So, by all accounts, the iPhone mini has been an extremely slow seller.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
Why would that form factor succeed in the Android space?
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I see these meme on tech sites all the time: “oh phones are too big I just want something simple”. That is a valid sentiment that I think is shared by basically no average consumer. For a lot of people, phones are their primary computing devices, so a big screen is nice there. Bigger phones allow for more battery capacity. Aging populations like them because you can use screen zoom features to really blow up that text size without making the effective viewport too small.
And…people just like big stuff. I know that’s simplistic and a little condescending, but then look at SUV and truck sales.
Whereas, fitting a top-line Snapdragon into a small phone is a challenge. There’s a reason why top-tier phones have copper heatpipes, vapor chambers, and so on. All things no iPhone has or needs.
You could still do a small Android phone, but you might have to abandon the idea of including a Snapdragon 8.
* https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/21/cirp-iphone-13-best-selling-l...
I think you can make a profitable niche selling smaller phones. Most people don't want a 12" laptop either as they consider it too small, but some people do and various companies still make a profit designing and selling them. I don't quite understand why it's so different for phones.
I'm inclined to think that applies more to Americans than people generally. Europeans and Australians can be quite content with smaller vehicles, smaller properties, and quite frankly smaller lifestyles.
People with smaller hands want to be able to operate the phone fully with one hand.
I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews and modern American perception. Why is being able to buy niche products somehow not a worthy thing to be desired?
My way of dealing with it is two phones. Besides my smartphone, I still use my more than ten-year-old Nokia when I do not want to take the big smartphone with me. Of course, it only has phone, SMS and a clock. But I usually do not need anything else when I go for a walk or meet up with friends. I just want to be reachable in case there is a problem.
Its old battry still lasts quite a long time, and I have it switched off most of the time anyway. So I can go 7+ days without recharging.
5% of 200,000,000 is 10,000,000.
5% can be a huge number, or a tiny number, depending on what it's 5% of.
I switched from Android to Apple specifically for the iPhone mini, and if they killed it, I would switch to the smallest phone on the market.
Because it's not Apple selling them and Android smartphone manufacturers operate with much lower margins.
Take Motorola for example, which isn't even one of the 10 largest smartphone manufacturers. They released ~30 different smartphone models in the past year alone, so they apparently make money, even if they don't sell millions of units per model.
Yet none of the models released in the past year has a height shorter than 159mm or a weight lighter than 155g.
I believe the reason why no smartphone manufacturer offers small phones anymore is not because they want to, but rather because there is some non-obvious reason why they can't. My personal theory is because it's difficult to get proper display panels for smaller phones nowadays. The fabs producing the panels switched to larger sizes due to demand and efficiency, which resulted in no smaller panels with up-to-date specs (high-refresh rate, HDR, low power consumption, ...) to be available. I'd appreciate if somebody could proof me wrong, as that'd be quite a bummer otherwise.
- people tend to correlate size and price, and by default the correlation is direct (for some things it's inverse), so at similar capabilities (and thus prices) consumers will tend to go with the larger version
- for a smartphone specifically, there's a direct relationship between battery size and device size, and battery life is a really valuable convenience
The iPhone 13 mini has a 2400 mAh battery, the 13 has 3200. 33% more battery capacity is a lot, and at 2400mAh I don't think the mini doesn't survive an entire day of relatively heavy use without a charge.
Well, it's up against the iPhone SE, which has the same size, same weight and the same processor. [1]
[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone13m...
Clearly, this whole 'sedan' concept is a failed form factor, every manufacturer should only make pickup trucks. Why shoot for less than the #1 market spot?
As the largest consumer of energy is the display of a smartphone, you don't need the same battery size to get the same runtime in a smaller phone. Also by increasing the depth of the smartphone by just 1-2 millimeters you can offset the smaller area available for the battery.
I don't use iPhones so don't really know very much, but my instinct is that it falls into this bundling fallacy about product characteristics (there might be another term for it; I don't know). It goes something like this:
Companies X, Y, and Z all market products with unusual characteristic A. But there's all sorts of other things about it that make it undesirable or less desirable, so the consumer is faced with trade-offs. In the context of choosing between desirable characteristic A, but also undesirable characteristics B and C, they choose another product because the cost of B and C is greater than the benefit of A.
