of units, shares many parts with other models, OK margin. This is no reason to kill a product.

At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.

I say all of this as a fan of the Mini series.

> At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.

All this is true for many other products, specifically cars. Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.

I get it, Apple has much better margins than Ford. And maybe a iPhone 18 Mini would reduce total margin for them. But if they move a couple of million units, it absolutely would make money.

> Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.

The current Bronco Sport generation was introduced in 2021 with minor changes in the ensuing model years. Ford USA sold 134k Bronco Sport in 2025, of 783k SUVs (17.2%) and 2.1M total USA vehicles (6.4%). the Ford E-series truck with 3.2% Ford Truck sales or 2.0% total vehicle sales may be a better comparison. It also is a design introducted in 2021.

phones are more likely mostly new designs in each model year, but we can wait for the teardowns to see.

https://www.best-selling-cars.com/usa/2025-full-year-usa-for...

So much for the long tail I guess. Tough luck if you want anything quirky or unique, society will only manufacture for the mainstream taste.

Society doesn't do anything of the sort. This is just diffuse irrational thinking. People invest their wealth where it will make the most profit for them and if a marginal dollar investment into the regular iPhone brings more profit than one into the iPhone Mini, then the owners and shareholders will ask the CEO why their money is flowing into suboptimal productions. People put their money investing in Apple in the hopes of a good return on that investment. If you want them to produce something that doesn't give them a good return, you'd have to pay to compensate, ie the price would rise but people wouldn't be ready to pay that. Otherwise you're asking people to subsidize for your enjoyment some luxury product as if it was charity. Willingly foregoing profit for the sake of someone else is subsidy or charity.

Long tail works well when the marginal cost is near zero and most of the upfront costs are born by someone else.

It was an lower spec, gimped version to be fair. No one in the market for a new phone on launch day is excited to buy a lower end, worse battery & camera version that's missing multiple features present on the other versions.

They should make 20" iPhone Ultra with latest amd threadripper, dslr camera and a diesel generator to power it on the go

Sure anyone will be very excited to buy it instead of lower end, worse battery & camera iPhone 18 pro

I'm going on ebay to buy old iPhone 13 Minis because I hate giant phones

I'm still waiting for my small android phone https://smallandroidphone.com/ ... written May 2022 :(

https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=LRWaCeOMC5z-dLOg very relevant video from almost 10 years back which was about Oneplus but says the same thing in much greater depth.

> "Basically, try to do the opposite of what HN is saying and you might just create a successful product."

If every instinct HN has is wrong then the opposite would have to be right.

The mini was not mini enough.

Your average HN reader is very very bad at understanding that they are NOT the mass market.

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