When the iPhone 12 lineup was announced, the main talking point about the mini among reviewers and whatnot was how poor battery life will be. To be honest, once I disabled the 5G (I'm not anti-5G, I just don't need it most of the time), battery life is fine. In fact, it's pretty phenomenal for the specs if you've had any lengthy history with smartphones (my first LTE phone either needed multiple charges per day, or I carried spare batteries).
It's pretty easy to build an echo chamber that agrees smaller phones are preferred and make it appear as though there's a decent amount of us, but the simple fact is, people like us are in the minority, and it shows in the iPhone sales. That's why there's not going to be an iPhone 14 mini, and why the mini design is probably going to be the next SE. And if you even look at the SE sales numbers, they're still not great against other iPhone models.
On top of that, this audience, specifically, are probably not going to be upgrading every generation, so there's going to be gaps where we don't feed the machine/sales numbers to make it look better. I will not buy an iPhone 13 mini. I will not buy an iPhone 14. I probably will not even buy the next SE even if it's an iPhone 13 mini with a newer SoC. So long as my 12 mini keeps going, it'll continue to serve me. So I fail to contribute to the sales numbers to make it look better.
I'm not sure about that. This could be due to the marketing/positioning i.e. Apple first switched to producing bigger phones (with more features/power) which caused people to buy these bigger phones (there were no smaller & newer phones).
After some complaints, Apple produced a smaller version of their phone but they market it as one with less features (smaller battery, smaller processor, etc).
If Apple devoted resources to producing smaller sized phones with comparable features as the Pro, the statistics might be different. To be clear, a larger phone will always have some edge but the minis should not be clearly designed as a step down version phone
Being very honest, I think the original iPhone was the right size - through the iPhone 4. I appreciate that people wanted larger screens, and larger screens accommodate larger batteries, but I think the 3.5" screen of the early iPhones made for a great size.
Oh well.
iPhone 12 and 13 minis are the same hardware with smaller screen and battery than their iPhone 12 and 13 (non-pro) counterparts. Are you referring to the SE or something? Even the SE has been getting upgraded processors with previous generation screens, cameras, etc.
The minis have been flagship specs in smaller packages. If the smaller battery thing was to be a knock on Apple for making it inferior, how do you suppose you fit a full size iPhone 13 battery into that mini frame with all the other internal hardware the same?
My suspicion is, based on various bits of info I've seen, iPhone 14 won't see a mini and the next SE will be based on the current mini. They have been upgrading the SoC in the SE but not the camera nor the screen, and I bet they want to get that bumped up to something more modern. So this form factor/size may not be all that lost. Here's hoping, anyway.