But then the companies all conclude "no one wants A" because they half-assed the product, not realizing that it wasn't A that was the problem, it was the B and C they released it with.
I see this all the time. With clothing for example, they'll make a garment out of really nice material A, but then release it with this weird design that doesn't really appeal to anyone except a stereotype. With tech I've noticed that they don't really make it available at all sometimes. So there might be product X, but you can't really find it anywhere. With a phone, hypothetically, it might be "my phone broke this morning and I need one ASAP and all the brick and mortar shops around me only carry these specific things and not the iPhone mini."
Anyway, I don't know the iPhone mini from anything, but the bundling fallacy is so prevalent in these situations I'm skeptical. I know I faced this a bit when buying my last Android phone: the next smaller down, which I preferred based on size, and which wasn't even "small", wasn't that much smaller but also had other downsides.
Sometimes I almost feel like companies sometimes intentionally sabotage experimental products just not to deal with the headache of supporting more options in their supply chain.
Also, sometimes there are things that don't sell to a huge market, but do sell, and have a very devoted following. Smaller phones might be like that. In my experience sometimes these "devoted markets" sometimes expand into larger ones later (for example, everyone realizes 3 years from now they can't fit their phones in their pockets anymore and that it doesn't matter if they have a nice big phone to move their fingers around on if they have no place to put it).
Good luck with your switch.
Was a hard decision, because my Android was rooted with LineageOS, was able to block ads and all kinds of nice things.
But ultimately, it just pissed me off too much to carry around a bulky phone (Fairphone 3).
Fairly happy with the 12 mini, just don't like the Apple ecosystem that much.
I'm from Europe, living in bigger European city, and I have a small car (3-door RAV4). I bought it so I can drive and park easily in the city and go up hills and mountains when I leave the city once a month.
And if I'm honest, that is the best car I could afford. I see lots of rich people with bigger and bigger SUVs cruising in the city in Germany: G wagons, BMWs, Audis, Volkswagen Touaregs, Porsche Cayennes everywhere.
I went on a road trip in the US, rented an SUV that would be huge and impractical here, but there, it actually felt small. The roads were wide, traffic wasn't bad, parking was easy. I loved it.
If I lived in the countryside in Europe where I need to transport stuff for my ranch/farm (and if I could afford it), I'd definitely consider buying a pickup truck.
The same goes for properties. The reason why I lived in a 30sqm apartment with my wife was that is all I could afford while living in the city, close to good job opportunities. I would have been obviously happier if I could have a 300sqm house.
0: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/ford-exec-says-this-is-why-it-s...
Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
It demonstrates the difference between HN and the real world.
On HN, if you can't serve a billion people, your product is niche. In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products.
It's why so many people on HN don't understand Panic, or its PlayDate. They don't understand artisan anything. They've forgotten the whole hipster movement, which still exists in pockets of the world. They can't grok that there are companies that have been in business for hundreds of years making products one at a time — by hand.
"X doesn't scale" is HN for "I know nothing about how the world works."
Let's assume very few people are switching ecosystems at this point based on form factor. That would mean Apple made a new product to cannibalize 5% of their existing market. No similar product exists in the android ecosystem. It seems reasonable that an android phone maker could get similar market share but have these sales come from a combination of their existing sales and competitors sales.
Then why is Apple dropping it ?
The battery capacity grows much faster than the display energy consumption, and it's not even a fight: at otherwise equivalent hardware, the larger phone has always had better battery life than the smaller one in every iPhone generation.
The minis both suffered significant criticism due to battery life issues, compared to their larger sibling.
> Also by increasing the depth of the smartphone by just 1-2 millimeters you can offset the smaller area available for the battery.
You can do the same on both smaller and larger form factors so that's not an advantage of the SFF phones.
