Comment by oceanplexian

I suspect there are two constraints working against mini mobiles:

1. The industry push for thin due to the consumer dislike of thick.

2. The invisible consumer expectation that smaller mobiles should be cheaper.

A mini screen with a fat body (large battery, good camera) is what many functionally oriented people should want, but cost and form will limit consumer desire and make it an extremely niche product?!?

Edit: I am thinking more Canon IXUS cross bred with a 20000mAh powerbank and stock Android One. In fact Canon or another reliable camera brand would be the perfect manufacturer. Fat and robust could work: sell the functionally ugly to practical tradesmen type? Unfortunately writer desires thin and light, which I don’t care about. No need for front-facing camera, instead put a 1” (4:3?) screen on the side of the main camera to allow for pointing/framing when doing selfies.

Functionally oriented people often have other constraints. I have tight constraints for mobiles: I am price sensitive (I break or lose phones), I want vanilla Android (manufacturer skinned often has broken upgrades & broken privacy & broken features), and I generally won’t buy products from extremely niche brands (unpredictable reliability, & trust issues).

Apple's limited success is not only a factor of the screen size but also market positioning. The mini is inferior in some specs to other iPhones but at the same time really high end as far as mobiles in general go. That makes it a niche product even if screen size was not a factor at all.

It targets people that have plenty of cash for a flagship but are willing to forego the top tier specs for a smaller size. Apple prefers you just buy the pro. And if you don't have much cash you can get the reheated 2017 iphone 8 with SE slapped on it :)

I bet if they made a mini T the price of an SE with a more limited camera and screen spec than the current mini it would take 50% of SE sales away.

You can't judge the market viability of one aspect based on a single model.

> How big is the group of people that want a smaller smart phone but aren't willing or able to switch to Apple?

It just feels like surely capturing 100% of the market for premium small Android phones (there really are none right now) must be at least as good as yet another large Android phone entering a market full of large Android phones.

None of the leaked specs (if real) for iPhone 14 include a "Mini" variant, so it looks like Apple killed theirs.

I'm going to buy a 13 Mini because of Apple's long term support, so it should last me a good few years.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford.

Just a note that this quote, and a similar one by Steve Jobs (‘Market research could never have given us the Macintosh’) are amongst the most misinterpreted in history. Most people see them as saying ‘market research is useless’ - what both were actually saying is that you need to take a new innovation to the customer and _then_ ask them what they think of it.

So no, don’t just flat out ask people what they want - but intuit and give people a little taste of what they could have - and then ask them what they think.

Also horses that could run at 100mph for 5 hours at a time would be far better than early cars. They run on clean renewable fuel, have built in natural intelligence to avoid crashes and carry drunk drivers, and come in a variety of pleasing colors (not just black!).

The main benefit of cars was that if you delay maintenance your transportation doesn’t die.

There’s still a market for faster horses.

Samsung make one called the Z-flip. Way too expensive for me, but to me it's the better flip phone I've been waiting for since 2005!

It was almost premium. Still didn't had Pros camera.

Real example was Pixel until version 4. The only difference between smaller and bigger versions was the obvious screen and battery.

The reason it's not a big market is that if glove-sizing worked the same way as phones, you'd have people with small glove size walking around in ginormous gloves. That's not the case because glove sizing actually behaves rationally, as opposed to truck-sizing, where every human in America wants a ginormous truck regardless of their actual need. Sadly, phones follow trucks, not gloves, because the former is ego-driven, not need-driven. Apple deserves credit for recognizing the counter-example to its own market presence and engages fully around it while no competitor follows suit.

Agreed. When I bought the original Samsung Galaxy Note, my friends all thought it was hilariously, ridiculously, impractically large. It was smaller than my current Pixel 5.

Yes, this phone is hard to use one handed, but the value of the large screen outweighs everything else.