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Comment by jasonvorhe | Hacker News Reader

Everytime I see Fairphone mentioned whenever there's news about GrapheneOS I'm confused as to why people keep on conflating both when they obviously have very different goals.

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? Not conflating, just we want a phone with both goals ...

The only one conflating anything is yourself.

This is no great conundrum. There is simply a large set overlap. A lot of the people who care about one one, also care about the other.

It's the same as Framework owners and Linux users.

FW is not a linux laptop company. They didn't even barely say the word Linux initially. Their selling point was the repairability and configurability. Only after they had been shipping for a while it became unavoidable that a huge fraction of their users were linux and even freebsd users. Only after some time and only gradually they started providing a little bit of official acknowledgement and support for Linux.

But repair parts and linux os don't have anything to do with each other! zomg why is everyone conflating Framework with a linux laptop company???

Every time Fairphone release new device I check width size. Still waiting for small device.

I wonder if Meta pays phone manufacturers under the table to keep their size large

The overwhelming majority of consumers just prefer larger screens (myself included). People seem to forget that Apple releasing the Mini was them listening to the minority and the sales numbers if it were poor versus the rest of the lineup.

And why would Meta even do that?

- facilitate the infinite scroll

- remind you that the phone is in your pocket, to initiate the infinite scroll

Sorry but this is maximum level conspiratorial thinking. Meta probably has some created some incentive for OEMs to make larger screens by way of people liking content consumption but the idea that they’d be paying for that is ridiculous lol.

I forgive you I guess

I find reading ebooks and long texts like wikipedia a lot more enjoyable on my 6.8" AMOLED panel than on the smaller screens i've had before. You can also doomscroll on smaller screens.

Or maybe the majority of people buying a new damn phone every other week just prefer it'd be a tablet

Just today I giggled and reminisced over the old XDA Developers Nexus 7 posts about LTE and wifi calling hacks…the many few of us worked hard to only rely on a tablet! Ironically, there is now not a second of my day in which id find a folding phone useful or logistically feasible. Alas…13 years too late.

Galaxy Tab 2 had builtin telephony! I’ve used the 10-inch model in my high school and it was great.

> the sales numbers if it were poor versus the rest of the lineup.

For one, the sales were still perfectly respectable. "Versus the rest of the lineup" is doing a ton of work here, because the rest of the iPhone models sell like crazy. For two, it is still bizarre that manufacturers refuse to make small phones even with that in mind. If you wear very small clothes (or very large clothes) that won't sell as many units, your options are limited, you have to pay more, but you aren't forced to go naked. But there's nobody out there doing the equivalent strategy for phones.

Bro the Mini was a flop for Apple, it could barely surpass 5% of all iPhone sales during its run. It would be nonsensical for a publicly traded company to leave money on the table and keep an underperforming product alive when they could put that towards the better performing bigger screen iPhones instead.

For a small company sure it could be considered a success.

I don’t think tech can be compared to the fashion industry. Also that example doesn’t really work. Because you basically have a locked in group who needs the clothes. Just also culturally there’s reasons why these clothing sizes exist. Nobody needs a small phone.

But across the board it makes no sense for any OEM to make small phones when the data all shows that bigger screens sell more. That’s just absorbing an unnecessary opportunity cost.

I think the only real way small phones will reach the market at this point in time is via a private company that’s basically run as a passion project.

Honestly in this case the consumers do share the blame. They begged for the mini and didn’t show up. If apple couldn’t do it it’s unlikely that the android oems could.

A brief search says that iPhone sales in 225 were approximately $200 billion. 5% of that is therefore approximately $10 billion. If you call that a "massive flop", your standards are completely unrealistic. That is a massive success.

And no, the clothes analogy is not flawed. The point is that in other markets, niche tastes and needs get served even if it isn't as cheap or plentiful. It's only the phone manufacturers which refuse to try to get sales from a smaller (but still quite extant) market.

It's all about scale. Yes 10B is a lot for most companies, but for Apple 5% is just a blip on the radar. They probably also did their market research and found that the vast majority of Mini users would buy another iPhone model if they discontinued the Mini. Those facts combined give Apple little incentive to continue the lineup.

Another thing that further clouds the 5% discussion is that some Mini purchasers may have bought it not because of the size, but because it was $100 cheaper while still getting the same SoC. Maybe those buyers were disappointed by the worse battery life, and Apple could choose to axe it or make it the same price as the regular iPhone and it would drop way below 5%.

Thanks you said it better than I would’ve

But you see people talking about the mini almost every time there's a discussion about iPhones (or phones in general). Surely it would have been worth it to Apple to keep the mini alive just to avoid the negative press and pretend they care about their consumers beyond making a profit. But I guess it really isn't possible to do things like that in a publicly traded company.

But you see people talking about the mini almost every time there's a discussion about iPhones (or phones in general).

...in tech forums where people hold strong opinions about tech and the people who have their pet peeves come out. IRL I have rarely heard somebody wanting Apple to bring the Mini back. Or the stereo jack for that matter.

> Bro the Mini was a flop for Apple, it could barely surpass 5% of all iPhone sales during its run.

They were making the SE at the exact same time as the mini, two years in a row, and the mini still got billions in sales. If they want a bigger percent, then do it less often and don't split the demand. It's been four and a half years since they did either mini or SE. People would buy plenty.

> leave money on the table

> opportunity cost

If it cost them that much to have extra models, they wouldn't have five iphone 16 variants that are all just different enough to need five internal layouts. And four 17 variants plus the air.

Don’t know what else to say here I guess you and the others here know more than Tim Cook does.