And much to my dismay Apple remains very much not a fan of that: after having increased the phone depth to long-forgotten heights of 8.3mm (a chonk not seen since the 4S's 9.3), it's been reduced back down to 7.65 in the 13 (up a hair from the 12's 7.4). I fear an eventual return to the dark days of the 6S/7 and their 7.1mm you could shave with (but couldn't pick your phone off of the table for lack of ability to grip the thing without using your fingernails to pry it off).
same way the universe is perfectly made for us because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here, ya'know ?
- Sent from my iPhone 13 mini
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Apple-iPhone-12-mini,...
I had the previous SE from years back and it's still my preferred size, the current mini is significantly bigger than it.
As an aside, I had to switch to the 12 mini as the old SE started becoming unusable due to its age. I did switch to a Pixel 4a temporarily but that was too big for what I wanted and traded it in as soon as I could.
I have a plethora of screens available to me, including a PC as my primary computing device; but when I'm on the go I need a _larger_ screen not a smaller one.
This narrative is cited a lot, and fueled rumors that Apple would kill the mini for iPhone 13. They didn't. So clearly it's profitable enough for them even though it's a comparatively low-volume product.
I think the issue with small form factor on Android is whether too many apps will have broken UI on such a small screen. Software support has been the issue with other innovative android phones, such as the LG Wing and even the original Samsung Fold.
I think sales are probably limited significantly by the marketing plan of both Apple and the carriers that sell phones - I'm sure that the larger phones are more profitable.
My wife's solution to iPhones being too big was to upgrade all of her handbags and to buy flouncy dresses with pockets.
Wanna trade families? Please?
I think there is also some competition with the iPhone SE. Even though the Mini is not intended to be a budget phone, it is 100 Euro cheaper than the non-mini. So, I can imagine a chunk of people would buy it for its lower price if the iPhone SE didn't exist. Even more if you consider that the Mini actually has a larger screen than the SE.
I'd love to get my wife a bigger car, so she wouldn't be scared of driving in the snow, but just buying it would be three times the price (or more) compared to the small car she's currently driving.
Also curious where you're from that you never heard of this.
For one - most of the iPhone Mini sale is because of 'Halo effect', die hard fans who anyway would have bought an iPhone, bought the mini version. An Android phone maker will not have that brand pull or halo effect to establish a new category, so it would be no where near that 10M number.
Second, iPhone or Mac devices are known for hardware and software integration. That translates among other things to good battery life (similar to RAM. Apple never talks about RAM).
iPhone Mini has been weak in battery department [1], one of the factor in its low sale as compared to bigger device. A Mini Android device will have mini batteries, that means it will have no chance in h* to last through the day - the minimum requirement in this day and age.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/20/apple-iph....
Watching German politics more closely during those years, I have seen that choices between: is better for car owners, is better for something else, gets decided in favor of is better for car owners 90% of the times. Heck, even some members of the Green Party are very cozy with the car industry (e.g. Kretschmann).
So make it 3mm thicker?
1: https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/2022/01/...
But rarely something as expensive to create as a smart phone.
SE is clearly a 'budget' (at least for apple) phone. Some people really want a small phone that isn't.
The newest SE is substantially larger and worse.
I love my mini, but it’s also clear this is the last one.
It is a bit unusual outside of the Netherlands and Denmark.
I tried to cycle to work 8km or so and it was fine until I had to cross a slope. And since this slope was etched by the nearby river, it went through the whole city, so there wasn't any way around it.
Took all the fun out of it honestly, especially during heatwaves.
The iphone 13 is 7.65mm. The Unihertz Jelly is 16.5.
Apple hasn’t made a phone thicker than 10mm since the 3GS, and that was 12.3 (up from the original 2G’s 11.6 because of the rounded plastic back vs flat aluminum).
I'd love for this to happen, signed the petition, and will hope for the best, but I think even if there would be a decent market for this the big players don't care to make that bet.
For example: I upgrade my phone every two years or so, so long as I like the new phones. If I don’t like the new phones, I wait as long as possible.
People that like smaller phones won’t necessarily leave the iPhone if they kill the Mini - they will just keep their current phones for as long as possible. And that can indeed hurt sales, even if Apple doesn’t lose market share.
Wow, angry much? I suggest contacting your local mental health crisis hotline before you turn your internet rage into something people actually care about. In the United States, just dial 988.
