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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

> 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.

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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?

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