That's a weird statement. Do you think knowing the most about something inevitably leads you to a specific decision? It doesn't.

And this isn't something that would affect their revenue particularly much. So while it's possible I've missed an important factor, even if I'm 100% right it could make sense for most people to say "do the option that leads to more happy customers, while still making boatloads of money", while a CEO says "we have enough happy customers, go for the extra sliver of money". Or an extra payment from Meta or whatever, I wasn't really talking about that idea, I was just arguing against their abandonment of small phones. The point is, don't use CEOs to guide your intuition of what decisions are best.

I would argue that it’s weird to expect that Apple should maintain a product that sells less when people have consistently shown that they will buy the better performing product anyway instead of not buying at all.

Like this isn’t a hypothetical, Apple literally released the Mini and it was the worst performing item in their iPhone lineup by far. If it was profitable enough, Cook would’ve kept it.

Like ultimately I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re trying to say, but like this:

> “do the option that leads to more happy customers, while still making boatloads of money", while a CEO says "we have enough happy customers, go for the extra sliver of money".

The consumers do take some blame here cause they did take the Mini away and people just ended up buying the other more expensive iPhones instead of not buying one at all. Why would Apple do anything different in that case?

The obsession with the Mini is something that is only really popular within an online bubble and isn’t reflective of real life trends, people here are being extremely disconnected from the public with this (and this is coming from someone who wants Apple to add a desktop mode to iOS). The only time Apple seems to maintain lagging product lines are with things like the Air which seemed to essentially be an R&D product for the Duo.

Customers shouldn't have to boycott to convince companies to make a good product. Companies should value millions of happier customers over a negligible change in product design cost.

Also do you think people wouldn't buy just about as many iphones if they killed a middle model? That's not by itself a good reason to kill a model or they wouldn't have as many as they do. Like, I'm sure pro and plus each get tons of sales but you could cut one with nobody being upset and redirect that budget to mini.

The follow-up strategy of “smaller width and height didn’t work, let’s try thickness next” reportedly not going any better.

I really think COVID shutdowns did the mini in. People couldn’t go to the store and try holding a phone where they could use it comfortably one-handed again. And then by the time they could, Apple axed it.

I don't believe this at all. If people yearned for smaller phones, they would have gotten it despite COVID. My wife and I both had a Mini and I remember going to the local electronics store (most of the summer there were no closures) and the iPhone islands were well-visited, but simply nobody was looking at the Minis.

I think people get the wrong estimation about the size of the contingent that want small phones. It is a vocal minority, similar to people ranting every time about headphone jacks. Most people do not care about these things. If they want to hook a wired headphone, they'll get a 10 Euro dongle and most people use Bluetooth. My wife uses a wired headphone for listening audio books at night and I never heard her complain about the stereo jack going away.

I bought the mini and I bought the Air so it worked on me. I think it’s crazy that Apple sold millions of devices and that’s not enough of a market. We should make devices few people use, not everything needs to be mass market, to me that’s enshittification and greed.

50% of the population has hands that are too small to operate a typical phone with one hand. It's ridiculous that there is nothing for such a huge number of people.

Most people take what they're given. Whatever is on the shelf or the front page, that's what they buy. Manufacturers make bigger screens because it's impressive and good for delivering content and provides room for cpu & battery, and most people just go along with it. They think about products the same as the weather. Whatever is, is just what is, like it's just part of the world, not something that people made and people can make differently. If there is choice available, they buy what they were told to want.

Sales numbers are not a strong argument in an environment like that. Countless things sell in huge numbers without anyone actually liking the product or service, even when there isn't a hard monopoly like your cable/internet.

There is a whole other big perverting factor too, which is that for many years now a phone is many people's only computing device. They are preferring phones that are larger that they'd really like for a phone, because they can only have one, and need it to do every job that you and I use a laptop for.

Honestly, maybe it's a market specific thing, but from having worked for a carrier, the overwhelming majority of consumers just dont know anything about any phone but the brand. They'll come in store looking for "an iPhone" or "a Galaxy", and the employee will usually push them towards whichever phone has the best deal (and very often, incentives to be sold), which rarely happens to be these alternative models like the Mini. The minority who does buy their phones outright or know what they want does tend to gravitate towards larger phones, but the rest typically just buys the standard, base model.

Majority that I know complains all over about poor durability, uncomfortable wearing in pockets and difficult to operate phone by one hand.

Lack of jack port and microSD card is next.

I believe Fairphone relies on popular off-the-shelf parts. If that stays consistent, the Fairphone will never be small. Save for a change in business model (e.g. pay more for smaller phone)

Smaller phone means smaller battery, which is not what majority consumers wants. However, there is a group of people that dont need power for feeding 147 apps on background.

Both are for for different niches, but their intersection is relatively big.

I agree they are separate. What annoys me is that every time FairPhone has news, there are obligatory FUD comments about how people should stay away from FairPhone because they don't support Graphene.

I think it's obvious that the target audience has a huge overlap...

HN readers aren't a huge demographic.

A huge overlap in two groups would obviously be at most 100% of the smaller group.

Is there a huge demographic for grapheneOS and/or fairphone? Let alone one that doesn't overlap with the archetypes that post here?

Poster said huge overlap, not huge audience:)

But I agree with the overlap. I use e/OS partly because I can run it on a Fairphone. I'd love to try Graphene.

I wouldn’t say obvious, no. It’s what I observe, yes. But I have some doubt about my observations scaling up to a valid statistics. Lots of folks out there are not techies yet do care about the environment. I can’t see them caring much about grapheneOS, but maybe I’m wrong.

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