Failing that, try getting a sense of humor. They're nice.
If anything, mobile phone market is exceedingly horrible because of consolidation into a single product with not much choice.
These days I find myself leaving my phone more and more, only taking it when I probably need a camera.
I really really want a Pro Mini :(
Even if it was there, that doesn't mean the phone would be small. People who want small phones aren't necessarily wealthy, so they would only be going after the market for the intersection of 'wealthy + want small phone'... which might be a very small market and not worth pursuing.
The iPhone 5 was the perfect size, and I miss that form factor. But The camera is what sells me the device.
Except companies like Samsung throw out dozens of new models per year, which all differentiate only marginally, and none of them gets a SFF while maintaining higher quality of features (i.e. no cheap phone with 720 display and such).
Sometimes they get it right, like with the Samsung A40 from 2019, only to not pursue the sales for a true successor. Heck, me and a lot of my friends and relatives bought an A40 because of its size and fantastic display.
https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-sch-w2013-jackie-ch...
And in 2018, One Plus had a $3,000 phone:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/this-3000-oneplus-6-is-the-...
I feel like my plan right now is to hope with the iPhone 14 launch, the 13 mini will continue to be sold with a price drop, and then I'll upgrade my 12 mini to the 13 mini and get the battery improvement. I love the size of this phone and hope I'm never forced back to the gigantic "normal-sized" phones that we've gotten stuck with the past decade.
Unless they used something akin to a laptop webcam, there simply isn’t enough space for a third camera.
Foldables seem like a better compromise here, and hopefully more like the zflip/razr get in this $700-800 range with stock android, good cameras, and decent battery life. The zflip 3 has been sold for $800, just give me stock android and I'd be a buyer. I'd be ok with a slightly slower processor if it means a better battery life, but within 10-20% of a flagship. Between a $450 6.1 inch Pixel 6a, or a $700-800 folding phone, it's going to be kind of tough to compete with a smaller slab phone if it's going to have to make more compromises to stay small.
I'd love a Nexus 4 sized phone again, but these aren't bad options, if you want small, go folding, or get a 6a. I'm sure the mini is a good option if you're ok with iOS.
We need a ruling like from back in the Bell System era where you are allowed to bring customer equipment to the network without the network owner permission.
(Not sure how good this example is, but anyway - flagship doesn't have to be physically giant.)
We understand just fine. It's not difficult to comprehend the appeal of customized, handmade work. The appeal is clear.
It's just that it's completely irrelevant in the context of this thread. Because you can't design and make smartphones by hand, one at a time. So what are you even talking about?
Apple plans pretty far ahead and moves slowly. When a phone goes on sale (like the iPhone 12 mini) the successor is already pretty far along in the pipeline, and I think it's unlikely they would cancel the successor based on a few weeks of sales data. They would at least wait until after christmas, at which point the 13 mini was probably already almost ready, at which point it probably doesn't make sense to cancel it anymore.
So if Apple nixes a product because it lacks demand, I would expect that to be after two years of sales. The decision might have been made already after the first year of iPhone 12 mini, but the decision would not affect the iPhone 13 lineup, only the iPhone 14 lineup.
You could see this slow product cycle when Apple failed to jump on the big phone trend. When the iPhone 5 came out, they underestimated the market for huge phones, and it took them two years to course correct and jump on the phablet bandwagon with the 6/6+. (And they had a phantastic quarter when they did since everyone has been waiting for a big iPhone for two years)
Citation needed? A lot of people love to jump to the conclusion that nobody wants small phones. My personal experience does not align with that conclusion. I'm happy to accept this conclusion if you have some kind of evidence for it, but the linked article just discusses battery life, which was greatly improved in the iPhone 13 Mini anyway.
I tried an iPhone 6S for a year before I got this phone. Couldn't stand the size. The current SE is the same size as the 6S. I'm basically stuck at a dead-end of phone size.
The current SE is not compact by historical standards. I'm not saying all phones need to be smaller, I just want one decent option.
Who would buy a sedan any more when you're screwed over this way? With phones and vehicles, we're stuck in this prisoner's dilemma situation where larger sizes lead to less desirability of small sizes, and the cycle repeats over and over again.
Same thing happens with public transit/car usage -- as more people use cars, public transit thins out, deals with more traffic on the roads, and becomes scarier because there are fewer "normal" people on public transit to make you feel safe from crime.
Curious if there's an research on how to escape from this kind of death spiral -- my suspicion is that the only real way out is regulation, because otherwise there's no way to overcome the self-reinforcing impact of these decisions.
As far as I am concerned, the mini IS the flagship. I would never even consider buying one of the larger models, as I consider them to be subpar, unpleasant devices to carry and to use. I'd choose to carry no phone over having to carry a full-sized phone, they have become too large to be considered conveniently portable.
For me, the perfect smart phone would be the same size and shape as a credit card, edge-to-edge screen on all sides, and approximately 3mm thick. And it would run iOS of course.
might have been true for mini 12, but mini 13 has amazing battery life, certainly nothing like 2020 SE which is truly abysmal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagship#Flagship_as_metaphor
Now, whether an iPhone Mini fits into that metaphor can be debated, but it's just a metaphor, after all. :-)
The whole point of a lot of things is that they are unscalable and if they somehow do scale they are not longer what they were.
My previous Xperia Compact, which is of about the same dimensions as mini, survived for a couple of days easily when new.
> iPhone Mini has been weak in battery department [1]
The article says "solid battery life", which matches my experience with 13 mini.
Edit: Yup, it’s nowhere to be seen on apple.com homepage. They don’t push it at all.
The "RED Hydrogen One," by that fancy camera company is closer I think. At least it had some story that could hypothetically have ended with a compelling technological reason for it to exist (RED is supposed to know cameras). Although, it didn't seem to work out either, but with a sample size of 1 it could be a fluke of poor execution.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/red-quits-the-smartp...
I'm surprised none of the really consumer-oriented camera companies have broken into smartphones. Camera stuff seems like more of a selling point for smartphones, than phone stuff. But, it seems like they never really want to dive in fully.
Many PC companies failed before Apple succeeded. Apple itself failed to the point of almost being acquired by Sun before succeeding by buying NeXT and shipping some hit products in the form of colourful iMacs and iPods with click-wheels.
The biggest problem with luxury products is that they have almost nothing to do with the product's tangible features and everything to do with whether you can establish a valuable brand. We live in a world where people spend thousands of dollars on fancy numbers that we have a kind of gentleman's agreement signify that they "own" a jpeg anyone can copy.
I suggest that there is absolutely a market for ridiculously priced phones, but the problem is not hand-crafting a phone with rare materials, the problem is creating the collective hallucination that owning such a phone will make other people envy you.
Apple actually sold some solid gold watches. There was a market for a $18,000 Apple Watch. It wasn't something worth sustaining in perpetuity, but there was a market. They also launched ridiculously priced accessories from Hermes, and there is still a market for them almost a decade later.
People will pay large amounts of money for exclusive items, but it takes a particular set of skills to launch something and convince the world it's the must-have accessory of the moment.
This is not necessarily true, though something people often believe.
A simple example of what I mean is traffic lights. I've lived in many European countries, including Germany, and travelled a very fair bit in the rest. In Germany, traffic lights are green for cars for a long time and green for pedestrians a very short time (feel free to measure this at any traffic light in your city). In countries where infrastructure is planned around humans, it's the other way around.
Cycling is another example of this. Germany doesn't have "bad weather for cycling". People cycle to work in winter in Helsinki and don't bat an eye. The difference is infrastructure. Helsinki has not only built the roads, lights and the rest around it, but they also ensure it's in good condition. When it snows, bike paths often get cleaned before car roads. It's a matter of choice. I bring up Helsinki because it's easier to compare. Netherlands and the like are so far ahead everyone else in humane cities that the comparisons are hard to make. Helsinki is a good example because their developments are recent and go to show that you can choose to live a different way.
The Germans probably don't know that with 2cm of snow, all the other means of transport, including the Amsterdam metro, stop working. So bicycle it is. I loved my 25km (round trip) bike commute when I lived there, it was such a great way to clear my head before/after work.
> Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
HN also has many fanboys that slavishly celebrate the decisions of certain prestigious companies as the best possible ones, because that prestigious company made it. Other decisions can be assumed to be inferior because, if they had merit, the company would have picked that instead.
IMHO, a lot of technology has plateaued, to the point where the hip new thing is objectively a regression that just looks different.
Without carrier phone whitelist, you won't be able to call on AT&T and many other networks.
It's not a "bad thing" about HN or American perceptions -- it's economic reality: it just isn't cost effective for the big incumbents to pursue, and it's (likely) beyond the scope of a grass-roots, Kickstarter-style effort.
As an example, the Z5 Compact had a 2700mah battery in basically something ~1mm thicker than a 13 mini, which has a ~2400mah battery. The Z5 Compact is also a 7 year old phone, which didn't have wireless charging.
I enjoyed MrMobile's review: https://youtu.be/skIgG8q_lKs
Australians will jump at the largest, cheapest Soniq TV JB Hi-Fi sells. Likewise (with 'local' brands) in the UK.
For example in Spain, the Pixel 6 Pro was only sold for a few days in February, then sold out, then returned a few days ago - so it only seems to start being consistently available now, and it's a 2021 phone. Oh, and only the 128 GB model is sold here. I had to ask an Australian friend to mail a 512 GB one to me!
And at least, they do sell it here. In most countries, you can't even buy it.
Compare to iPhone where you can get every model with every storage capacity consistently, in Spain, and in the overwhelming majority of countries in the world.
I've even seriously considered switching to iPhone for this very reason, by the way.
Now the guy loves his big iPad and his iPhone that he wouldn't go any size smaller because he'd struggle to see what's on the screen. The only challenge he has now is he likes the bigger phone, but struggles to keep it in his pockets when working, when you add in a protective cover.
People don't often know what they want, they're just driven by what they've had and whether they think it has worked for them, which most people can justify their own decision.
I do think however, that there will become a point where phones simply are too big. I'm just not sure how far off we are from that.
> RAV4
Viewpoint from Japan: is it small?. I feel same thing for BMW Mini because it's bigger width than average on the road.
If you thought the joke was distasteful, say it was distasteful. But pretending it was serious and loudly letting us all know you are against trading human beings is some of the lamest virtual signalling I've ever seen.
I knew the response sounded American, then this clarified it. I’d like to see the sale of phone sizes by country.
E.g. vans within the Kei (keijidōsha) classification pretty much don't exist in Europe, but are common in Japan.
Grains of sand getting into the hinge and mandatory factory-installed screen protectors are not things I want to deal with on a purchase that expensive.
The current folding generation launching this year (4th Gen) is likely to be the next big thing, rumors are huge price drop and likely a more polished experience as production is ramping up for more units.
What do you mean by newer iPhones? They use stainless steel since 2017 in the models X, XS (Max), 11 Pro (Max), 12 Pro (Max) and 13 Pro (Max), so it's nothing new.
That really doesn't say much. Google has never figured how to sell hardware, nor shown the will to learn. If Google was trying to sabotage the sales of the Pixel line, it could probably not do a better job.
In my case, I don't see why I would be sad over having a bit more place. It would be nice to have a place for an office, a small home gym, bigger kitchen, dining room, terrace with a BBQ, etc.
I'm not saying it would solve every problem in my life, but it would make a couple of things less inconvenient.
Also, during the pandemic, faceid didn't work in public. People looking for a small phone had to choose between a more expensive model with more cameras and cheaper phone with working biometric authentication.
That skews all sorts of market share stats. Anyway, annual sales by model (the SEs are usually released at a different time of year) would make for a more meaningful comparison than calendar Q1 sales starting after Christmas and ending a few weeks after the SE launch.
What could change that would be the availability of a smartphone that turns into a PC/laptop when connected to a docking station. I suspect that Microsoft is pursuing such a plan with the integration of Android into Windows 11. Let's see ...
Indeed, all those things are much much easier and cheaper to produce than a smartphone. You could do them at your home.
Try building from scratch a small Android phone at home.